However, he said, the image resolution was not high enough to allow experts to determine whether the objects were indeed from Flight 370.

“Clearly, we must be cautious,” Mr. Hood said.

The satellite images were captured by the French military two weeks after the aircraft went missing with 239 people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Mr. Hood said that the area covered by the images was close to the underwater search area, but that it had not been searched from the air at the time.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in a report last year that, based on the results of the underwater search, a 9,700-square-mile area northeast of the initial underwater search area was now the place with the “highest probability of containing the wreckage of the aircraft.”

Daniel O’Malley, a spokesman for the bureau, said in a telephone interview that the re-analysis of the images from 2014 showed that while the possibly man-made objects had not been in that 9,700-square-mile area, drift modeling indicates that they could have been there when the flight crashed two weeks earlier.

The re-analysis of the images was conducted by Geoscience Australia, a government agency, which received them in March as part of a scientific review that began last year, Mr. O’Malley said.