Haute-Garonne, France · 2016-08-03 · from the GEIPAN archive
On August 3, 2016 at 11:06 PM, a witness and his partner observe the slow and silent movement of two luminous objects (sunflower yellow) that follow each other. One of the witnesses takes a photograph with his camera. The objects move away toward the South. They go out, leaving only a red dot visible beforehand. The photograph transferred to the computer intrigues them. Only one testimony is collected. The witness experienced two strange things: a first with a UAP seen with his own eyes in the sky, and a second even stronger with the photo. The visual observation perfectly indicates a flight of Thai lanterns: the characteristics match, such as the color, the trajectory (corresponds to the wind recorded that evening: from 300° while the witness places the arrival of the UAP at 330°), the mode of final extinction, the appearance possibly cylindrical (like a "tibia"), as well as the date on a summer evening. The surprise caused by the photo (showing luminous flagella around the UAP) results from a photo artifact. The operator left everything on automatic (flash "on" and exposure duration of 1s), triggered his camera which immediately flashed. The flash stopped very quickly as soon as the light threshold needed to capture the dark parts of the field (the tree branches) was reached, but the capture continued for the full second for the brighter elements of the field (here the lantern) which did not need flash to be captured. Thinking the exposure was finished (the confusion is easy between the nearly instantaneous flash duration and the longer exposure duration), the operator stopped framing properly and moved, with the shutter still open, which produces these zigzags or flagella of light. In this long additional exposure after the flash stopped, the dark parts no longer impress the sensor and remain fixed as they were at the end of the flash, which is why the witness may think his camera did not move because the tree branches are sharp, whereas he did move regarding the capture of the lantern. This testimony illustrates the potentially deceptive nature of Thai lanterns and even more so of photos. It also illustrates the chain of erroneous interpretations that surprise or emotion can trigger. Here, the camera freezing and its dating error are experienced and described as linked to the strange phenomenon in the sky. The origin of the UAP is a Thai lantern, but the key element of the strangeness experienced by the witness being rather the photograph, GEIPAN classifies the case as A: photographic artifact.
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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