L'Amarante: a silent object above a garden in Laxou

Laxou is a western suburb of Nancy, in Lorraine. In October 1982 the witness lived there, in a house with a small garden behind it. The official report names them only as "M. Henri". A 30-year-old researcher in cell biology. Married, meticulous, with little prior interest in UFOs.

Thursday 21 October 1982. The morning fog had cleared. About 12:35, M. Henri was in the garden. They looked up and saw a bright point, and at first took it for an aeroplane. Then it changed course. It seemed to head straight for the house, becoming a circular form as it came in from the southeast. It slowed as it descended. The witness backed away three or four metres.

It stopped about a metre above the lawn, near a privet hedge. The witness compared it to two soup-pot lids placed against each other. About 1.5 metres across and about 0.8 metres high. The lower half was polished metallic grey-blue, "like beryllium". The upper half was translucent, a lagoon blue-green. No seams. No rivets. No welds. It gave the impression of a very heavy mass. It made no sound at all.

For about twenty minutes it hung there. The witness came within about 50 centimetres, bent down to look underneath, and greeted it in several languages. They tried to photograph it. The camera did not work. Then, suddenly, it rose straight up, as if sucked away, about ten times faster than it had arrived. No whistle. No rushing sound. Beneath it the grass stood straight up, then settled back.

The witness reported it to the gendarmerie that same evening, and the gendarmes noted their emotional state. GEPAN, France's official UFO study group, was informed the next day. Samples were taken on 22 and 27 October. GEPAN visited the garden on 29 October. Military radar had logged five intermittent returns, judged consistent with ordinary clutter.

Then there were the amaranths. A border of them grew less than a metre from where the object had hovered. The nearest plants had dried out: 40 per cent water content, against 80 per cent in plants further away. Their bright red had turned dull brown, but the roots were alive. Technical Note 17, "L'Amarante", followed on 21 March 1983. M. Chauzy, an atmospheric physicist, suggested a vertical electric field of at least 30 kV/m could have lifted the grass as the object left, and perhaps dried the plants. The laboratory results were called ambiguous. The case was classified D. Unidentified.

No hoax has been alleged. Sceptic Éric Maillot proposed a partly deflated, two-sided mylar balloon about 91 centimetres across, metallic or blue-green. On a cold morning of about 9 °C, he argued, it came down onto tall hollyhock or amaranth stems and rose away once the sun warmed it. In 2023 he and Jean-Michel Abrassart reported new evidence for the balloon.

Raoul Robé looked elsewhere. On 8 September 1982, about six weeks before the sighting, French television aired La soucoupe de solitude, a film showing a small bluish saucer. Others questioned how a balloon could explain the sudden departure and the lifted grass. And the electric field idea met its own objection. The witness had stood within 50 centimetres of the object, unharmed.

L'Amarante is the best-known official French physical-trace case after Trans-en-Provence. It has appeared in books by Robert Roussel, in OVNIS l'évidence by Jean-Jacques Velasco and Nicolas Montigiani, in Le Monde in 1990 and in podcasts. The file remains a D case. Unidentified.