Sighting record / 1871
August 1, 1871. Evening at the Marseille Observatory. Jérôme Eugène Coggia, a trained professional astronomer, watched a large red body moving slowly across the low sky. It drifted. It stopped. It changed course two or three times. He timed it against the stars for a quarter of an hour or more, while it shrank from about half the width of the Moon to a small point. Then it fell straight down to the horizon, throwing off vivid scintillations. The Académie des Sciences argued over what to even call it. A. S. Herschel suggested a fire balloon. Charles Fort put it in The Book of the Damned. It has never settled comfortably into any category.
In 1871 the Marseille Observatory stood on the Longchamp plateau, beside the Palais Longchamp. Among its staff was Jérôme Eugène Coggia. He had joined in 1866. He would later discover several comets, including the Great Comet of 1874, and five asteroids. He was a trained observer, used to fixing moving points of light against the stars.