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.

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The Marfa Lights

East of this west Texas town, lights have been watched since 1883: basketball-sized spheres that hang over the desert, split, merge and go out. The cowboy Robert Ellison recorded the first, taking them for Apache campfires. University physicists showed in 2004 that a good share of them are headlights on Highway 67 refracted through layers of warm air. A share — but not all, and it cannot account for the sightings that predate cars.