TAMPON (LE) (974) 01.10.2012

On 1 October 2012 at 19:35, several witnesses in Le Tampon, Réunion, saw a white ball with a white trail move rapidly through the sky, apparently descending toward the ocean. A general power outage followed very shortly afterward. One account was collected. GEIPAN considers all the sighting's characteristics consistent with a fireball. It says the witness found the event unusual because he associated it with the outage, which GEIPAN regards as coincidental: outages were not rare on the island, and EDF had in fact scheduled some that week. No fireball record could confirm the event, but the source notes that such records are never exhaustive, especially away from continental areas. GEIPAN considers a fireball the most probable explanation and classifies the case as B.