Sighting in Debris Spatiaux (retombee) — National, December 21, 1988

At around 12:50 a.m., a great many witnesses spread across France along a north-south line saw a very bright white object cross the sky, trailing a yellow-orange streak. Pilots also saw it from their aircraft in flight. The phenomenon moved very fast and no sound was heard. Toward the end of its path, the object broke up into several pieces.

The next day, south of Bourges, a person working the land found a piece of sheet metal about 70 cm long in their field, which was recorded in a police report. Examination of the piece showed that it was a fragment of the nozzle of a Russian Soyuz launcher. That rocket had lifted off five days earlier, on 16 December 1988, from Plesetsk in the USSR, carrying the satellite COSMOS 1984, an optical reconnaissance satellite of the Yantar 4K2 type, which came back down on 13 February 1989.

GEIPAN therefore classified the case as A: the observations, made both from the ground and in flight, matched the atmospheric re-entry of a piece of aerospace debris.