Sighting in Torpes (25), February 15, 2019

Several independent witnesses noticed bright, circular objects in the sky one morning, moving slowly and silently. Some took photos or filmed them. The GEIPAN received two testimonies, though other people living in north-eastern France seem to have seen the same thing. The descriptions agreed: a white, shiny ball, sometimes two, that looked stationary or drifted very slowly and steadily. Each of the two accounts described an observation lasting more than a quarter of an hour, about twenty minutes in all, in good visibility. One witness contacted the gendarmerie right away, the other the GEIPAN.

The investigation, which went beyond the two testimonies, identified the source: double-walled hot-air balloons taking part in the third edition of the "Ballon Concept Challenge", a competition starting in Switzerland in which the balloons try to travel as far as possible from the launch site. That year the fleet spread out northward over Franche-Comté and then Lorraine, with some reaching Germany. The lack of a visible basket, the ball shape, the unusually high altitude of the balloons and their metallic surface, which reflected the Sun strongly, may have made the sighting seem strange. All the evidence nonetheless pointed to balloons. The GEIPAN classified the case as category A, a fully identified phenomenon, with no remaining unexplained element.