The Lamps over the Ploughed Field

At about 23:50 on 16 December 1988 a literature student was driving home alone on a small country road. Some 2 kilometres ahead she saw small lights and took them for a tractor working late. They did not move. As she drew nearer they grew larger and brighter. The object, she told the gendarmes the next day, hung still about 20 metres above a ploughed field and some 30 metres from the road. It was round and slightly domed, "comme une assiette plate recouverte d'une assiette creuse retournée", like a flat plate under an upturned bowl, and no more than 10 metres across. Four to six white lamps underneath lit the field. She wound down her window and turned off the radio but heard only her own engine. A light was on in a house at the end of the field that normally stood empty. Alone and frightened, she drove on and watched for a minute to a minute and a half.

What is on the record

GEIPAN's file holds the gendarmerie's report, procès-verbal no. 2219, with her signed statement. The gendarmes searched the field with her and found no trace. The road runs past a military airfield, whose name is blanked. Its weather station found no meteorological cause, and the radar station reported nothing unusual. The light in the house had an ordinary source. It came from the showers of a disused farm used for military exercises, left on by soldiers when they pulled out the day before. No other witness came forward. The gendarmes wrote that her good faith and credibility justified a thorough inquiry.

Of the object GEIPAN says that no further data could be gathered and that it could not be identified. Its summary sets the sighting "au coucher du soleil", at sunset, but her statement gives 23:50 on a pitch-dark night without stars, and that is followed here. Class D is GEIPAN's category for a case it investigated and could not explain.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds its witnesses' identities, so the record carries no identified witness. A tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What hung over the field near Les Rues-des-Vignes is not resolved here.