LOUDEAC (22) 10.03.2015

On 10 March 2015 at 04:30, a witness riding a scooter on a small country road saw lights through trees above the fields and initially took them for wind-turbine lights. As he approached, he saw for 4–5 seconds a black oval object with lights alternating between yellow, orange, green, blue and red. It seemed stationary above a livestock feeding trough. When he reached the end of the tree-lined stretch and faced the object, it disappeared instantaneously. He noticed no sound, smoke or smell. Only one account was collected. GEIPAN considered wind turbines 2 km away, a drone—drone flying occurred in the village—and a model aircraft, given a club a few kilometres away. None of these hypotheses could be retained (see investigation report). The information level is adequate, but the account’s reliability is weak in GEIPAN’s assessment: - There is a striking similarity between T1’s account, at age 18, and those of his two younger siblings, aged 12 and 7, concerning an observation 6 weeks earlier in the same town: LOUDEAC (22) 31.01.2015. Shared features include a black oval, yellow, blue, green and red lights, dimensions, and especially extremely similar detailed drawings. - GEIPAN had concluded that the earlier observation probably concerned a neighbour’s drone. The neighbour used multicoloured LEDs and acknowledged that he was probably responsible for what was seen. Confirmation of the flight date and location would have led to A rather than B. - Here the drone hypothesis faces two major obstacles absent from that earlier observation: the reported closeness and large angular size, and instantaneous disappearance. - A drone in open countryside in the middle of the night is questionable but not excluded: the pilot used immersive flying, described in the earlier report as remote flight out of sight. If a drone was involved, GEIPAN considers that it could not have been as close or disappeared in the way reported. - Another possibility is influence between witnesses within the same family. At the observation and field investigation, T1 did not yet know the earlier case’s conclusion. He knew his siblings’ descriptions and drawings and that GEIPAN had investigated at his family’s home. He may have adopted the idea of a mysterious local phenomenon important enough to bring several official national “experts” to the site, producing heightened vigilance. This could lead him, consciously or not, to attribute the earlier phenomenon’s features to another unusual experience, whether minor enough otherwise to escape attention or genuinely very strange. - GEIPAN says there is no evidence either way, but it cannot exclude the extreme possibility of conscious influence amounting to a hoax: the witness might have seen nothing strange and wanted his own observation and investigation like his siblings. To explain the coincidence, GEIPAN sees only either the drone’s actual return with major reporting errors, or conscious or unconscious influence from the earlier observation. Either would indicate weak reliability, without discrediting the young witness, who was 18 and may individually or with his family have felt heightened anxiety and vigilance following the earlier observation, which remained unexplained to them. Ultimately no hypothesis explains the observation, but its evidential substance is too weak to support an unexplained classification. GEIPAN classifies the case C: insufficient reliable information.