Sighting in Villefranche-sur-Mer, November 16, 2009

The report came in a year after the event, prompted by a television programme. At around 7:45 pm, two people were driving toward Villefranche-sur-Mer when they noticed a blazing red light moving across the night sky. It changed course, and the witness then lost sight of it. The witness had time to take a photograph and phone a relative living in the direction in which the light had vanished. According to the witness, their family saw a reddish object come down on the lower slopes of Mont Boron hill, then rise again and disappear quickly in a white flash. Only one account was collected.

The witness described the light arriving from the east, on the Monaco side, then, when directly above the observation point, turning about 30° toward the southwest, toward Nice, with an impression of diving. The witness first thought of a Thai lantern, then seemed to rule it out, mainly because of the speed. Yet the measured wind was consistent with the path: it blew toward the southwest at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, about 3 km away, and shifted between southwest and southeast at Nice airport, 9 km away. It blew at about 10 km/h, with gusts up to 30 km/h. The sense of unusual speed may come from the impossibility of judging distance properly. The photograph neither supports nor weakens the lantern hypothesis.

The end of the sighting came from the witness's mother, not from the witness. A reddish object settling on the hill fits a lantern that was fading, or one pushed down by the wind while still lit. The slow rise could also fit, but the disappearance in under a second in a white flash does not. It is not known whether the mother watched continuously or confused it with another nearby phenomenon. Despite GEIPAN's request, she gave no direct account. The testimony was therefore not consistent, and GEIPAN classified the case C, for lack of reliable information.