Sighting in Paris, August 23, 2015

During the night of 23 to 24 August 2015, several witnesses, each on their own, reported an intense red glow in the Paris sky. The first witness noticed it from 11:25 pm, towards the south-east. The very bright light seemed to be constant, with changes in intensity, and moved slightly before returning to its starting position. Intrigued, the witness photographed it with a smartphone and kept watching until 1 am, then went to bed.

A second witness, at 12:58 am, saw a fire-red ball in the north-west above the buildings for ten minutes. They took three photographs with a mobile phone. They went to wake their spouse, and when they came back to the window the object was gone.

The two accounts were consistent and rich in usable data, and were analysed separately. The photographs allowed useful cross-checks. The characteristics of the phenomenon match those of a powerful red laser used by a private individual from the top of a building in Paris's 11th arrondissement: what the witnesses saw was the light spot formed by the beam on the low cloud or haze layer. Ambient light made the beam itself invisible, both to the naked eye and on the photographs, except after one of them was enhanced. The case is only weakly strange, mainly because of the light's intensity and its persistence for more than an hour and a half. GEIPAN classified the case as B, a probable identification.