A triangle shape in Vend�e, France

On August 20, 2014 at 11:05 PM, a witness in a field getting ready to put away his drone sees a set of 12 red-orange lights in the night sky. The lights, arranged geometrically, form a trapezoidal shape in motion, then go out one by one. Several other people present make this observation. Only one testimony is collected. Let us analyze the elements available to us: a free-text statement by a witness reporting what he saw, and elements seen by other witnesses. It is difficult to distinguish what is direct testimony from indirect testimony. There is no GEIPAN questionnaire. The police report simply states that the gendarmerie received this free text. The phenomenon appears low on the horizon, composed of about a dozen (estimated by the witnesses) lights of a red-orange-vermilion color "arranged geometrically forming a sort of trapezoid forming at its right end a right triangle." The object considered is supposed to be immense (about a hundred meters), delimited by the lights. The witnesses do not see inside the object, they suppose some kind of haze, one of them (who is not the author of the free text) noting "that the stars are invisible through the surface delimited by these luminous points." The weather situation recorded at "La-Roche-Sur-Yon," about 10 km east of the observation site, on Météociel reports a northwest wind of 7 km/h on average. These witnesses are marked by previous observations, including one mistaken for Jupiter and stars that led to a GEIPAN report in 2009. Other insufficiently documented facts were classified as C. The witnesses' description of the phenomenon is compatible with the observation of a release of lanterns during a summer festive evening. The red-orange color, their successive extinction are also characteristic. The description does not explicitly give the direction of movement but the witnesses' path to follow the UAP allows it to be reconstructed. It is compatible with the wind direction (from N 0) measured at 10 km. Finally, it is a summer evening conducive to such festive events. The consistency of the testimony is weak. We have neither a gendarmerie investigation nor a GEIPAN questionnaire, which results in particular in the absence of a recorded direction of movement. The description mixes direct testimony (the author of the text) and reported testimonies unusable by GEIPAN. Nevertheless, in view of the typical elements of lanterns, this lack of consistency does not oppose this explanation, the other option having been to classify the testimony as unexploitable. Note that this testimony describes the joy that the sensation of having observed "UFOs" can give witnesses, a joy all the stronger because it responds to an expectation of seeing them oneself for years. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as B: observations of Thai lanterns.