Sighting in Marquette-lez-Lille, February 22, 2014

At about 7:45 p.m., the witness was coming home from grocery shopping. While parking in front of their home, they noticed a point of light in the sky moving to the left. After roughly two minutes of watching, the light left their field of view and they headed into their garden.

There, they saw the phenomenon again, along with a second one moving in the opposite direction. The two crossed paths. The first kept moving away, while the second stopped and stayed fixed in the sky until clouds covered it, between 10 minutes and an hour after the observation began. No other witness account was collected.

The GEIPAN investigation concluded that this was a misidentification of the International Space Station (ISS), which was crossing the path of the star Sirius, a particularly conspicuous object. The ISS was visible at a time very close to the one the witness gave, on a trajectory fully consistent with the one described. Its close approach to Sirius could have briefly created the illusion that the star was moving in the opposite direction. According to GEIPAN, the witness's eyesight was not at fault; rather, it was their interpretation of what they saw, shaped by how they felt (tiredness, surprise, an observation made in several stages). The case was classified A.