Hautes-Pyrénées, France · 2013-09-22 · from the GEIPAN archive
A witness reports successive observations of silent luminous balls in the sky between September 22 and 28, 2013, in the evening. This testimony of observations of a very bright ball near the horizon, visible for a long time and several days in a row and seeming to follow the observer, is a very classic misidentification, sometimes called a "following ball." Its origin is obviously astronomical: in this case it is the planet Venus, dazzling this autumn in the early evening (Magnitude = -4.7). The direction indicated by the witness on his drawing corresponds to an approximate azimuth of 241°, while Venus at the same time is at an azimuth of 235°. The photos are entirely consistent with this hypothesis, and the witness reports another orange ball, less bright, slightly above and to the right, which is the planet Saturn (see astronomical chart). The witness reports another very different phenomenon on September 23, 2013: observation of a few seconds of the very rapid passage of an orange ball. This much rarer phenomenon, called a bolide, most likely corresponds to the re-entry into the atmosphere of a meteoroid (meteorite). GEIPAN classifies this case "A": observation of Venus, and of a bolide.
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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