Finistère, France · 2015-05-26 · from the GEIPAN archive
On May 26, 2015, from 9:45 PM to 10 PM, a witness observes a phenomenon already seen a few weeks earlier that intrigues him: it is a luminous point, "less bright than Venus," static, with changing colors (green, red, yellow), visible to the naked eye, seeming to make small circles around a fixed point. Only one testimony is collected. This testimony is not very precise: the time is a priori incorrect, because the witness describes and photographs at night, while the sun does not set until 10:07 PM. We will assume that the observation took place around 11 PM. The indicated observation direction is fairly imprecise: it is the witness's diagram that best indicates the height above the horizon, which we estimate to be around 20 degrees. The Brest weather report indeed indicates a mostly clear sky, and a north wind (see the Météociel report). The observation of a seemingly fixed luminous point in the sky naturally suggests a star (probably Capella, see attached sky chart), but the witness reports a rotating red, green, yellow light: it is this characteristic that seems strange, but it can be explained by the scintillation phenomenon (see the article A star?). Scintillation and more or less rapid variations in color and appearance are often observed and are a source of misidentification; these variations are all the more noticeable when the star is low in the sky and the atmosphere is both clear but disturbed (high heat, wind), which is the case that day. The photograph, taken handheld with a camera equipped with a powerful zoom, shows a reddish arabesque typical of motion blur. The GEIPAN classifies this case "B": probable observation of the star Capella.
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This is an official case file of GEIPAN, the French space agency's unidentified aerospace phenomena office, machine translated from French. The original text and the full investigation file are at geipan.fr. We reproduce it with thanks and remove anything on request.
Anomaly