The Authon-du-Perche gendarmes' sighting (GEIPAN file first named Nogent-le-Rotrou), 1980

Early spring, 1980. France was in the middle of a wave of sightings that had run through 1979, the season of the Cergy-Pontoise "abduction" of November 1979. Since 1977 the gendarmerie had been copying its UFO procedures to GEPAN, the unit of the space agency CNES charged with studying them.

Authon-du-Perche sits in Eure-et-Loir, in the Perche region, in the arrondissement of Nogent-le-Rotrou. Its gendarmerie brigade answered to the company headquartered there.

Monday, 10 March 1980. At about 21:30, a motorist on the D13 between Les Étilleux and Nogent-le-Rotrou reported a UFO on the radio frequency of the Nogent-le-Rotrou company. Another account of the night describes a taxi driver who had seen a strange glow on the road to Authon. The neighbouring brigade passed the call along. The Authon gendarmes, at the end of their shift, went to the spot. They found nothing unusual.

The night was not over. At 22:10, one gendarme was closing the shutters of his bedroom at the Authon barracks when he and his wife saw an orange ball or disc, about ten times the size of the visible stars. It changed from bright orange toward red and seemed to move in successive jumps, stopping abruptly. He called his chief and the other gendarmes, who watched until it disappeared. At 22:40, four of the five gendarmes left by car toward Les Étilleux.

What they reported was a large rectangular form with rounded corners and white luminous ramps, strips of light along its body. The official file counts five gendarmes as witnesses. Afterwards, some of them reported feeling unwell. Accounts also mention insomnia.

The ufology magazine Lumières dans la Nuit, in its issue no. 195, gave a different timeline. Its account begins at 22:50, with the gendarmes watching from about 23:45. In this version a luminous rectangular object moved at low altitude and slow speed, surrounded by a halo of dazzling light. Its colour was a very vivid blue. It seemed to hop, then zigzag, at an altitude estimated at 150 m. It kept this up for about fifteen minutes. The two timelines have never been reconciled.

The gendarmerie wrote a preliminary report on 25 March 1980 and sent it to GEPAN. A private group, the GRC of Le Mans, followed with its own report on 10 December 1980. It covered three separate observations and included witness transcripts and drawings of the objects as the witnesses saw them.

GEPAN classed the case D. Unidentified. It filed it under the name of the company headquarters, Nogent-le-Rotrou. Years later, GEIPAN reopened a number of old files with the aim of being more relevant in its conclusions, a review that sometimes ended in a change of classification. This case was among them. Whether the D verdict survived lies in that reopened file.

No hoax allegation has surfaced. No conventional explanation appears in the accounts that retell the night.

The case lives under several names. Nogent-le-Rotrou, in the old GEPAN index and in the Lumières dans la Nuit version. Authon-du-Perche, in French Wikipedia's list of GEIPAN files, which sums it up as a large rectangular form with light strips seen by several gendarmes, some of whom felt unwell. One online chronology even calls it "Authon-sur-Perche (Sarthe)", wrong on both the name and the department.

All of them describe the same night. Five gendarmes, a quiet road in the Perche, and a shape of light that no one has explained.