Police witness in Lot, France

GEIPAN continues to publish all of its archives on its public website www.geipan.fr. Among its publications are old cases classified at the time (A, B, C or D) which are now being re-examined, for the sole purpose of being more relevant in their conclusions. Thanks to new technical means (software) and the investigation experience acquired over all these recent years, this re-examination sometimes leads to new remarks or even a change of classification. This observation case, previously classified D and named SAINT-GERMAIN (46) 1985, is part of a set of cases recently re-examined. On the night of January 24, 1985, two witnesses were startled by two successive flashes followed by clicking sounds and a sudden, intense, brief brightness. Above their house, these witnesses saw an object shaped and sized like a rugby ball. This milky-colored object then moved slowly and silently, surrounded by a whitish halo. About three minutes later, these witnesses and other people heard detonations. No electrical power outage was noted in the house. The description contains the key characteristics of certain meteoroid re-entry phenomena: - Great light in the night, illuminating a large area. - Oval, elongated glow, with halo, crossing the sky. - Detonations occurring afterward. - Multiple witnesses over an area that can be extensive. The police report collected the testimony of people under the same roof or neighbors. But the call for witnesses by T1 through the local press made it possible to record about ten people in neighboring districts claiming to have made similar observations at the same time (no testimony recorded by the police). The aspects of the phenomenon are offset in time. The light in the night illuminating the area very widely is caused by the meteorite at one or more particular moments (here, flashes followed by a longer period of illumination) of its re-entry into the atmosphere. This passage at extreme luminosity can be more or less long, the meteorite then not being in the witnesses' field of vision or they did not have time to detect the original source in the sky. When it entered the witness's field of vision, its luminous intensity had reduced (T1 says "the daylight seemed very long to us, but it cannot have lasted more than a few seconds; immediately after, night returned very quickly, at that moment, I saw an object or a ball of white fire arriving,...."). The detonations can occur with a more or less long delay relative to the luminous phenomena. Indeed, these re-entry phenomena occur at high altitude between 100 and 20 km of altitude, the sound propagation time (at 330 m/s) toward the ground can create offsets of several minutes. It is also classic that witnesses perceive the phenomenon as very close in the sky. GEIPAN has processed a significant number of cases over the last fifteen years and nowadays many sites record data collected on the ground (by automatic cameras and/or by testimonies) during these re-entries. The characteristics of these phenomena are now well known to GEIPAN, in what makes them repeatable as well as variable, and the testimonies received are resolved without special investigation. It also becomes easier to reprocess old cases like this one, except when the testimonies are too brief and can leave doubt. An example from 2016 with more than 20 recordings on the site (International Meteor Organization) illustrates the functioning of one of these sites as well as the geographical spacing and the number of witnesses who can observe such a phenomenon. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as A: very probable observation of meteoroid re-entry.