The Marliens Ground Trace, Côte-d'Or

The first week of May 1967. Marliens, a village in the canton of Genlis, near Dijon. A clover field at a spot called Le Champ Terraillot, some 500 to 800 m from the road between Genlis and Longecourt. It belonged to Émile Maillotte, farmer and mayor of Marliens. No one saw anything in the sky. No light. No sound. No craft. What made this case was left in the ground.

Camille Maillotte, the owner's son, found the trace. It lay under clods of earth, a sight one account compared to bomb damage. On the evening of 6 May the clods were cleared away. Camille Maillotte was firm on one point. The trace had been there before the storm of 5 May.

The trace covered about 30 m². Popular accounts call it a six-pointed star. At the centre was a depression 1.30 m across, the earth hard and compacted. In the middle of that depression was a hole 40 cm wide and 30 cm deep. A bent cylindrical imprint 12 cm in diameter ran across it. Inside lay broken flint, crushed earthworms and dried clover leaves. Six furrows ran outward, their walls hardened and coated with a grey-mauve powder. Almost every furrow held a slightly conical hole. At the bottom of each, two narrow holes sloped away at 45° and ended on a flat stone coated with the same powder.

On 10 May a CSERU investigator arrived with the Genlis gendarmerie brigade under Adjudant Geslain. They photographed the site from the air and on the ground. No vehicle tracks. No footprints. No radioactivity. Commandant Gerlach, the departmental fire-prevention director, confirmed there were no burn marks. "Les enquêteurs sont perplexes," one account reads. They could not attribute the marks to any known machine, on the ground or in the air.

The powder went to the Laboratoire municipal de Paris. It found a refractory oxide, silica or alumina, that appeared to have partly melted. The rounded edges of the quartz crystals pointed to at least 1,500 °C. The Faculté des sciences de Dijon confirmed the result by X-ray spectrography.

On 11 May an air navigation engineer, M. Bois, phoned the ufologist Charles Garreau. The military radar at Creil had picked up an unidentified echo, and Bois was asking about traces near Genlis. Garreau concluded that the echo was the object that marked the field, and he dated the landing to 10 May. The next day the story was in France-Soir.

The dates did not line up. Roger Mignot placed the discovery on 5 May, and the gendarmes were already on site on 10 May. The RR0 case file heads its radar section "Détection radar… trop tard". No radar record has ever been published. Agronomists from Dijon also found a natural fissure that ran about 10 m into the neighbouring barley field.

Fused silica. Branching channels ending in narrow sloping holes. A storm over the region on 5 May. Most later writers settled on lightning, and Patrick Gross allowed for ball lightning. Two points stand against it: Camille Maillotte's insistence on the timing, and the absence of any burning.

In its September and October 1967 issue, Flying Saucer Review ran Alain Rifat's "Was it a Landing at Marliens?" beside a survey of French research groups by Jacques Vallée. The Condon Committee cited the case in Roy Craig's chapter as physical evidence blamed on UFOs when no UFO had been seen: "a ground depression and connecting system of crooked, thread-like tunnels." Captain Kervendal cited Marliens alongside Valensole. In 2014 Patrice Vachon and Patrice Seray gave it a book of its own.