Vosges, France · 2013-12-31 · from the GEIPAN archive
An orange orb in Vosges, France
The witness, looking toward the north-northeast at 5:30 p.m., "observed from a moving vehicle an orange light above the horizon. The light seemed fixed; it was neither a star, nor the Moon, nor a streetlamp."
Indeed, there is no very bright star in that direction, nor of course the Moon, and it is too high in the sky for a streetlamp.
Since the observation took place shortly after sunset, one can consider the temporary reflection of the sun on an airplane or a satellite. The witness says the light seemed fixed, but since he was moving, this statement cannot be considered rigorous.
GEIPAN did not find on "Flightradar24" any commercial airliner that could have caused this reflection, but nothing rules out a military aircraft. The Calsky sky chart gives several satellite candidates: the NOSS satellites that were passing in the witness's direction of observation at that time, in particular the launch debris: 3-4 Rocket. These objects, generally not very bright (magnitude 4 to 6), are known to sometimes "flash."
These hypotheses, although suitable, could not be sufficiently consolidated for GEIPAN to adopt them. GEIPAN classifies this not-very-strange case in category "C": lack of information.
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On July 14, 2013 at around 11:45 PM, a witness observed 5 orange light sources moving in the sky over Toulouse. The witness then made a second observation of the movement of a slightly opale…
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 fo…
On October 20, 2013, between midnight and one in the morning, two people walking together are intrigued by the presence in the sky of a set of equidistant lights forming a triangle. Only one…
On February 16, 2013 at 7:32 PM, a witness observes, through a French door, the very rapid and silent passage of an orange ball in a straight trajectory. An orange ball crossing about 45 deg…
On August 1, 2013 at 12:40 AM, two people are intrigued by the presence above a tree of a blinking orange ball that then rises into the clear sky and will be hidden by a neighboring building…
both described an orange orb
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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