Sighting in Temara, November 20, 1954

Between about 12:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m., several people noticed a luminous phenomenon in the sky, but only one account was collected. The witness described an object that moved vertically in a zig-zag pattern, starting from the south-southeast, under a cloudless sky. It was sometimes bright and sometimes dark, and it had a halo around it.

The sighting was very long and involved a large point of light, which first pointed investigators toward an astronomical cause: the star Sirius was in the southeast at 12:30 a.m. and then moved toward the south. The halo could result from an atmospheric haze of desert sand, and the zig-zag movements could be explained by the autokinetic illusion, a common perceptual effect when staring at a point of light in the dark.

This hypothesis could not be confirmed because the direction of observation was too vaguely described: the azimuth was only roughly estimated as south-southeast with no change over time, and the elevation was given in metres rather than in degrees. For lack of precise information on the position in the sky, GEIPAN classed the case C, insufficient data.