The Dazzling Ball at Thiant

At five in the afternoon on 26 September 1990 a woman at Thiant was watching television when a ball of light outside her window caught her eye. It was heading towards the house. Frightened, she called her two neighbours, who watched it with her. The ball climbed, then came back down and stopped above a tree. There it grew very bright and lit up the whole area, dazzling the witnesses. The sighting lasted five or six minutes in all.

What is on the record

GEIPAN's file holds a short description and four testimony sheets, with no documents attached. The sheets carry the name of Haspres, a neighbouring commune a few kilometres to the south-west, rather than Thiant. Three come from women aged 50. They describe a multicoloured ball with a trail, and one puts it at 30 to 40 centimetres across. Two of those sheets give the time as 6pm rather than 5pm. The fourth sheet comes from a man of 30 among farmland at 6pm. He describes a silent sphere two to three metres across. The description never mentions him, and the file does not say whether he watched the same light from somewhere else.

GEIPAN names no hypothesis that it tested or rejected. Its description ends "Aucune explication n'a pu être donnée à ce phénomène" (no explanation could be given for this phenomenon). It classes the case D, which means it was investigated and not explained, and rates it strange to very strange with medium to strong consistency.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses, so the released record carries no identified witness, even though four people left testimony. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What blazed above the tree is not resolved here.