Sighting in Debris Etage Centaur — Haute-Garonne, November 3, 2015

A motorist driving at 7:06 in the early morning saw a phenomenon made up of several reddish glowing fragments cross the sky from west to east. It split first into two, then into four or five pieces, and quickly faded out above the Pyrenees. The witness heard no particular sound, and the sighting lasted 15 to 20 seconds. Another motorist, on the A64 motorway, also filled in a questionnaire describing what they had seen. Many witnesses in Spain saw the phenomenon as well.

GEIPAN concluded that this very fast fireball, which broke into several pieces, had the characteristics of a large piece of space debris re-entering the atmosphere. However, the object did not appear in the list of catalogued objects published by the American service SpaceTrack. An investigation by an outside specialist identified it as the third stage of a Centaur launcher, used in 2002 to launch an American military satellite. Spherical tanks survived re-entry and were recovered in Spain.

The case is remarkable because it combines eyewitness sightings with debris found on the ground. GEIPAN classified it as A: the observation was the atmospheric re-entry of a Centaur stage.