The Angel Hair Sightings at Oloron-Sainte-Marie and Gaillac

Autumn 1952. France had no official body to investigate flying saucers. Two towns in the southwest were about to supply one of the strangest cases of the era. Both would be remembered for what fell from the sky.

It was a Friday, about 13:30. In Oloron-Sainte-Marie, in the Béarn, Jean-Yves Prigent, the chief supervisor of the local college, was with his family when he noticed a "cottony cloud of strange shape." Then he saw what moved with it. "A narrow cylinder, apparently inclined at a 45-degree angle," he said, "slowly moving in a straight line toward the southwest." A sort of plume of white smoke was escaping from its upper end.

Ahead of the cylinder flew about 30 smaller objects. Through opera glasses they looked like red spheres, each surrounded by a yellow ring. They moved in pairs, "following a broken path characterized in general by rapid and short zigzags."

A white, hair-like material drifted from the objects and wrapped itself around telephone wires, tree branches and roofs. Rolled into a ball, it turned gelatinous and vanished. A school headmaster gathered samples. One flared when burned, like cellulose, while others literally disintegrated within moments. "There was a hair!" the Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace began its report.

Ten days later. Late afternoon in Gaillac, in the Tarn. Mme Dore, 64, of the route de Toulouse, heard her hens cackling strangely and thought a buzzard was circling. She looked up and saw four saucers at first, then about a dozen. In the middle of them, "a kind of long flying cylinder... whitish, which let escape a white plume of smoke."

Her son came out. So did M. and Mme Corbières, and M. Corbières senior, 63. The saucers "whirled slowly, grouped by two, and scintillated in the sun." The Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace counted 16 circular, spinning objects with "a bluish glow along their edges," and about 100 residents watching. After some twenty minutes the formation was gone.

As it left, "white wires resembling glass wool" fell to the ground. Two hours later the filaments still hung on electric wires and branches. Then they became gelatinous and melted. No laboratory analysis was possible.

A local doctor saw it differently. In his letter, "the phenomenon of October 17 was really a migration of field spiders carried through space by gossamer threads." The French call these threads fils de la Vierge, the threads of the Blessed Virgin. He believed the smoke trails described "in all good faith" were fraying threads, the colours were sunlight refracting through floating clumps of web, and the zigzags came from the wind and the watcher's own movement. Some French sceptics agreed. Spider ballooning is known to produce mass falls of web.

Others point back to the witnesses. They described a structured cylinder trailing smoke, with escorts flying in pairs. And the samples flared or dissolved before anyone could study them.

The French researcher Aimé Michel made Oloron and Gaillac his signature angel hair cases. Jerome Clark included the phenomenon in his reference work on early UFO history. La Dépêche du Midi later called Gaillac the first UFO case in the Tarn, and a Science Channel series revisited the story in 2015. Patrick Gross preserved the original newspaper pages online. The threads are long gone, but the question remains.