Sighting in Tuffé, February 17, 2015

At around 8 p.m., a witness in their garden saw a very bright white, tube-shaped phenomenon with a red mark at its front travel from east to west. It went out abruptly in a clear sky. The sighting lasted five to six seconds. According to the witness, the object covered about three quarters of the sky. No other testimony was collected.

Its bright, elongated appearance and its fast, straight path are typical of a bolide. The BOAM station at May-sur-Orne recorded a bolide at the same moment. Seen from the station, it crossed an azimuth sector of 150° to 160°, exactly where the witness was located, and its direction of travel matched an east-to-west passage. The high elevation (45° to 60°) reported at both places is consistent with a bolide at an altitude of 50 to 100 km moving east to west along the axis linking the two points, which were 130 km apart. The witness was at the eastern edge of the station's visibility range, so they could have begun seeing the bolide earlier and over a larger stretch of sky. The witness very probably saw a meteoroid entering the atmosphere. GEIPAN therefore classified the case as A: observation of a bolide.