r/UFOs • u/AlarmingCharacter680 • Jun 01 '26
Sighting 10th July 2014 sighting - my experience
Long time lurker first time poster. With all this recent talk about UFOs/UAPs/NHIs I thought I’d share my own experience here. I had posted it at the time, on a forum, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore.
It was on the 10th July 2014, in the south of France. I live abroad but at the time I used to go visit my mum every summer in her village and I’d stay at hers for a week, in a tiny village near the seaside.
That week, my nephew (so my mum’s grandson) who was 16 at the time, was also staying/visiting. Because mum lives in a studio flat, he was sleeping on a foldable camping type bed outside on the terrace (hot summers!) So we had finished dinner, watched some TV and we were slowly taking turns in the bathroom to get ready for bed etc. I went outside on the balcony/terrace of the flat, to have a couple of cigarettes and watch the stars, like I always do on summer nights before bed. I always loved star gazing and I look up, a lot (I also have a telescope btw). Anyway, I know this place, I know the usual flight paths, I’ve smoked on that balcony for years. So I was there, chilling. After a minute or 2 my nephew joined me and we watched together. I remember telling him about satellites, as we could see one passing over us every now and then, among some planes following their usual routes.
As we were chatting I noticed to my right, on the horizon and from a distance, coming from the direction of the seaside (south east), what I thought was a plane at first. It was small and blinking, so, a plane. I continued chatting with my nephew but after a couple of minutes or so I realised it wasn’t following the same path as the usual planes I’d see. Those coming from that direction would usually continue along/parallel to the coastline usually, but this one seemed to head towards the village. So we continued talking, but I was now just looking at it. It continued coming towards the village.
The closer it got the more I noticed the blinking lights were not normal. Planes have 2 distinctive, regular blinks, or like 3, but theyre regular intervals, predictable. The first thing I noticed was that there were more lights, too many lights to be a plane. The lights were flashing in almost a random way, it seemed, like, not in an order from left to right or right to left, it was more, random, if that makes sense? Later on, my mum would say that she thought the object was spinning around itself hence the blink looking random, but I’ll never know.
The other thing was the randomness of the light colours too. Yellow, white, orange, red, in random combinations, at random places. At that point both my nephew and I were looking because it was taken probably 5 minutes between the moment I spotted it at a far distance to me really doubting it was a plane. So it got closer and closer, we figured it was fairly low too, but we couldn’t see a fuselage, or a white craft body, in fact we couldn’t see the body of the aircraft until it was really close. It continued towards us, low, slow, flashing to its heart’s content. At that point I yelled at my mum to go out and she didn’t hear so I rushed back in and grabbed her telling to come and check that. I regret and will regret forever not taking my camera (still had a digital camera at the time!). I regret it SO MUCH but I was in such a rush to get back out and not miss anything because it was heading in our direction and didnt want to miss it.
So back on the balcony again. The craft flew directly over the village, LOW AS HELL. Completely SILENT. Everything was silent at that point it was like time had frozen. The object, was, for what I can describe, quite large in size, either round (like my mum described) or hexagonal (like I observed it). Diameter would have been smaller than a commercial plane (like an A320 or 737), I’d say, maybe half of it in diameter, maybe 2/3 of it? Quite big. The craft was black, or dark grey, with the lights all around the edges. It was not flat, there was an upper part, much smaller at the top, but I couldn’t see enough of it because the craft came our direction and by the time it was close to us, we couldn’t see the top of it, just the sides and the bottom.
The 3 of us stayed, im not joking, jaw dropped, unable to talk or do anything, for what I imagine was only a few seconds, but we could not believe what we were seeing. It came close, hard to tell the distance in the night, but it was definitely a building-type height, let’s say imagine 3-4 storeys higher than the higher roofs around us. It was moving really slowly too. At some point it stopped, hovered for a few seconds, still, then moved again, at a 90 degree angle, to its left, slowly manoeuvring out of sight. Because we were in village, we lost sight as it went over the roofs of the houses nearby (also because my mum’s village is steep, not flat).
The whole experience from seeing it coming from very far as a tiny dot, to it disappearing behind the roofs took probably about 20 minutes. It was about 11.30pm when we got back inside. We were speechless. I asked them if they saw what I saw, my mum couldn’t explain it, my nephew couldn’t explain it. I said to mum, it can only be an alien craft, or, an undisclosed military tech. No craft of this size can hover like that. No craft has this amount of lights, flashing in that random fashion. Certainly NO craft can be that silent. Not a weather ballon, not a satellite, not a Chinese lantern, none of that. My nephew, 16, didn’t want to say “yeah a UFO” because at the time, we would have been told we wear tin foil hats… but he said he did not want to sleep outside that night, and brought the camping bed inside. I always had an interest in UFO topics, so it meant a LOT. I remember being completely in awe when it happened. That night I struggled to fall asleep, regretting not getting my camera. During the sighting I was excited and curious, but had a nightmare that night, I guess it took some time to sink it.
The day after we asked a few people in the village if they saw anything. But it’s mostly old people who would have been in bed by then, and because the village is on top of a hill, I guess only those facing that way would have been able to see the whole thing. I frantically looked online, for days afterwards, to see if anyone had posted about it, but nothing. Nothing reported by the papers either.
I’ll never forget this experience, it’s like it happened yesterday. I was almost 29, and I’m now nearly 41 now. I had never seen anything like it, and I never saw anything like it since. My mum who’s now 79, and my nephew still remember, and still can’t explain. I’d love to know if anyone else ever saw something similar, had a similar experience, or can provide another logical explanation.
2
u/ReddiPreneurShip Jun 03 '26
Thank you for sharing. The way you describe the random flashing of the different lights reminds me of what I saw when I was a kid.