Sighting in Franois, February 6, 2019

At around 6:30 a.m., a driver travelling along a road through a forest saw in the rear-view mirror a whitish, cylindrical luminous phenomenon that lit up the road strongly. It passed in front of the vehicle and lit up the inside of the car. Startled, the witness stopped and got out, but the phenomenon had already vanished. No particular noise had been heard.

The witness was the only one to report it, and gave an account only to the gendarmerie, without filling in the GEIPAN Terrestrial Questionnaire, and provided no photo or sketch. Many details of the testimony are therefore unknown. Even so, the investigation favoured a mistaken identification of a bolide: a cylindrical shape with a beam of light, very fast and silent movement, and an observation lasting several seconds all fit a very bright meteor. The FRIPON network recorded no bolide in north-eastern France that night, only one event in the south of the country. The BOAM network, however, recorded four bolides late in the night, between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. local time, all by a station located in an area consistent with the sighting. None of them could be formally linked to the case, given the lack of other witnesses and the scarcity of detail. The case was classified B: probable misidentification of a bolide.