Sighting in Sermur, August 6, 2018

At around 10 p.m., a witness was stargazing from a hill overlooking the village. Five closely spaced, aligned points of light caught their attention. They took a photograph, and when they enlarged it, the light sources appeared to form a flat rectangular structure. The witness described the moving object as five white luminous rectangles bordered by five red points of light. No other testimony was collected.

The GEIPAN investigation concluded that the witness had mistaken an airliner for something unusual. The photo was a six-second exposure, and its elements (a white streak and a red dot) repeated five times, roughly once per second, which is the rhythm of an aircraft's anti-collision lights: red and white flashes. The continuous line linking them is green, the color of an aircraft's starboard position light. The object was moving north to south, east of the witness, a path on which an aircraft shows its starboard side. Its angular movement of about 5° over the six seconds, roughly 1° per second, also matches an airliner, and international flights leaving Paris for Africa follow a consistent route. The delay in processing the case meant the specific aircraft could not be identified.

The witness had described a diagonal, downward path, but the stars show it ran roughly parallel to the horizon. The investigation attributed this to a misreading based on the photo rather than on what was actually seen, made worse by a questionnaire completed in December for an August sighting. The case, of medium consistency (a single witness, but with a photograph), was classified A.