Sighting in Villeneuve-d'Ascq, November 26, 2021

During the night, between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., the witness watched a point of light on two occasions, for about fifteen minutes each time. At first it looked like an extremely bright star. Its light sometimes took on a blue tinge. It moved almost constantly, in small, mostly straight-line shifts, yet stayed within the same area of the sky. During the second session it was still there and had moved roughly 3 to 4 metres toward the upper right. The witness estimated its elevation at between 15° and 30°, with an azimuth that went from 140° to 160°. No other testimony was collected.

The very long duration of the sighting pointed the investigation toward an astronomical cause. The JPL/NASA Horizons website identified the star Rigel: at 11 p.m. its azimuth was 137° with an elevation of 22°, and at 11:30 p.m. it was 160° with an elevation of 29°. Its magnitude of 0.2 over the period makes it very easy to see, which matches the brightness described. Rigel is a very hot star and appears blue, which also fits the account.

The strangeness the witness perceived came from the intense brightness, the lack of any reaction to the wind, and the fact that it stayed in the same area for a long time. These are consistent with a star drifting very slowly, about twenty degrees over the period. The small, near-constant straight-line movements are explained by the autokinetic effect, a common perceptual illusion when looking at a point of light in the dark. GEIPAN classified the case as A: an observation of the star Rigel.