Sighting in Vitteaux, May 30, 1977

At 3:30 a.m., two people travelling by car noticed a red-orange glowing ball above the town. It was low in the sky and moved slowly from south to north. The witnesses heard no sound during the 5 to 6 minutes the sighting lasted.

The case is an old one and was re-examined using recent software and the investigative experience gained since. It was judged consistent: there were two witnesses, one of them a police officer, the description was very precise, and their sincerity and credibility were never questioned. The phenomenon they described shared many characteristics (duration, shape, size, colour) with the setting Moon. The Moon was in fact present in the part of the sky they were looking at, yet the witnesses did not mention it.

GEIPAN concluded that the problem was not the witnesses' eyesight but how they interpreted what they saw, influenced by tiredness, night driving and a Moon seen only intermittently through clouds. This low-strangeness case is classified A: a sighting caused by mistaking the Moon for something else.