Sighting in Utelle, July 31, 2013

Shortly after midnight, a witness standing on the Madonne d'Utelle plateau noticed a luminous ball moving slowly across the sky at high altitude. It gave off flashes at regular intervals, which puzzled the witness.

The GEIPAN investigation looked at the many satellites that are visible on summer evenings. The third stage of the rocket that launched the American satellite LAGEOS in 1963 could match the sighting. On the sky chart produced with Calsky, oriented north-west with the Big Dipper on the right, a white trace shows the path of this object over thirty minutes. An object of this kind almost always spins: a reflective part of it can periodically bounce sunlight back very strongly and produce a flash.

Because the position of the phenomenon in the sky is only imprecisely known, this hypothesis could not be confirmed with certainty. GEIPAN classified the case as B: a probable sighting of a satellite, in the form of debris, at high altitude, whose rotation causes periodic flashes.