Sighting in Trans-en-Provence, June 14, 2014

At 8 p.m., the witness saw a dark, spherical object come out of a leftover thunderstorm cloud. It moved slowly and silently from north to south. The witness filmed it, but the video shows the object for only 2 seconds and from a distance: it appears as a roughly spherical, dark object reflecting the sun. The object then vanished into another cloud.

The investigation considered a balloon to be the simplest explanation, either a hot-air balloon or one filled with helium (a small festive latex balloon or a larger plastic-film one). Its straight, fairly slow path fits this idea. To test it, regional weather records were compared with the direction of travel. In Toulon, the wind came from the west at 11 to 30 km/h, shifting south and weakening. In Cannes, it was light and from the south, turning north. At Le Luc, 20 km away, after a thunderstorm in the late afternoon, a light westerly wind was blowing at 8 p.m., turning north by 9 p.m., very unstable and changing direction every hour.

The weather, disturbed by storm cells, and the region's rugged terrain made it impossible to determine the local low-altitude wind at that exact moment. The balloon hypothesis, although consistent with the observation, could therefore not be confirmed. The witness rejected it. Because of the lack of verification and cross-checking, the GEIPAN classified the case as C, insufficient data.