Vosges, France · 2015-05-07 · from the GEIPAN archive
On May 7, 2015 at around 9:45 PM, two people are intrigued by a luminous phenomenon in the sky. Powerful lights (white, red, and orange) seem to turn around a craft. No noise is heard during the movements. A check of air traffic in the witness's direction of observation by the FlightRadar24 site tells us that a RyanAir flight in descent, at about 2000m altitude, was coming from the North (heading Southeast) and at 9:40 PM made a 90° heading change to the Northeast to head toward Strasbourg airport (see the FlightRadar screenshots in the appendix). After this heading change, it therefore appeared "from behind" to the observers, thus almost stationary since its moving away is hard to perceive. The witness will however perceive this moving away at the end of the observation. This movement is absolutely consistent with the testimony: "It arrived from the N-E at a fairly fast speed and it suddenly went into stationary flight." In this phase of flight, the plane's lights are multiple: very powerful landing lights, but pointed forward, fixed position lights green, red, and white, and above all flashing lights of two types: red anti-collision lights, and white flashes (strobe). These two types of lights flash about once per second but are not synchronized, sometimes giving the impression of a chain of flashing lights. The silence described by the witnesses is not surprising: the plane was 15 or 20 km away, the engines are at low power in this descent phase and therefore not very noisy; moreover the witness's environment does not seem very quiet: the television is on and a notable background noise is heard on the video. The GEIPAN classifies this case "A": observation of the plane of flight RyanAir 5061.
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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