The Customs Officer's Saucer at Étauliers

At about 7.10 on the morning of 13 January 1980 a motorist passing through the area saw a saucer-shaped craft. It was holding still. He judged it five or six metres across, with lights flashing at its edges. He stopped and got out of the car, and as he did so it began to move slowly away at what he put at 30 or 40 km/h. The witness was a customs officer. What struck him most was the silence. In five minutes of watching he heard no sound from it at all.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena. It holds this case as ETAULIERS (33) 13.01.1980 and classes it D. Class D means GEIPAN investigated and could not explain what was seen. Its page was last updated in June 2021.

The file is thin, and the reason is on the page. The officer was in a hurry and did not report it on the spot. He made his statement only when he reached the Haute-Garonne, far to the south-east. No other witness came forward in the area, and GEIPAN says no further information was gathered. The page lists no documents and no hypotheses. Its geography is also loose. The case carries the name of Étauliers in the Gironde, yet the description has him passing through the Charente-Maritime, the neighbouring département just to the north. The record does not say which road he was on or which way the craft went.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses. The record gives his job but not his name, and nothing in it shows him acting as a customs officer when he saw the craft. So it carries no identified witness. The tier measures sourcing, not the man's reliability or GEIPAN's work. What he watched drift away is not resolved here.