Sighting in Vaux-le-Pénil, October 18, 2014

At around 10:25 pm, the witness and their spouse were looking at the stars when an elongated orange shape passed silently over their heads. It followed a straight path and crossed the sky in under four seconds. As it went by, it blocked out the stars the two of them had been watching. Only the witness filled in a questionnaire.

The outline the witness drew matches exactly that of an orange paraglider wing, and this was the first hypothesis investigators considered. An electric paramotor would account for the launch, a flight of more than a kilometre and the silent pass, since the engine can be restarted only at the very end, for landing. On the other hand, experienced paraglider pilots consider a night landing with no moon, no lights and no power applied at the last moment to be suicidal, particularly in a field where horses are almost always present, as these animals are often frightened by flying wings.

Still, no solid argument rules this scenario out, and many elements support it. It remains surprising that neither the witnesses nor the horses saw or heard the pilot land, possibly less than 100 or 200 m away. GEIPAN classified the case as B: probable observation of a paraglider landing, possibly a motorised one.