Sighting in Julos, January 9, 2025

The witness, the only person to see the phenomenon, was getting ready to leave for work when, at 6:45 a.m., they noticed from the front steps of their home a large red-orange ball trailing a thin line of smoke. It moved in a straight line from the northwest to the southeast and passed directly overhead. Its apparent size was estimated at 2 cm, measured with a ruler held at arm's length. After roughly 30 seconds, features of the landscape blocked the view and the witness lost sight of it.

The witness later consulted the website "Méprise du ciel", recommended by the GEIPAN, and considered an atmospheric re-entry, but quickly dismissed the idea, stressing that they had never seen a trail like this one.

The GEIPAN rated the case's consistency as medium: there was a single witness and no photo or video. The strangeness came mainly from the trail. The IMO's FIREBALL website, which records atmospheric re-entries, received nine reports at the same time from people in the same area, in southern France along the foothills of the Pyrenees. They described an object mostly red-orange, travelling in a straight line for between 7.5 and 45 seconds, a range that includes the witness's duration. Reported directions varied, but two witnesses on the Basque coast also gave a northwest-to-southeast path. The trajectory determined by the IMO differs from the witness's by only a few degrees. The length of the sighting pointed to an artificial object rather than a natural fireball, and the IMO attributes the sightings to the Starlink® 5144 satellite. The GEIPAN classified the case as A: re-entry of a Starlink® satellite.