The Trans-en-Provence Landing
The account
A disc-shaped object landed in a garden and left circular marks on the ground before taking off.
What investigators found
The official French agency analyzed soil and plants and recorded changes, but critics say the marks may have an ordinary origin.
The story
On the afternoon of January 8, 1981, retiree Renato Nicolaï was working in the garden of his home in Trans-en-Provence, in southern France, when he said he saw a disc-shaped object descend, touch down for a few moments and leave right away. It left a circular mark on the ground. The police were called and collected samples.
The case was studied by GEPAN, the official group for the study of aerial phenomena attached to the French space agency. Laboratory analyses pointed to changes in the soil and in the plants, which made the episode famous as one of the rare cases with physical traces studied by a government. Skeptics argue that there is only one witness and that the marks may have been made by a vehicle or by construction work at the site.