Pas-de-Calais, France · 2016-05-15 · from the GEIPAN archive
On May 15, 2016 between 10:30 PM and 11:00 PM, several people in a garden observed the slow passage of several balls or spheres of yellow-orange light. All the balls moved in the same direction (East-West) with a regular gap between them. No noise was heard throughout the observation. A video and photos were taken. The witnesses reported their observations to the gendarmerie. GEIPAN does not have the photos and video. The statements of the 4 witnesses are consistent and are highly characteristic of an observation of a release of Thai lanterns, both in terms of the colors, the shapes, the type of trajectory, including the mode of disappearance with the extinguishing of lanterns, which can create an impression of disappearance by "flash" or sudden distancing. The occurrence on a weekend night, favorable to festive events, reinforces this hypothesis. We do not have a measurement of the local wind; the one measured 20 km away is weak (5 km/h) and of fluctuating direction. The movement of the lanterns can thus be on the order of 100 m/min; they actually fly much lower (at 100 or 200 m) than the witnesses might imagine, who cannot properly assess the distance to an unrecognized phenomenon. Thus in 5 or 10 minutes, the movement in the sky can be very significant, as was reported, even with a weak wind. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as B: Thai lanterns.
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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