Sighting in Debris Spatiaux (retombee) — National, October 18, 2009

The GEIPAN received a very large number of reports from all over France about something seen on a Sunday evening at around 9:15 pm local time. Witnesses saw one or two bright points of light cross the sky from the south toward the northwest. Most often, a white halo followed them, like the tail of a comet. Nobody heard any sound.

The investigation linked these sightings to the atmospheric re-entry of the Centaur stage of an Atlas rocket, specifically the moment when it released its remaining fuel. That rocket had launched an American military weather satellite, the DMSP F18, from Vandenberg base in California. The case is classified A, meaning identified. The GEIPAN website published a news item on it, with a graph of the trajectory and two photographs, and new witness reports continue to be added to the file.