Sighting in Marseille, March 30, 2009

A witness went to the gendarmerie with two videos recorded by an automatic video recording station, which were handed in at 14:38 on the same day. The first sequence, filmed at 14:34, shows the trails left by a passing airliner. The second, filmed a few minutes later, shows an unknown sparkling object crossing the field of view and leaving a luminous trail in broad daylight.

GEIPAN compared this recording, a rare one of a daytime light trail, to a meteor. One point was problematic: the object's angular speed looked slow compared with that of the airliner filmed with the same camera. The explanation put forward was that, with the sky light but partly cloudy, only the brightest part of the path could be seen. That is the end of the trajectory, where the atmosphere has slowed the object the most. Another uncertainty remained: the hypothesis only holds if the clouds were transparent enough, since a meteor's luminous phenomenon occurs above 10 km in altitude. The video of the airliner's trail, probably at more than 3,000 m, seems to support this, though not with certainty.

The case was classified B: a probable atmospheric re-entry. The witness later sent GEIPAN another video, dated 4 May 2009, showing a ball of light on an ascending path; for the time being GEIPAN had no explanation for it.