Sighting in Saint-Dizier, August 20, 1978

From 22:50 one evening, a serviceman noticed three lights in the sky, each about the size of a ping-pong ball. They moved from east to west, shifted position relative to one another and turned orange. From the first floor of a building, the witness called over another serviceman, who saw only a single point of light. The two went out onto the aircraft parking area, where three more servicemen joined them. All of them watched the silent movements of a point of light moving at an irregular speed: shifts, stops, zigzags and a backward motion. It disappeared toward the north, gradually losing brightness.

The investigation looked at the possibility of a festive-type light beam (a skytracer) creating a spot on the clouds. Several points supported this: three coloured lights merging into one, erratic movements, a stationary phase, a non-zero apparent diameter, a summer evening and probable cloud cover. Others weighed against it: such devices were still rare at the time, and the witnesses described a brightness greater than a star's, whereas reflection on clouds gives a fainter halo. The fact that no trace of an equipped nightclub could be found forty years later settled nothing either way.

The reliability of the accounts was open to doubt: all the witnesses used the identical "ping-pong ball" comparison, which shows they had talked and influenced one another. The main witness was also a career sergeant with authority over the others, who were conscripts. In addition, the object's elevation and angular size were missing, and only the first witness had seen the multiple-light phase. No hypothesis could be retained, yet the case was not consistent enough to be called unexplained. It was classified C, for lack of reliable data.