Sighting in Pantin (93) 30.05.1993 T1, May 30, 1993

At about 4:15 a.m., a witness who had come home after an evening out looked at the sky from their balcony and noticed an orange, rectangular shape. Its apparent size was about 1 metre. It stayed motionless for around fifteen minutes, then moved slowly, changed direction, drew away and vanished at the horizon. The witness also saw a flashing red light. No sound was heard. At 4:30 a.m., from the same balcony, the witness saw a second shape: round, white, not dazzling, stationary and also about 1 metre across. They watched it continuously until 6 a.m., when it faded away very slowly. This second sighting is covered in a separate file (T2).

GEIPAN re-examined the case, which had first been classed D, and separated the two phenomena. The first was most probably the landing lights of an aircraft on a night approach to one of the two Paris airports lying in the line of sight. Such lights can be seen from very far away. At that distance, their light blended with the red anti-collision light, producing the appearance of an orange rectangle. The eastward movement, the low elevation above the horizon, the flashing red light that appeared once the aircraft turned to face the runway, the slow motion and the lack of noise all support this. The second phenomenon looks like a confusion with Venus, which was rising in the east, while the many clouds that night explain why it vanished. The witness was probably not used to watching the sky at that hour, and the first sighting likely led them to scan the sky. Buildings served as reference points, which partly makes up for the absence of angular measurements by the gendarmes. The case's consistency is rated average. It is classed B: probable sighting of an aircraft.