Sighting in Saint-Denis-de-l'Hôtel, March 24, 1997

At about 6:30 a.m., a motorist was driving on an expressway, roughly 4 km from an interchange, when they noticed a moving luminous phenomenon in the cloudy sky. It consisted of several sets of 5 or 6 rows of lights, neatly ordered and stacked one above another, spread over a wide area. The lights were strong, so the witness could not make out any precise outline.

The witness saw the phenomenon head toward La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, then toward Sully, before returning to its original line, again toward La Ferté-Saint-Aubin. The witness slowed down but kept driving toward Orléans and lost sight of it. No other testimony was gathered.

The investigation considered a mix-up with a nightclub skytracker: lights without a solid object, a geometric arrangement possible with some models, a Monday morning following a Sunday evening, a stratocumulus ceiling able to catch the beams, proximity to Orléans and its nightclubs, the long range of such projectors, and back-and-forth movements. However, it is impossible to check, years later, which venues had such equipment. Also, no known example shows projectors producing a geometric figure like the one described, which weakens the hypothesis. The location, duration and shape are imprecise, and colour, angular size and elevation are unknown. GEIPAN classified the case as C, owing to insufficient data.