Sighting in La (sea) Manche, May 13, 2014

A pilot flying over the English Channel at 17:35 local time reported to air traffic control a luminous phenomenon that puzzled them. To the left of the aircraft, they saw one or two silver balls. The message was very brief, worded in English as "one or 2 silver ball on the left", and gave neither the duration of the sighting nor the direction in which the phenomenon moved. No other witness account was collected for that date.

The sun was to the right of the aircraft, at an azimuth of 255° (southwest) and an elevation of 36°. Weather data from Caen showed substantial cloud cover.

GEIPAN put forward two possibilities. If the phenomenon moved with the aircraft, at the same speed and in the same direction, it could have been a glory (a Brocken spectre, or pilot's cockade), which appears opposite the sun and is projected onto a cloud layer. It could also have been the atmospheric re-entry of space debris or a meteoroid. Because the report lacked detail, the case was classified C, for insufficient data.