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.
Warminster and the Thing
At Christmas 1964 people in this Wiltshire town began complaining of a strange noise — a low drone and crackle that shook roofs. The local paper called it the Thing, and that was the beginning. By 1965 hundreds were climbing Cley Hill above the town every night with flasks and binoculars; on the best weekends five thousand came. Warminster became Britain's first place of UFO tourism, decades before crop circles. The noise most likely came from the Salisbury Plain training area, which begins a couple of kilometres away. The lights over the hill were attributed to everything from signal flares to planets, and never entirely explained.
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