Sighting in Vernet-les-Bains, October 3, 1981

At 2:45 a.m., a witness looked out of the window to check the weather. On the horizon, they saw a luminous object coming from the Cerdagne and heading toward the Mariailles ridges. It was short and rounded, with a dark base and a brightly lit upper part. The witness stepped onto the balcony and saw a second, identical object following the same course as the first. They also heard a faint noise coming from the objects. Only one testimony was collected.

The witness had thought of aircraft but dismissed the idea because they judged the distance to be 300 m, which did not seem compatible. However, no angular size measurement had been taken, so the reliability of that distance estimate could not be assessed. The objects had not passed in front of any terrain feature that could have set a maximum distance. Beyond 4 km, they would have been outside the area covered by the available air navigation records; closer, they would have appeared in them. The details described and the whistling sound are compatible with aircraft, even at more than 4 km. The absence of navigation lights in the account may be explained by the fact that the investigators at the time asked no questions to clarify what the witness had or had not seen.

Aircraft could therefore explain the observation, but this requires additional, plausible assumptions that lower its probability. With no angular size and no structured deposition protocol, the data have limited consistency and the uncertainty is too high. GEIPAN classified the case C, insufficient data. The case belongs to a file that was re-examined, originally classified D under another name, which had wrongly grouped three separate observations together.