Sighting in Valady, November 8, 2015

Between 11 p.m. and ten past midnight, two witnesses saw several yellow-orange glows moving silently across the night sky. They followed one another and vanished as they gained altitude. The orange balls took a few minutes to cross the sky, on a weekend night, travelling from south to north.

The gendarmerie investigation found nothing unusual. The detection and control centre at Saint-Mars-La-Pile, which tracks aircraft on radar, reported no anomaly in the area that day. COSMOS, the air force's military centre for monitoring space objects, found no trace of any phenomenon in its data.

The GEIPAN linked the sighting to Thai lanterns, probably released nearby at the end of a private party. The direction of travel matches the light south-easterly wind recorded at Rodez, 15 km away. In this very hilly area, low-altitude air currents follow the valleys more than the prevailing wind does. One of the witnesses also described a regular, successive launch of a series of hot-air balloons. The case was classed B: very probably Thai lanterns.