The Oval by the Water Tower

Between 6.05 and 6.25 on a January evening in 1980 a man at Le Loroux-Bottereau watched an unidentified object arrive and leave. At first he described it as a cylinder with two small dark fins on its side. As it came closer it settled about 200 metres up, some 300 metres east of a water tower. Now he saw it was oval and lit a bright yellow-orange, and the fins had gone. The file puts the observation at seven minutes. Throughout it his radio-telephone crackled abnormally, and he made several sweeps with a hand-held spotlight. Then the object pulled away abruptly and climbed fast. Frightened, he went to alert the gendarmerie. A fault in the electrical circuit of his dashboard was found afterwards.

What is on the record

GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena, holds the case as LOROUX-BOTTEREAU (LE) (44) 20.01.1980. It classes it D. Class D means GEIPAN looked into it and could not explain it. The page rates the case strange to very strange with medium to strong consistency. Its description ends by saying no further information was gathered on "ce phénomène qui reste inexpliqué" (this phenomenon, which remains unexplained).

The date does not agree with itself. The case title, the observation-date field and the testimony sheet give 20 January 1980. The description opens on 24 January. The file does not say which is right.

The rest is thin. The one testimony sheet records a man of 40 looking east and puts the object at three to four metres long. There are no documents, and GEIPAN names no explanation it tested or rejected. It does not say who examined the dashboard or how the fault was linked to the sighting. Nobody else is recorded as having seen the object.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses, so the released record carries no identified witness. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What hung beside the water tower is not resolved here.