Sighting in Tallard, November 6, 2013

On the night of 6 to 7 November 2013, a witness noticed several lights in the sky from 11:55 pm onward and filmed them. They phoned the gendarmerie and the civil aviation services to report it. A gendarmerie patrol came to join them, and everyone made further observations between 12:30 and 12:54 am. At 1:00 am, a gendarme in Gap also saw a twinkling ball of light toward the south-east. The first witness and the patrol stopped observing at 1:40 am, and the gendarme in Gap stopped around 2:00 am. The sky was relatively clear. The video the first witness recorded is of very poor quality: the images are blurry and zoomed in.

The GEIPAN investigation concluded that the witnesses had mistaken very bright celestial objects for something unusual: Jupiter, Sirius, Vega and Rigel. The lights twinkled, and the observations lasted more than two hours from Tallard and about an hour from Gap, which fits astronomical sightings. The twinkling matches that of stars, which is stronger the lower they sit on the horizon, as was the case here; the nearby Alpine terrain further strengthens the high-altitude winds that cause it. The true positions of the astronomical objects matched those of the lights very closely, and they were visible in the directions the witnesses indicated. The movement of one of the lights was also consistent with a celestial object. With low strangeness and high consistency (several witnesses, a video recording), the case was classified A.