Sighting in Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx, August 9, 2014

One evening at about 10:40 p.m., a witness standing in their garden noticed three large, round, white lights arranged in a V, with a red light in the middle, moving beneath the cloud layer. The whole thing passed silently over the house, then sped up and vanished. No one else came forward.

The sky was overcast, the wind was from the north, and there was intense thunderstorm activity with dry lightning and no rain. At that time, the International Space Station, followed by the European cargo craft ATV5, could in principle have been seen fairly low in the north and north-east. However, the witness was not looking that way, the cloud cover was complete, and their description does not fit that kind of object at all, so this explanation was set aside.

Close luminous balls during a storm suggest ball lightning, and the path and behaviour of the phenomenon fit that idea. The red dot and the apparently stable positions of the balls relative to one another fit it poorly, but could be due to a perceptual illusion. The triangle carrying the three lights is not certain either, since people often perceive a shape linking separate points of light (the "Gestalt" effect). With no other witnesses or photographs, the GEIPAN could neither confirm nor rule out these hypotheses. The case is classed C because of insufficient information and cross-checking.