Sighting in Ternay, May 22, 1981

At around 11:40 pm, four members of a family were driving when they noticed, with some difficulty because of heavily overcast skies, a very bright phenomenon at low altitude. The driver stopped, intrigued; the phenomenon was now near a small grove. For about fifteen minutes the witnesses made out an oval-shaped object with white and blue-green lights and, at times, red-orange lights at its ends. The object seemed to give off beams of light, stayed motionless and made no noise. It eventually disappeared behind the grove.

The driver drove on to drop off two of the passengers. Two of the witnesses then went back to the spot by a different route. As they drew level with the grove, thick fog suddenly enveloped the wood, and they turned around. A last glance showed them small red-orange lights near the ground, and they then went home. The investigation the next morning found no traces on the ground or in the surrounding vegetation.

GEIPAN reexamined this case, originally classified D, and reclassified it as B. In the darkness the witnesses could not tell where the sky ended and the land began; they took the phenomenon for an object in the sky, when it could have been on the ground about 2 km away, on sloping land higher than their position. The explanation favored is a forestry machine working at night in a small wood to the south, which aerial photos from 1978 and 1981 show was cut down between those dates. The flickering is explained by the machine's lights passing behind trees, and the apparent movement relative to the grove by a parallax effect. On their return, the witnesses looked to the right, behind the grove, rather than to the left, toward the south.