Sarthe, France · 2015-02-17 · from the GEIPAN archive
On February 17 at around 8 p.m., a witness in his garden observed the passage from east to west of a phenomenon shaped like a very bright white tube with a red mark at the front. It went out abruptly in the clear sky. The observation lasted between 5 and 6 seconds. No other testimony was collected. The bright and elongated visual aspect, as well as the linear and rapid trajectory in the sky, are characteristic of a fireball. The BOAM station at May-sur-Orne recorded a fireball at the same time according to a trajectory seen (from the station) located in an azimuth quadrant (150° to 160°) where the observation site happens to be, and a direction that indeed gives a perception of east to west. The passage at high elevation (45 to 60°) observed on both sides is compatible with a fireball at an altitude of 50 to 100 km crossing from east to west, the axis connecting the two points being 130 km apart. The witness was at the eastern limit of the station's visibility and therefore could have begun to see the fireball earlier and with a greater excursion across the sky (3/4 of the sky according to the witness). The witness very likely saw a meteoroid reentry. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as A: observation of a fireball.
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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