Sighting in Verfeil, March 23, 2011

Around 11:30 p.m., a motorist noticed a large ball in the sky, with a color leaning toward red. They stopped and took a photograph of it, just before it suddenly vanished.

The investigation found that the witness's description matched an aircraft seen head-on, arriving from the east. It may have been the Nice–Toulouse flight, which lands at Blagnac at about 9:55 p.m. Seen from the front, a plane's forward landing light looks like a motionless point of light, and the flashing lights cannot be seen because the light is dazzling. If the aircraft changes course slightly, for example to line up with the Blagnac runway, the point of light shifts sideways and then disappears, because the witness is no longer in line with the light beam.

GEIPAN adopted this hypothesis and classified the case as B: probable observation of an aircraft seen head-on.