Sighting in Rentree Atmospherique, March 15, 2015

At about 8:45 p.m., many people saw a coloured luminous phenomenon cross the sky. Hundreds of witnesses watched it in north-eastern France, and above all in Germany and Switzerland. GEIPAN received seven reports: five from witnesses on the ground and two from pilots in flight. The phenomenon stayed visible for almost ten seconds because its path was relatively shallow. It travelled from north-north-east to south-south-east, roughly from above Stuttgart to above Zurich.

One of the pilots, who was flying north, said the phenomenon had brushed past the aircraft, when it was in fact more than 200 km away. GEIPAN points out that this impression of closeness appears in every fireball report, pilots included. At high altitude there is no atmospheric haze, so the distance of a bright, unknown light cannot be judged.

Several cameras recorded the fireball, which made it possible to establish its trajectory precisely and show that it was natural in origin: a meteoroid, a small rocky body that crossed Earth's orbit and fragmented as it entered the atmosphere. Its original size is very hard to determine, somewhere between 100 g and 10 kg. GEIPAN classified the case as A: a phenomenon fully identified as a fireball.