Sighting in Sainte-Catherine, November 10, 2014

At around 10:00 pm, the witness looked out of a window and noticed a point of light in the sky that flickered slightly. It drifted very slowly to the right and changed colour very quickly. The witness tried to photograph it but did not manage to. The sighting stopped between 12:45 am and 1:00 am. Around 1:40 am, while starting to fill in a GEIPAN Electronic Questionnaire, the witness glanced outside again and saw the light once more, then lost sight of it around 2:30 am. Only one testimony was collected.

According to GEIPAN, the length of the observation (about 3 hours for the first phase and 45 minutes for the second) and the very slow drift to the right are typical of an astronomical misidentification. The movement from the West toward the North, with the object's elevation decreasing, matches a celestial body in the North-West. Two different stars would therefore have been taken for a single object, the gap of about 45 minutes between 1:00 and 1:45 am making this confusion easier. A Stellarium reconstruction shows that Vega, a very bright star (magnitude 0.0), lay at an azimuth of 297°, against the witness's estimate of 298°. The rapid colour changes (red, green, blue) are explained by star twinkling caused by high-altitude winds as a rainy weather system arrived. The small apparent movements the witness perceived result from the autokinetic illusion.

The case, of medium strangeness but sufficient consistency, is classified A: a certain misidentification of the stars Vega and Deneb, whose positions at the times given match the phenomenon exactly.