Sighting in Gondrecourt-le-Château, September 16, 2012

At 4:40 pm, a walker on their own noticed a white ball in the sky that looked like a cloud. It was heading toward them while staying high up. The witness put its apparent size at about one centimetre, and as it came closer it grew to roughly three times that size. The witness took a photograph. GEIPAN received the account in May 2013.

GEIPAN first looked at the possibility of an object carried by the wind. There is no weather station close to Gondrecourt. Records from Saint-Dizier (45 km away) and Nancy-Essey (55 km away) show a very changeable wind, both in direction (northeast, southwest, south, southeast…) and in speed (4 to 25 km/h). It is therefore impossible to state that the object was wind-borne, although that is highly likely. In the photo the object looks white at the zenith and grey near the horizon, which points more toward a fairly low object than toward a cloud. Its clear growth in size during the sighting points the same way and suggests a very low altitude. At 100 m altitude, a 12 km/h wind would have carried it across half the sky (90°) in one minute, over 200 m. The shape described could fit a ball of down, perhaps blown from a nest, or a swarm of insects, but these remain unconfirmed hypotheses.

Without a local wind measurement and with no way to estimate the object's altitude, GEIPAN classified the case C: there was not enough precise information to reach a firm conclusion.