Trans-en-Provence Case

Trans-en-Provence is a small commune in the Var, in south-eastern France. Renato Nicolaï had lived on his property there for nearly 14 years. Sources call him a farmer or a retired mason. That winter he was building a cement shelter for a water pump in his garden.

January 8, 1981. About 5 pm. "The weather was turning colder." Then came a sound. "My attention was attracted by a slight noise, a sort of faint whistling." Nicolaï turned around. A device was in the air at the height of a big pine tree at the edge of the property. It was not spinning. It was coming lower toward the ground.

It settled on a lower terrace of the sloping plot. One account puts it about 50 m away, another about 30 m. He moved to a small cabin to see. "From that position, I clearly saw the device resting on the ground." It looked like two saucers, one inverted on top of the other, with a ridge around the edge. It was about 2.5 m across. "It was the color of lead."

It did not stay. "Right away it lifted off, still emitting a slight whistling sound." Underneath he saw four openings. No flame. No smoke. It kicked up a little dust and headed north-east, toward the forest of Trans.

The next day Nicolaï showed his wife the marks. She told a neighbour, who called the gendarmerie. Gendarmes interviewed him, photographed the site and took samples. They recorded two concentric circles, 2.20 m and 2.40 m across, with black streaks that looked like tyre skid marks. On January 12 the case went to GEPAN, the UFO study group of the French space agency CNES.

Jean-Jacques Velasco led the site work. The biochemist Michel Bounias studied the plants. The lab results pointed to compression by a mass of about 4 to 5 tonnes. The soil had been heated to between 300 and 600 °C. There were traces of iron oxide, phosphates and zinc. Alfalfa near the ring had lost 30 to 50% of its chlorophyll. Technical Note 16, published on March 1, 1983, concluded that a major event had occurred. It had caused mechanical deformation, heating and perhaps some trace deposits of material. The note ruled out a helicopter, a weather balloon or an artillery shell. GEIPAN still classes the case "D", unidentified after investigation.

Sceptics read the same ground differently. After all, the gendarmes had written of tyre skid marks. In 2007 the Observatoire Zététique argued that the ring came from a concrete mixer or another vehicle used for the building work. Critics noted that the marks formed overlapping semicircles that did not match the saucer's shape. They also questioned the sampling and the chlorophyll analysis.

Nicolaï's own words added to the debate. In 1989, on TF1's Ciel mon mardi, he said "c'est un conte disons", roughly "it's a tale, let's say". Yet in the same breath he repeated that he had seen it and pointed to the proof on the ground. He never confessed. He never formally retracted his account.

In 1988 Jacques Vallée visited the site and interviewed the Nicolaïs again. He had original samples retested at a US laboratory. He reported that the results supported the CNES findings and the witness's truthfulness. Popular Mechanics called it "perhaps the most completely and carefully documented sighting of all time." The debate over it has never closed.