SAINT-GEORGES-DE-POINTINDOUX (85) 20.08.2014

On 20 August 2014 at 23:05, a witness in a field preparing to put away a drone saw approximately 12 red-orange lights in the night sky. They formed a moving trapezoidal arrangement, then went out one by one. Several other people present also watched, but only 1 account was collected. The available evidence was an unstructured written statement mixing the author's observations with those attributed to others, without a clear distinction between direct and relayed evidence. There was no GEIPAN questionnaire. The gendarmerie report merely recorded receipt of this text. The lights appeared low on the horizon and were described as red-orange to vermilion, forming a trapezoid with a right triangle at its right-hand end. The witnesses inferred an immense object, approximately 100 m across, outlined by the lights. They could not see its interior and suggested a kind of mist. Someone other than the author reportedly said stars were invisible within the outlined area. Meteociel data from La Roche-sur-Yon, about 10 km east, recorded an average northwest wind of 7 km/h. The witnesses had previous sightings in mind, including a Jupiter-and-stars misidentification documented by GEIPAN in 2009 and other insufficiently documented events classified C. GEIPAN found the description compatible with sky lanterns released during a summer celebration. The red-orange colour and successive extinction were characteristic. Although the statement omitted the movement direction, GEIPAN reconstructed it from the witnesses' route while following the lights and found it compatible with the northwest wind measured 10 km away. The summer evening also favoured such a release. Evidential support was weak: no substantive gendarmerie investigation, no questionnaire, no explicit direction, and an unusable mixture of firsthand and relayed observations. Nevertheless, GEIPAN considered the lantern features sufficiently typical to support the explanation; the alternative would have been an unassessable classification. The source also notes the joy expressed at feeling they had seen UFOs, heightened by years of hoping to see one personally. GEIPAN classified the case B: sky lanterns.