Sighting in Paris, May 20, 2017

On a Saturday evening, between 8 and 9 p.m., a witness noticed a bright point of light in the sky over Paris. Looking through binoculars, they saw that the glint seemed to come from an elongated, silvery-grey shape. Its brightness and color resembled those of the Moon in broad daylight. Some areas of the shape were darker than others, notably a small circular part. The object appeared motionless during the roughly 15 seconds of observation. The witness first thought of an aircraft seen head-on with its light pointed their way, but the stillness of the light puzzled them, and the shape looked solid, like a metallic body. Only one account was collected.

GEIPAN concluded that the witness probably saw an aircraft whose fuselage briefly reflected the sun toward them. The sky was clear and the sun was low on the horizon, in the west-northwest, while many aircraft were flying in the southeast. The plane would have been at an elevation of 20 to 30° and 20 or 30 km away. In 15 seconds it would have moved about 3 km, an angular change of 6 to 9°, hard to detect. Such a bright reflection depends on a precise geometry between the sun, the witness, the aircraft and its heading, and is fleeting by nature. Through binoculars, the elongated shape matched the fuselage, and the darker circular part probably came from the wing, seen edge-on, and from where it joins the fuselage. This kind of mistake is not unusual, and GEIPAN classified the case as B, a probable aircraft sighting.