ALENCON (61) 27.10.2014

On 27 October 2014 at 19:54, a witness in his yard saw a dark triangular object with steady lights at its corners move rapidly northeast to southwest across a clear sky for 2 seconds. He heard no sound. He took two photographs that he initially considered unusable. He reported the same observation at 23:43, with the UAP moving in the opposite direction. No other account was collected. The case was published on 23 February 2016 and classified C for lack of consolidated information and corroboration. It has since been re-examined. GEIPAN considers several points seriously damaging to the witness’s sincerity (see investigation report): - Contrast enhancement of the two photographs, which he associates with the first evening’s two successive UAP passages, reveals a dark mass attributable to an actual building façade bordering the yard opposite the chimney visible in the photograph. What he identifies as the moving UAP stays at the same level relative to this mass between photographs. GEIPAN finds no explanation for why those fixed lights would have appeared so mobile and fleeting. - Initially he found nothing corresponding to his observation: “Despite being set up, the camera could not capture the movement. Unusable photographs.” He later sent the same images to GEIPAN as showing the UAPs, without qualification. - Neither the photograph dates nor times match the two passages he associates with them. An incorrectly set camera clock scarcely explains images separated by 3 minutes versus passages the source calls “nearly 3 hours” apart, with exact reported times of 19:54 and 23:43. GEIPAN argues that such minute-level precision excludes a memory error about the interval. An accidental photo mix-up also seems unlikely because he expressly identifies the UAP in these images. - He did not answer GEIPAN’s request to clarify the photo dates. GEIPAN considers only one alternative to deliberate fabrication of evidence: impressed by his visual observation and disappointed not to find it in the images, he may have eventually attributed an apparent photographic anomaly to the UAP. That would require the fixed lights to appear only in photographs and not to the naked eye, which GEIPAN considers highly implausible. It argues that even this alternative indicates insincerity in omitting the qualifications or questions the situation should have prompted, compounded by his failure to answer its email about the dates and photographic surroundings. The account has moderate evidential substance: it is imprecise, comes from one witness, and includes two photographs that do not show the phenomenon, with poorly specified shooting conditions. GEIPAN nonetheless considers it sufficient to support the insincerity hypothesis. GEIPAN concludes that the available evidence gives no physical explanation for the UAP, but strongly suggests that the account’s strangeness results from a lack of sincerity. This concerns the account, not whether the witness actually saw something strange: there is no evidence excluding that possibility. Classification A: high probability of a hoax or lack of witness sincerity.