The La Source triangle

At about ten at night on 27 March 1980 a motorist and his passenger saw a dark triangular mass in the sky. Blinking red and white lights sat at each corner and marked out its span, which the driver put at 50 metres. The object first hung still. It then moved off, tilting slowly, and kept about 50 metres from the ground and from the car. It climbed again, banked to the right and disappeared into the sky at high speed. The sighting lasted four to five minutes. With the windows shut they heard no particular noise.

What is on the record

The source is GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena. Its file 1980-03-00755 is titled La Source, the southern district of Orléans. Its two witness questionnaires are filed under Bazoches-les-Gallerandes, a commune in the north of the Loiret. The file never says where the car was, so the location is less certain than the title suggests.

The questionnaires describe a man and a woman, both aged 30, and time the sighting at 22.15. Both give a single triangular object coloured black, red and white, and both record silence. The man's form puts the span at 50 metres and logs changes of direction and height as well as a stationary phase.

GEIPAN classes the case D, its category for a phenomenon investigated and not identified. It adds only that "aucune autre information n'a été recueillie" (no other information was gathered). The published file lists no hypotheses tested or rejected, though a silent triangle with corner lights is the kind of report that is often weighed against aircraft.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L0, a single account. Two people saw it, but GEIPAN withholds the identities of witnesses, so its record carries no identified witness. The tier measures sourcing and says nothing about the quality of GEIPAN's work. What the record holds is two people in one car and a silent triangle that the state could not explain. What it was is not resolved here.