Sighting in Nuku-Hiva, October 22, 1988

At around 3:30 a.m. according to the initial accounts, several witnesses in French Polynesia saw very bright balls of light pass overhead, white according to some and reddish-orange according to others. The phenomenon followed a straight path across the sky, and no particular sound was heard. Four witness accounts were collected, but late, between two and five weeks after the event. The witnesses placed it at around 4 a.m. The gendarmerie investigation also noted that, the same night, the crews of two airlines, New Zealand and UTA, had reported phenomena with long condensation trails off the Marquesas Islands.

Several balls moved along together, with trails, glows of differing intensity and, in some cases, ogive shapes. These features match the atmospheric re-entry of a fragmenting meteoroid or of a spacecraft. The sighting lasted more than a minute and the angular motion across the sky was not very fast, which favors a spacecraft. The case, first classified D, was re-examined. NORAD records list several objects that re-entered that day. By plotting their final orbits, the GEIPAN found the one whose passage matched the observation: object no. 19597, the upper stage of the rocket that had launched the Raduga 22 satellite. It passed near the observation site at about 13:45 UT, or 4:15 a.m. local time, from northwest to southeast, as described by the two best-placed witnesses. Another witness, farther away, mainly perceived only the west-to-east component. The path given by a fourth witness does not match, but in light of the other accounts and of the crews of the two airliners, that testimony does not rule out the hypothesis. The GEIPAN therefore classified the case as A: atmospheric re-entry of a rocket upper stage.