France · 01 July 1965
Valensole, 1965
DocumentedA lavender grower walked into his own field at dawn expecting to find a helicopter parked in it. What he described instead was an ovoid machine on legs and two small figures beside it, and he was close enough to reach for one of them. By the following day the gendarmerie were taking his statement in the formal register and photographing the marks in the soil, and the plants at that spot were reported to have grown differently for years afterwards.
- Where
- Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
- When
- 01 July 1965
- Who reported it
- 1 witness
- How direct
- Civilian farmer; first-hand statement formally collected by gendarmerie
- Entities described
- 2 figures
- Handled as
- INVESTIGATED / UNRESOLVED
- Evidence class
- GOV-2
What the record resolves
The record carries a face, a head, eyes, skin, hands or proportions.
The gendarmerie statements carry height, cranium and face. It is one of the few files that resolves a body at all.
On that description this archive reads the form as Grey-like. That is a reading of recorded words, not the record classifying itself.
The record
An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.
- Gendarmerie Nationale / CNES-GEIPAN; CNES / GEIPAN Proces-verbal no. 445 - Valensole witness statements (opens in a new tab)
The document is attached to this entry.
What is not settled
One witness, no photograph of the object, and a man with every incentive to be believed and none to be laughed at. What survives is a procès-verbal: an official record that these statements were made and this ground was examined. GEIPAN classifies the case D, unidentified, which says the investigation could not account for it. It does not say what it was.
