Sighting in Saint-Michel-sur-Meurthe, December 31, 2013

A witness was traveling in a moving vehicle and looking toward the north-northeast at about 5:30 pm when they noticed an orange light above the horizon. It looked stationary to them, and they stated that it was not a star, the Moon or a street lamp.

The GEIPAN investigation confirmed that no very bright star lay in that direction, that the Moon was not there either, and that the light was too high in the sky to be a street lamp. Because the sighting took place shortly after sunset, a temporary reflection of sunlight off an aircraft or a satellite was considered. Since the witness was moving, their impression that the light was fixed could not be treated as reliable. No airliner that could have caused such a reflection showed up on Flightradar24, but a military aircraft could not be ruled out. A sky chart produced with Calsky listed several NOSS satellites passing in the direction the witness was looking at that time, notably a rocket debris object, 3-4 Rocket. Such objects are generally faint (magnitude 4 to 6) and are known to flash at times.

These hypotheses, though reasonable, could not be firmly enough established for GEIPAN to adopt them. GEIPAN classified the case, regarded as of little strangeness, in category C, meaning insufficient information.