Sighting in Gérardmer, August 18, 2018

The witness was in a forest with a friend, taking a few astronomical photos of the sky. At 23:08, a bright point of light suddenly caught their attention, with a brightness close to that of Venus. It appeared near Ursa Minor, at the edge of the constellation Cepheus. The witness watched it only very briefly, and it seemed to them to be stationary. Only one account was collected.

The investigation found that the location where the light appeared and the details given were not particularly strange. The only puzzling aspect was its apparent lack of movement, but this is explained by the satellite seeming to head toward the witness and pass almost directly overhead. The witness described the sighting very precisely, which made it possible to confirm the position of the phenomenon and to cross-check it against the preferred hypothesis: sunlight reflecting off an object orbiting the Earth.

GEIPAN concluded that this was very probably a misidentification of a flash from the Iridium 33 satellite (a piece of debris), given the position of that debris at the time. The case is classified A.