Sighting in La Calmette, December 15, 2023

A witness was driving on the N106 towards Nîmes at 07:10 when they noticed a very bright white light in the clear night sky. It was about 30° above the horizon and moving from north to south. The witness saw no trail and heard no sound. The light travelled in a straight line at high speed, then changed course as if going around a hill, and disappeared after 3 seconds. It crossed only a very small part of the sky. There is only one account, with no photo or video.

GEIPAN rated the case as having medium consistency: a single witness, no recorded visual evidence, and incomplete data, notably on the exact direction in which the witness was looking. The fireball hypothesis, a fireball being a luminous phenomenon caused by a natural celestial body entering the atmosphere, rests on several points: a fast white light, a brief sighting, an initial straight-line movement and, above all, a fireball recorded at 07:07 by three cameras of the FRIPON network, at Mantet (66), Le Bleymard (48) and Aubenas (07). The network did not reconstruct the precise trajectory, but the directions recorded by two of the three cameras closely match the witness's position.

The lack of a visible trail is surprising but not necessarily unlikely: watching from a moving vehicle, through a window and for a very short time, may have made it impossible to see, as could a perspective effect linked to the fireball's entry angle. The change of direction may have been only apparent, caused by the vehicle changing direction. GEIPAN classified the case as A: fireball.