Sighting in Tours, February 14, 2023

The witness was at home, closing the shutters at about 1:30 a.m., when they noticed a twinkling point of light in the sky. It looked bigger than a star, and their first thought was an aircraft. Ten minutes later, and again around 3 a.m. when they went back to their observation spot, they found that it had not moved. The twinkling was intense, sharp and regular, and the colour changed rapidly, from red to white and then green. The witness filmed and photographed it. In the video and in the two photos the colours do not show and the point stays blurry, probably because of the heavy zoom used. Having lived in the town for more than fifty years, the witness knew the position and orientation of the phenomenon very well. Only this one witness was interviewed.

The investigation showed that the witness had seen two different stars, in two separate phases: Betelgeuse, then Procyon. A nearby building had hidden the setting of Betelgeuse, and the observation times together with the positions of the two stars explain why the witness believed they had seen a single fixed point in a clear sky. The colour changes come from the atmosphere and temperature, which cause diffraction, turbulence, refraction, absorption and scattering. The strong twinkling, the point-like, star-like appearance and the lack of movement all support this conclusion. GEIPAN classified the case as A: observation of the stars Betelgeuse and Procyon.