[MER] DE TOULON (83) VERS SEYNE-SUR-MER (LA) (83) 07.08.2023

On 7 August 2023, as dated in the case title, the main witness T1 and his mother T2 took boat route 18 across Toulon harbor toward Les Sablettes, arriving 20 minutes later. They saw a 'craft', which T1 placed above the harbor, zigzagging in the sky. The UAP was oblong, white or silvery, and sometimes appeared as two points according to T1 or three according to T2. The French summary also calls it rectangular. Just before reaching the Les Sablettes landing stage at 14:15, T1 took two photographs and a video. He disembarked, went to his car in a nearby parking lot, and did not see it during the 15-minute drive home. Only 5 minutes later, once home, did he see a UAP again, low to the east, passing visually behind a nearby house. He observed for 15 minutes during the harbor crossing and less than a minute from home. The case has substantive supporting evidence*: a video and two photographs analyzed with GEIPAN's IPACO* image-analysis software yielded parameters for calculating angular elevation and azimuth and determining the movement direction during the second observation phase. T2 also reported to GEIPAN, but incompletely. *Under GEIPAN's criteria, evidential strength is the amount of information collected for an account that is considered reliable and objectively substantiated. In this case, seeing several aircraft and their movements would naturally be interpreted as a curved or zigzagging path if, despite the breaks in observation, T1 believed throughout that he was seeing the same single UAP. This accounts for the main strangeness he perceived. The aircraft's similar distant appearances—white, 'Tic Tac'-shaped—reinforced that impression. T1's azimuth and elevation estimates were nevertheless notably precise and accurate. Certain clues, especially an established break in observation and differences between elevation estimates, led investigators to divide the sighting into four phases. This supported the multiple-aircraft hypothesis (see the investigation report). An elongated white shape matches these aircraft seen from a distance. In the initial phase, however, those features could also fit other things such as a bird or balloon, and the phenomenon could not be clearly identified. For the other phases, the use of aviation tools, particularly the CAPCODA* map and FlightRadar24, showed that the observations involved a forest-fire surveillance aircraft over the hills around Toulon and a scheduled airliner, flight EWG6838, which T1 photographed and filmed around 14:15. Their reconstructed paths match the UAPs' azimuths and elevations within the observation periods. GEIPAN classifies phases 1 bis and 3 as B, probable observation of a Dash aircraft using the designation Milan 80 on fire-risk surveillance over the Toulon hills, and phase 2 as B, a scheduled airliner. Phase 1 is C: phenomenon not identified because sufficiently substantiated information is lacking. *CAPCODA: the French Air and Space Force's Air Operations and Air Defense Planning and Control Center. *IPACO: GEIPAN's image-analysis and processing software, IPACO.fr.