Grand Est, France · 2013-02-13 · from the GEIPAN archive
An orange orb in Grand Est, France
On February 13, 2013 at around 9:15 PM, witnesses in Alsace and Lorraine (including 6 people in the Strasbourg-Entzheim control tower) observed the silent passage of a luminous phenomenon followed by a trail in the sky. The phenomenon moved along a horizontal trajectory. Other testimonies would be collected later.
These testimonies describe the passage of a fireball identified as the atmospheric reentry of a stage of the Soyuz SL-4 R/B launcher (catalogued as 39083, or 2013-007B), launched on February 11 to put a Progress cargo ship into orbit bound for the International Space Station (see the graph of the ground projection of the modeled trajectory of the object).
It is noted that that evening, only Alsace and the Southeast of France had clear skies; this explains why this phenomenon, although very spectacular, was relatively little noticed in France.
This case is classified as "A" as perfectly identified as the atmospheric reentry of (large) space debris.
On November 22, 1981, between 7:40 and 8:00 a.m., several people are on the ring road at the airfield. Daylight has not fully broken but visibility is good. Suddenly they see a red-orange ba…
On April 15, 2012 around midnight, a witness observes the silent movement of a round orange ball that seems to be on fire. The object moves on a downward trajectory toward the East, then tur…
On August 1, 1991 at 8:46 PM, a pilot resting at his home reported by telephone an observation of a non-incandescent object like an orange glow moving in a straight line along an ascending t…
On December 12, 2012 at 7:20 PM (UTC) a pilot and a controller are intrigued by the presence in the sky of a yellow-orange light of strong magnitude. A photograph was able to be taken from t…
Several testimonies from pilots in flight and one ground witness describe the slow passage of a luminous phenomenon in the sky around midnight on the night of September 21 to 22, 2012.
A si…
On November 15, 1956 at 7:05 PM in Paris, a pilot observes from the ground a bright red ball moving from northwest to southeast in the clear sky. A second ball detaches from it and follows a…
both described an orange orb · pilot witness
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This is an official case file of GEIPAN, the French space agency's unidentified aerospace phenomena office, machine translated from French. The original text and the full investigation file are at geipan.fr. We reproduce it with thanks and remove anything on request.
Anomaly