Sighting in Rentree Atmospherique — National, September 20, 2012

Several people saw a luminous phenomenon cross the sky slowly around midnight on the night of 21 to 22 September 2012: four pilots in flight over northern France and one witness on the ground. The four pilots' accounts were gathered in a single report forwarded by the CRNA Est in Reims. All of them observed the phenomenon directly, under a clear sky. No onboard radar echo and no malfunction of the flight instruments were reported. One of the pilots specified that the light was blue.

The witness on the ground described a fluorescent green ball with a trail, moving along a descending path. The same phenomenon was also seen by large numbers of people in England, where it travelled from east to west, more slowly than typical fireballs.

A meteor specialist at the Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des éphémérides, consulted by GEIPAN, considered the object very interesting and suggested it might be a small asteroid temporarily captured by the Earth. This type of phenomenon occurs between 100 and 60 km altitude. Given that the pilots were looking north, it was the same event that the four pilots, the witness in Laon and the witnesses in England all saw. GEIPAN classified the case as A: atmospheric entry of a meteoroid, observed as a fireball.