The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Provence, France, on July 13, 2008.
"The first image I filmed was three halos of fixed white lights, in the sky, towards the southwest." With the camera at the end of his eye, Robert does not want to miss anything of this phenomenon that he still cannot explain. "I was with my friends on my terrace, everyone saw the same thing." It was at 10:15 p.m. in Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, on the night of Friday to Saturday.
Everyone, turned towards the Luberon mountains. "These lights, horizontal for a few seconds, make no noise. It is complete silence. They multiply, then two seem to detach themselves. They continue to descend to flee towards the west, in the direction of Gordes. In a second they disappear. There remain four lights symmetrically next to each other." They fade into the black of the night. Everyone catches their breath. Robert is still looking for the dots of light with his camcorder, he zooms in to the maximum, adjusts the sharpness of the image.
"The four lights, still perfectly still, have returned. Suddenly. Without any sound. Then the formation seems to move. It adopts an angle of 30ºC. The lights split in two in the sky, the inclination is stronger and stronger to become horizontal, there are no longer six lights, but twelve slightly above Mourre Nègre, some of which are invisible to the naked eye. The "constellation" takes the very clear shape of a rectangular parallelepiped." Robert and his friends have been watching the movement with fascination for 10 minutes.
"Suddenly, the rectangle fades and disappears." Above Gargas, estimated at 5 kilometers in front of them, "after five minutes, suddenly, the lights reappear, in the same direction. Still horizontal. The four lights are fixed, one light flashes on the left of the formation. They all tilt, they move away, and nothing more". It is 10:35 p.m., Robert is "not worried" despite the scene of which he is the privileged witness: "It excites me and really interests me" on the contrary.
A few kilometers away, Ludovic saw the same events, two days earlier. "I was in front of a company to the west of Apt. Five lights were flashing very slowly just above my head, a few dozen meters high. They formed an arc of a circle. Suddenly, they started to turn on themselves, to go towards the West in a few seconds. They reappeared three times, in the same place in the sky, in the space of a quarter of an hour, to disappear in the same way". On the evening of Wednesday July 2, at the same time, in the sky of the Apt region, the lights had already appeared before Ludovic's eye. The next day, back on the scene, the phenomenon repeated itself. "It was like a saucer, like in the movies, I'm sure. A strange thing, floating in the sky. I'm still shaken by it!".
For the moment, the intrigue hovers over Apt. Neither civil nor military aircraft are allowed to fly at the height where the lights were assessed. Only the observatory makes a hypothesis as to the importance of the lights: "The more charged the atmosphere, the more diffuse the light." A phenomenon that could partly answer the intrigue. However, the silence that surrounds these movements of luminous dots in the sky remains unexplained. Nothing listed for military bases. At the flight test center of the 125 air base in Istres, "nothing is listed. No official flight recorded." The duty officer states: "If there had been any activity, we would have heard the noise of our aircraft."
Airbase 701 in Salon-de-Provence "recorded nocturnal aerial activity on Wednesday, perhaps Tucanos from the Air Force School. A nocturnal activity that does not explain the number of odd lights in the formation seen in the Pays d'Apt. The aircraft have a light under each wing, and another landing light, but the lighting of the latter in flight remains extremely rare." The officer is categorical: "No flights Friday evening!"
By C. Denime and D. Diaz
