Sighting in Saint-Georges-de-Pointindoux, August 20, 2014

At around 11:05 pm, a witness was standing in a field, about to pack away their drone, when they noticed about a dozen red-orange lights in the night sky, sometimes described as vermilion. The lights were arranged geometrically and formed a kind of trapezoid, with a right-angled triangle at its right-hand end. The group sat low on the horizon and moved along, then the lights went out one after another. Several other people present watched it too. The witnesses imagined an immense object, around a hundred metres across, outlined by the lights. They could not see inside it and assumed some sort of haze. One of them, not the author of the account, said the stars were not visible through the area enclosed by the lights.

Only one testimony was collected, a free-text statement passed on to the gendarmerie. There was no gendarmerie investigation and no GEIPAN questionnaire, and it is hard to tell what the author saw directly from what others reported to them. At La Roche-sur-Yon, about 10 km to the east, the wind was blowing from the northwest at an average of 7 km/h.

GEIPAN concluded that the witnesses saw a release of Thai lanterns during a summer party evening. The red-orange colour, the lights going out one by one and the overall layout all fit this kind of object. The direction of travel, reconstructed from the route the witnesses took to follow the phenomenon, matches the wind direction measured 10 km away. The testimony has low consistency, but this does not rule out the explanation. The case is classified B. GEIPAN also notes that these witnesses had made an earlier sighting, a mistaken identification of Jupiter and stars, and that the text conveys the joy of finally seeing "UFOs" after waiting years for the chance.