CITY:
REGION:
COUNTRY:
DATE:

Lausanne
Vaud
CHE
July 21, 2015

I am hoping your department may be able to help with something I managed to photograph last night in Switzerland (21st July 2015 at around 11pm) Last night sitting in my lounge I noticed a strange orange light, I thought it was at first a plane as we can often see the flight path heading to Geneva from our balcony. I saw a single point of light similar to the headlight on a commercial aeroplane, it was orange. Next to it, I saw an orange streak, it was actually the streak which appeared quite quickly that caught my eye. The point of light was about the size I would expect for a commercial plane, but the streak next to it I found odd. It was higher up in the sky, around where I would expect a flight path to be for a commercial plane. After probably 30 seconds, the orange streak went away and the single point of light persisted probably another minute and then also faded out. I thought perhaps it was one of those chinese lanterns burning up. I was also wondering if I had just witnessed a plane on fire. Several minutes later, sitting back on the couch, I notice the light again this time larger and more of a streak than a point of light. I called my wife to have a look, we both remarked it was strange and she commented it may be a chinese lantern also. I went to get my camera at this point and snapped one photo before it faded out - probably only 30seconds to 1 minute from sighting to fading away had passed. A few minutes later again, and the glow was back and much, much larger. It was also much lower in the sky, appearing over the small hills we can see from our balcony out towards Jura, and le Vallee du Joux. It was quite large, and stayed for several minutes. After a few minutes it also simply faded away to nothing. I managed to take some photos of this anomoly, one photo when it was a streak as described the 2nd time, lastly when it was quite low and persisted for some time we took quite a few photos. The problem I have is that I was using a low light setting with no tripod, and you can see the house lights on the hill are streaked from the long exposure time as I have moved slightly. Some photos are much better than others, 2 photos in particular are reasonably clear, and I was hoping you may be able to comment on what this anomoly may be? I am completely baffled as to what the thing is, I thought this may interest you. I am using a Canon EOS 650D with a 55 to 250mm lense. It was taken in the direction of Vallee du Joux / Jura from Lausanne. To give you an idea of scale, you can clearly see the lights from the houses on the hill below (which are some what smeared from the long exposure in the photos) Due to file size I have sent you only the 4 photos which I believe are the best quality with the least smearing. I do have more photos if they would help you in a determination, I am happy to provide them to you. The last photo is a photo of the hill taken from roughly the same position, with the exact same photo and lense settings to give you an idea of scale and position - perhaps it is possible to overlay the daytime photo with the night photo to get a good idea of spatial positioning. You can see that it is definately NOT a plane. In this final phase when I was able to take several photos, the size of it was just much too large, too strange to be a plane, and much much too low to ground. In one of the photos, if you zoom you can see some textures on the object, but it is quite hard to tell if that is because of the movement of the photo. If you have any idea what this anomoly might be, please offer any explanation you may have. All rights reserved. Although I agree to submitting these photos for analysis and discussion, I grant only limited license on the proviso that you recieve 20% commission for images sold, I remain the owner/author and expect 80% of all monies (if any) you make on provided images to be paid to me. I am not supplying you my images for you to profit with no reward for myself. Hate to add that to the bottom of this report, but after reading your disclaimer at the bottom your terms are unclear. I do not grant exclusive rights to MUFON. In the interest of scientific research and disclosure and intellectual property, I reserve all rights to these images. Therefore I agree to your terms at the bottom of the page, with the change to terms as stipulated above.
Credit: MUFON