Sighting in Gien, April 13, 2015

At around 10:45 on a Monday, the witness was sitting on a café terrace with friends under a clear sky. They saw a very bright object go past without making any sound. Theirs is the only account that was collected. The object looked metallic and was rotating as it crossed part of the sky in less than a minute. The witness was facing south-southwest (azimuth 220°) and the object moved from their left to their right. The observation ended with the object descending in a spiral.

Since the witness did not recognise the object, they could not properly judge its distance or size, and such values are often overestimated: a 50 cm object seen at 100 metres looks exactly the same as a similarly shaped 5 m object seen at 1,000 metres. GEIPAN put forward a Mylar balloon, a metallised fairground balloon, that had slipped from its owner's hands. The Météociel record for Orléans shows a variable wind from northeast to east. This is not quite aligned with the southeast-to-northwest axis the witness perceived, but it could push a balloon from the observer's left to their right. The spiral descent could match the balloon deflating after an overpressure caused by altitude. GEIPAN classified the case as B: probable observation of a Mylar balloon.