Venus confusion in Cannes on New Year's night 1980

Summary

On the night of January 1, 1980, a motorist in Cannes observed a luminous object he described as a ball of thread with black squares between the filaments, evoking something supernatural. He used binoculars and took photographs, but the negatives came out empty. There were no other witnesses. GEIPAN reviewed the case with modern tools and concluded the object was Venus, visible in the sky but unrecognized by the witness. The confusion was attributed more to subjective interpretation than to a genuine perceptual error.