An account in Nord, France

On Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 11:30 PM, a motorist and his passenger were intrigued by several orange luminous phenomena moving silently in the sky over Lille. Only one testimony was collected. The observation of orange balls crossing the sky in a few minutes, on a weekend night, strongly suggests Thai lanterns, probably released nearby at the end of a private party. It is noted that this was the first Saturday after the Chinese New Year (Feb 19), a major occasion for releasing flying lanterns. Because the witness was moving in a car and observed the multiple objects intermittently, the precise trajectory of the objects could not be reconstructed and compared with the wind direction (light easterly wind); see the Météociel data. GEIPAN received no other reports of this type of phenomenon in Lille for that evening. Due to this impossible verification, and despite the strong resemblance to Thai lanterns, GEIPAN classifies this case as "C" due to lack of information. The witness refutes this Thai lantern hypothesis that was presented to him.

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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.