Sighting in La Salle, May 7, 2015

At about 21:45, two witnesses noticed a luminous phenomenon in the sky that intrigued them. Strong white, red and orange lights seemed to circle around a craft. No sound was heard while it moved. According to the testimony, the object came from the north-east at fairly high speed, then suddenly stopped in place. Near the end of the observation, however, the witness did notice it moving away.

The investigation checked air traffic in the direction of the sighting using FlightRadar24. A RyanAir flight in descent, at roughly 2,000 m altitude, was arriving from the north on a south-easterly heading. At 21:40 it turned 90° to the north-east to head for Strasbourg airport. After that turn, it was seen from behind by the observers and looked almost stationary, since its movement away was hard to perceive. This matches the testimony. In this phase the aircraft showed powerful landing lights pointed forward, fixed green, red and white position lights, plus red anti-collision beacons and white strobe flashes. Both kinds of flashing lights blink about once per second without being synchronised, which can look like a chain of blinking lights. The silence is not surprising: the aircraft was 15 to 20 km away with its engines at low power during descent, and the witness had the television on, with noticeable background noise audible on their video.

The GEIPAN classified the case as A: the witnesses had seen the aircraft operating RyanAir flight 5061.