Sighting in Schiltigheim, June 5, 2015

One evening at 9:10 pm, a witness standing on their fourth-floor balcony noticed two round, dark shapes in a clear sky. The first seemed fairly stationary, while the second slowly traced an arc around it. The witness filmed the scene for a long time, then got into their car to move closer, but lost sight of the objects. They were the only witness on record, and their videos were posted online only later, after a brief technical problem.

The videos showed shapes strongly resembling two hot-air balloons, or possibly gas balloons, whose baskets could not be told apart from the envelopes because of the distance. A radiometric analysis using the IPACO software supported this two-part appearance. The trajectories, partly reconstructed from the ground landmarks visible in the footage, were fairly similar, except that one of the shapes lost angular height. They could give the witness the impression that one shape was circling the other, and they matched objects carried by the wind, drifting steadily to the witness's left. The descent of both shapes was consistent with the requirement to land before nightfall.

The exact aircraft could not be identified, but nearly all the details agreed with this simple explanation. A flight from Kehl, or even Offenburg, was considered very likely: tourist flight companies operate there, in the direction of the sighting and at a distance consistent with the balloons' apparent size. The strangeness was judged very low and the consistency fairly high, since the videos confirmed the account. GEIPAN classified the case as A: hot-air balloons.