An account in Rh�ne, France

On August 22, 2014 at 1:30 PM, two witnesses were intrigued by the movements of several bright white dots several kilometers away in the sky. Only one testimony was collected. The attached Meteo-France map indicates partly cloudy weather, with very weak and unstable wind (Meteo). In the observation region (southwest of Lyon) the weather conditions at that time were such that planes only made contrails between flight levels 357 and 416 (35,700 and 41,600 feet): the multiple planes present recorded by Flightradar24 were flying below these levels (e.g., 24,725 feet), and therefore did not make condensation trails. The somewhat unusual situation of this accumulation of high-altitude planes (at least 5, see Flightradar record), not making contrails, and probably reflecting the sun temporarily depending on their position, would have caused this luminous ballet that astonished the witness. GEIPAN classifies this case as A: observation of reflections on airliners, without contrails.

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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.