Sighting in Saint-Malo-des-Trois-Fontaines, May 25, 1985

On a Saturday night, between about 11 pm and 1:30 am, four witnesses observed several luminous phenomena in four stages. First, while travelling in a vehicle, they were intrigued by numerous flashes of various colours visible in the sky from several points along their route. Back at the family property, they scanned the starry sky and noticed two points of light that moved while keeping the same distance between them, at varying speed, before disappearing behind the landscape. Next, through a gap in the trees, they saw a red, rectangular object on top of a hill. Frightened, they went indoors and talked it over without understanding what they had seen. They then heard a dull noise and noticed a total silence over the countryside, which worried them. When they went back outside a few minutes later, there was nothing to see. The next day they went to the gendarmerie, whose enquiries among local residents turned up no other witnesses.

The case, first classified D, was re-examined. The flashes of the first phase were probably caused by thunderstorm lightning, which the weather records placed to the west that evening. The witnesses did not know the area, the lightning was very distant under a clear local sky, and the thunder could not be heard. For the other three phases, the descriptions are brief, imprecise or contradictory. Each has at least one possible explanation that can be neither confirmed nor ruled out: an aircraft's lights for the two points of light, the moon breaking through clouds at low altitude for the red object, and a rumble of thunder for the noise. GEIPAN suggests a priming effect: the first observation may have created a sense of strangeness that led the witnesses to notice other phenomena which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. That Saturday evening a fair was being held in a nearby town, so many people were out late at night. Because angular measurements, directions and durations are missing, the consistency of the case is poor. GEIPAN classified phase 1 as B (thunderstorm lightning) and the rest of the observations as C.