Sighting in Soppe-le-Bas, July 20, 2013

At about 1:30 in the morning, on a Saturday night, a witness was puzzled to see groups of dark red balls passing silently across the sky. The balls, sometimes described as orange-red, moved in single file. The witness took photographs of them.

The objects were estimated to be travelling from east to west. That direction is hard to match with the local wind, which was very weak and variable and therefore uncertain: the wind was recorded as northerly at Colmar and southerly at Basel, which may explain a change of direction. The witness had not known that Thai lanterns existed, but after looking into the subject accepted that these could have been such lanterns.

GEIPAN classified the case as B. Orange-red balls moving in single file on a weekend night strongly suggest Thai lanterns, and the uncertainty about the local wind did not change that conclusion: the sighting was most probably of Thai lanterns.