Sighting in Le Tampon, October 4, 2025

At about 3:00 a.m., the witness set out on foot from the volcano refuge to climb the Piton de la Fournaise, with three other people, one of them a second witness, to watch the sunrise from the summit. About two thirds of the way up, under a perfectly clear sky, the witness stepped briefly away from the group and noticed a bright object moving across the sky.

The sighting lasted two to three minutes. The object followed a horizontal path from left to right and then disappeared at the horizon. Its light, at first white-yellow, turned a deeper yellow without flickering, and it left a visible trail. The witness judged it faster than an aircraft but slower than a shooting star. Near the end, they made out two very close light sources, as if the object had split into two parts travelling along the same path. Both witnesses took photographs, producing six usable images in which the object is clearly visible. Only the first witness reported the sighting to the GEIPAN. They themselves rated the strangeness as low and thought it was probably an identifiable phenomenon.

The investigation ruled out a bolide, since the duration and apparent speed were incompatible with one. The features described match an artificial atmospheric re-entry. According to the CNES Space Surveillance Operations Centre (COSE), the satellite Starlink 2437 was re-entering the atmosphere at that time. The calculated trajectory differs somewhat from the one reconstructed from the photographs, but at roughly 160 km altitude atmospheric drag is very strong, and a small error in the atmospheric density used in the models can produce such discrepancies. The GEIPAN classified the case as B: probable atmospheric re-entry of a Starlink satellite.