An account in Sarthe, France

Recent testimony (2008) about an old observation. On Saturday, November 2, 1974, at around 8:30 PM, a motorist and his passenger were surprised by the slow and silent movement of a tube-shaped object, black with three very dark red colored zones: two were at the ends and one in the middle. The witness got out of his vehicle and saw the craft rise vertically, then move very slowly above the road and then the trees before disappearing. The observation lasted several minutes before the frightened witnesses got back on the road. Only one testimony was collected about this phenomenon. This 1974 observation case was not reported to GEIPAN until 2008, and consequently was handled with low priority. This nighttime observation of a tube "black as velvet" bounded by 3 luminous disks must first be analyzed with the tools of perception psychology (so-called contour or shape illusion): it is very common for an observer of a set of luminous points moving together to mentally reconstruct a volume bounded by those luminous points. In this case, if the presence of the 3 luminous disks (called portholes by the witness) is not in doubt, the existence of the tube should not be considered certain. As a result, the phenomenon becomes a set of 3 luminous disks moving slowly together, which could correspond to luminous objects carried by the wind, such as Thai lanterns, very common nowadays (2016), but very rare in France at that time. It is noted that the observation took place on a Saturday evening at 8:30 PM, a time conducive to festive events. It was also All Souls' Day; some people symbolically honor their deceased by releasing Thai lanterns. Although this hypothesis is plausible, GEIPAN cannot retain it, on the one hand due to the absence of a weather report allowing the movement of the lights to be correlated with the local wind, and on the other hand because Thai lanterns were at that time used only by Asians or by tourists returning from Thailand. Unable to make these verifications, or to find other cross-checks, GEIPAN classifies this case in category C due to lack of information.