Sighting in Los Angeles, October 15, 2024

The witness was in the cockpit of an aircraft in flight over the Atlantic Ocean, at about 9,000 metres (30,000 feet), when they noticed a luminous phenomenon at around 08:00 UTC. Scanning the sky about 60 degrees above the horizon, they spotted a halo of very intense light, with an apparent size comparable to that of the Moon.

The halo moved down toward the horizon, roughly eastward, for two to three minutes, with no change in brightness. It then went behind the horizon line and disappeared. The witness provided three photographs, one of which seems to show a dark mass attached to the halo.

GEIPAN rated the case as having low strangeness and good consistency, since there was a single witness but several photos. The description strongly suggests an upper rocket stage venting gas in the vacuum of space while lit by the sun, a step known as passivation. A reconstruction of the trajectory of the Starlink 10-10 group, launched on a Falcon 9 rocket about 1 hour 40 minutes earlier, matches the path of the phenomenon exactly. The rocket's last stage was starting its second orbit, a favourable moment for the deorbit burn meant to bring it down over the Indian Ocean. The case was classified A: the witness saw the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher performing a deorbit manoeuvre.