Sighting in Challans, August 8, 2012

At about 11:10 p.m., a witness watched two very bright objects travel side by side from south to north at very high altitude for about a minute. The account was very brief, and no other witness came forward.

The investigation consulted the satellite pass schedule compiled by Calsky. Several satellites were crossing the sky at that time. The International Space Station, extremely bright (magnitude -4.3), had two cargo vehicles docked to it, the Russian Progress and the Japanese HTV-3, and followed an apparent path from the southwest to the northeast. At nearly the same moment, two other satellites, IGS5 H2A Rocket and Alos, passed from south to north, roughly 80° apart. They were much fainter, at magnitudes 2.7 and 3.

The witness could hardly have missed the spectacular pass of the station, yet the direction they gave does not match its path, and they described only one very bright point. If they saw the other two satellites, those were not very bright. Because of this uncertainty and the vagueness of the testimony, the GEIPAN classified the case as B: probable observation of satellites, without being able to say exactly which ones.