Red lights in Alpes-Maritimes, France

The testimony was given one year after the sighting and was triggered by a television program. On November 16, 2009, around 7:45 p.m., while driving toward Villefranche-sur-Mer (06), two people observe the movement of a blazing red light in the night sky. The UAP changes trajectory and then is lost from view by the witness. The latter has time to take a photograph and to call a relative living in the direction where the UAP disappeared. The witness reports that his relatives saw a reddish object land on the lower slopes of Mont Boron hill, then rise again and disappear quickly in a white flash. Only one testimony will be collected. The trajectory perceived by the witness is an arrival of the UAP from the EAST (Monaco), then at the vertical of his observation point (Villefranche-sur-mer) there is a change of trajectory toward Nice. The change is in fact fairly small, around 30°, to take a component toward the Southwest (toward Nice) from an arrival from the East, and is associated with a perception of descent ("nose-diving") toward Nice. It is noted that the witness thinks of a Thai lantern at first (a kind of blazing red light very close to a Thai lantern) then seems to reject this hypothesis mainly because of the speed. However, the measured wind is compatible with the trajectory. Closest to the observation point (3 km away at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat), the wind blows toward the Southwest. At Nice airport (9 km), the wind is shifting at that hour, going from toward SW to toward SE, which indicates that in such an environment of terrain and sea, the wind can be very variable from one point and one moment to another, with probably also horizontal wind streams and sudden "nose-dives." The wind is not weak, 10 km/h with gusts up to 30 km/h. The perceived strangeness in terms of speed may result from the impossibility of judging the distance correctly. The photo teaches nothing that would validate or invalidate the lantern hypothesis. The rest of the observation no longer comes from the witness but from his mother and is reported by the witness. What the mother sees at the beginning is compatible with the lantern hypothesis, since she sees a reddish object land on the hills. One is no longer dealing with the "blazing red" seen by the main witness, but with a reddish color compatible with the lantern's extinction phase. Note that the very shifting wind could also have blown the lantern down toward the hill while it was still well lit. On the other hand, the final phase is no longer compatible: the slow rise could still be compatible if the lantern was still lit and could rise again after being pressed to the ground by the wind, but not the final disappearance in a white flash in less than a second. It is not known whether the mother observed the UAP continuously (she called her son back to tell him about this ending) or whether she could have confused it with another nearby phenomenon. Up to this last element, the observation is compatible with the flight of a Thai lantern. The strangeness of this observation (compared to a Thai hypothesis that otherwise would be retained) rests solely on elements that were not reported directly to GEIPAN, despite the request for testimony made by GEIPAN to the mother via the witness. The testimony is therefore inconsistent. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies it as C: lack of reliable information.