Thirty luminous dots over Nîmes, 2016

Summary

On 17 December 2016, three people in Nîmes watched about thirty white dots and one orange one drifting silently across the sky. A video was recorded but the main witness declined to have it published. The north-to-south wind that day matched the objects' direction. Although the witness questioned irregular trajectories, the footage showed a left-to-right drift consistent with wind.

Urban air currents can produce local variations in movement, and some stationary points in the recording turned out to be stars visible through thin cloud cover. Halos around the lights were optical aberrations. Given the festive weekend context, GEIPAN attributed the phenomenon to Thai lanterns and classified the case as B.