The Fontvieille searchlight

At about ten at night a driver at Fontvieille, a village near Arles, noticed three red points of light blinking some 100 metres above the ground. At first he could make out no shape behind them. They moved slowly from east to west and he heard a faint hum. Then one of the three dropped closer to the ground and, in GEIPAN's words, "l'inspectera avec ce qui semble être un projecteur" (examined it with what seemed to be a searchlight). The other two held still. The witness then made out a dome lit in several colours.

What is on the record

The source is GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena. Its file 1978-04-00512 holds a short summary and one witness questionnaire. The questionnaire describes a man of 30 on a clear night. It logs three phenomena and puts the dome at 25 metres across.

The archive's fact sheet attaches a second GEIPAN file to this page, case 3973, and it describes a different night. A bus driver came forward in 2015 to report a green glow like a large drop of water, trailed by three smaller drops, crossing the eastern sky from north to south one December evening in 1978 on the road from Fontvieille to Paradou. His passengers saw it too. GEIPAN says the account has every mark of a space-debris re-entry and classes it C for want of a date. It shares a commune with the April sighting and nothing else.

The file does not agree with itself in two places. The questionnaire times the sighting at 22.40 on 26 April, while the summary opens on 27 April. The summary mentions a light hum, but the questionnaire records total silence. The summary also says the local press carried other accounts of the same phenomenon. None of those accounts is in the file and none is named.

GEIPAN classes the case D. That is its category for a phenomenon it investigated and could not identify. The published file lists no hypotheses tested or rejected. Its reasoning stops at the closing line that the phenomenon "reste inexpliqué" (remains unexplained).

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L0, a single account. One GEIPAN record carries the April sighting; the December file under the same commune is another event and does not corroborate it. GEIPAN withholds the identities of witnesses, so its record names no one and carries no identified witness. The press reports it mentions are not in the archive. The tier measures sourcing and says nothing about the quality of GEIPAN's investigation. What the record holds is one motorist's account of three lights and a beam, filed by a state body as unexplained. What he saw is not resolved here.