The Crozon Sighting: Three Red Rectangles in the Storm (2020)

The Crozon peninsula juts into the Atlantic at the western tip of Brittany, in Finistère. It is military country. The Lanvéoc-Poulmic naval air base sits on the peninsula, and the Île-Longue base for France's nuclear-deterrent submarines lies nearby.

Monday, 13 January 2020. 07:48. The day had not yet broken. A storm was blowing in, with strong gusts, low cloud and rain. The driver of a utility vehicle was alone on a small rural road near Crozon.

To the left, partly hidden by the tops of a clump of pines, hung two identical horizontal red rectangles. Then a third appeared suddenly beside them, at the same spacing. They were bright and sharp-edged, like "truck tail-lights", and no sound was reported. There was no dark mass, beam or halo around them. Inside, they seemed to be made of small moving spheres with a mobile aspect, "as if it were alive."

Each rectangle was about "2 metres long by 50 cm to 1 metre high, spaced 1 metre apart". The gusts were shaking the vehicle. The lights held perfectly still.

After a few seconds, the three moved off toward the south, keeping their arrangement and shrinking as they went. First came a slow departure, rising above the houses. Then came the motion the witness stressed again and again. The lights travelled by ricochets, following the small hills and rolling ground, each bounce an estimated 20 metres high. The GEIPAN investigator later compared it to "pebbles one throws" across water.

Near the horizon, they accelerated. Then they were gone, almost instantaneously, toward the sky, "without interacting with the clouds." From first sight to total disappearance, about two minutes.

The witness's questionnaire reached GEIPAN, the UAP office of the French space agency CNES, on 29 June 2020. A remote analysis came first, and the strangeness of the case then prompted a field investigation. On 30 January 2021, an investigator met the witness on site to reconstruct the sighting and conduct a cognitive interview. The expert committee reviewed the file on 19 May 2022. That summer, the Lanvéoc-Poulmic base replied that none of its aircraft were manoeuvring at the time.

GEIPAN weighed drones, helicopters, a lighthouse, wind-turbine warning lights, a laser projector, windscreen reflections, aircraft and truck reflectors. No lighthouse in the area could project steady red rectangles at the witness for two minutes, and none would move by ricochets. In the rain, a beam would have shown beneath the lights. The shape suggested luminous signage, but no example could be found. Three drones fit "somewhat better", but that meant large drones at fairly close range in a storm.

The case has limits: one witness, a report filed months later, and an interview a year after the event. Still, GEIPAN judged the testimony "very coherent and well-detailed". It classified the case PAN D1, with strangeness rated 0.55 and consistency 0.65.

Category D is GEIPAN's rarest verdict. Vincent Costes, head of GEIPAN, has put it at about 3% of all files. The Crozon lights later became two episodes of the Dossiers OVNI podcast, one telling the witness's story, one with Antoine, the GEIPAN investigator on the case. No hoax allegation has surfaced. No explanation has been found.