Sighting in Saint-Raphaël, May 14, 2024

At about 11:30 pm, two witnesses walking their dog along a clifftop road in the hills above the town noticed a very bright, white, oval shape in the sky to the northwest, positioned beneath the cloud layer. A thick streak of light of the same color was attached to it and slanted diagonally toward the ground. After a few seconds, the phenomenon moved very quickly to the south, then immediately returned to its starting point, where it stayed motionless. The first witness heard no sound. The observation lasted about ten minutes. The two witnesses then began running toward their home and saw that the phenomenon was heading toward them.

Only one of the two witnesses completed the GEIPAN questionnaire, but the account was very detailed and had been written the day after the sighting. Two webcams had also recorded the phenomenon, which was clearly visible in their footage and helped identify it. The consistency of the case was rated excellent.

The investigation concluded that it was very probably a powerful skytracker, an outdoor single- or multi-beam searchlight with a 180° sweeping system, most likely used by a private individual from a villa in a hamlet of Bagnols-en-Forêt. The oval, white shape is typical of such a device. The low clouds received the light from the ground and produced a bright spot on their underside. The fast movements fit the capabilities of a ground-based projector of this kind. Archive footage from the municipal cameras of Fréjus and Puget-sur-Argens shows a skytracker beam along the line of sight at the matching time. The positions of the beam on the ground and of its reflection on the clouds agree across the witness accounts and both cameras. The bearings converge on the southern edge of the inhabited areas of Bagnols-en-Forêt, about 20 km from the witnesses. The municipality, when contacted, could not determine the origin of the skytracker. The case is classified A.