Sighting in Saint-Lô, April 4, 2012

At around 8:15 p.m., a witness noticed two yellow or white points of light crossing the sky at high speed from the east toward the north. The first followed a straight, steady path. The second one held the witness's attention: it kept circling the first, tracing ellipses, turning abruptly at sharp angles, touching the other point and then dropping back behind it very quickly. After about fifteen seconds, both points of light vanished, either into or behind a cloud.

A field investigation made it possible to pin down the azimuths, and a cognitive interview brought no significant new information. GEIPAN found that the usual explanations based on misidentification could not account for the movements of the second object around the first. A temporary visual illusion (ophthalmic migraine, phosphenes) remained a possibility, but the witness appeared to have perfect eyesight and health and had never reported anything similar, so with nothing to support it, that explanation was rejected. Consistency was rated 0.7, since there was a single witness, though without reservations, and strangeness 0.6, because the object moved in a non-linear way but was far away. The case was classified D1, unexplained.