The Gendarmes' Light on the A10

At 4.35 on the morning of Saturday 23 January 1982 two gendarmes of a motorway platoon were driving south on the A10 near Trancrainville. The driver noticed "une masse claire indéfinie" (a vague pale mass) in the sky straight ahead. To his colleague it looked like a light-grey cone, point upwards. Then fields about 600 metres from the road lit up. The top of a high-voltage pylon lit up so sharply that the driver could make out its metal crossbars. He never saw a beam and compared the light to "lumière noire" (black light). Farm sheds near Artenay lit up in turn. When he pulled over, everything stopped with him. He got out and shone a powerful torch at the mass but saw nothing more. Neither man heard a sound. After about 29 kilometres the mass was gone, but a glow still hung over the woods to the east.

What is on the record

GEIPAN, the UAP unit of the French space agency CNES, first filed the case as ORLEANS (45) 1982 and re-examined it in a 2018 investigation report. The file holds both statements, taken within three days, and a photo plate from a reconstruction on site. The gendarmes' own inquiry found nothing flying from the Orléans air base, whose radar had been off since the evening before. Motorway staff had noticed nothing.

GEIPAN tested two explanations. A planet seen through cloud could not look like a pale mass or light the ground so tightly. A helicopter with a searchlight above the cloud fitted better, and the report rates it at 30 per cent. But the cloud sat at 1,200 and 1,500 metres, too high for the helicopter searchlights of the day. The lit patch on the pylon was too narrow for a lamp at that height, and a search lamp would not look like black light. With no field inquiry of its own to lean on, GEIPAN calls the case borderline between unexplained and unusable. It classes it D.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD. A released government record names who saw it: two gendarmes of the A10 motorway platoon, whose command post the report places at Saran in the Loiret. Their names are withheld. No independent testimony sits beside that record in the archive. The tier measures sourcing, never truth. What lit the fields along the A10 is not resolved here.