UFO sightings — France
UFO sightings — France. 4 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
Quarouble and the Sleepers That Had to Be Replaced
On the night of 10 September 1954 a metalworker named Marius Dewilde went out to his barking dog in the yard of his house by the railway embankment near this village in northern France and, by his account, saw a dark mass on the track and two small beings in something like diving suits. A beam from the mass, he said, held him still for a minute. The next day gendarmes and railwaymen found depressions in the sleepers; a calculation from the strength of creosoted oak gave a load of thirty tonnes over a few square centimetres. Five sleepers were replaced. It is the first widely investigated case in France and the beginning of the French school of the subject.
Cussac and the Four in the Field
On 29 August 1967 two children, thirteen-year-old François and nine-year-old Anne-Marie Coüetin, were minding cows near this village in the Cantal when, by their account, they saw four small dark figures beyond a hedge and a sphere some five metres across. The figures rose into the air and were drawn into the sphere, which went up with a whistle and a smell of sulphur. The gendarmerie questioned the children separately the same day; their accounts agreed on details that are hard to arrange between them. Their father noticed the same smell at the spot, and the dog would not go near the hedge. The case entered the French official statistics as unexplained and is still there.
Valensole and the Lavender Field
On the morning of 1 July 1965 a farmer named Maurice Masse walked out onto his lavender field on the Valensole plateau and saw an egg-shaped craft on six legs, with two small beings beside it examining the plants. By his account one of them pointed a tube at him and he could not move until the craft had gone. The gendarmes recorded a depression in the ground and the marks of the legs. The lavender at the landing spot grew badly for several years afterwards, which the neighbours noted too. Masse was a respected man, a member of the Resistance, and visibly disliked the attention: he refused journalists for decades. The case remains among the most cited in the French literature.
Trans-en-Provence and the Mark on the Terrace
On 8 January 1981 a retired man named Renato Nicolaï was working in his garden outside this Provençal town when he heard a whistle. Turning, he saw a lead-grey object the size of a car settle onto the lower terrace; a few seconds later it lifted and went. The gendarmerie came the next day and took soil and plant samples — a rare case where samples were taken before any publicity. GEPAN, the state laboratory at the French space agency, found compressed soil, traces of heating, and biochemical changes in the alfalfa: plants at the centre of the mark had between a third and a half less chlorophyll. The GEPAN report is published. It does not name a cause.