The Ernolsheim-lès-Saverne Ball of Light and the Bouxwiller Gendarmes

The night of Saturday 21 to Sunday 22 August 1976. Northern Alsace. R. B., 21, and his fiancée M. C., also 21, left Saverne looking for a bar that was still open. They took road CD 219 toward Ernolsheim-lès-Saverne. It was about midnight.

At the entrance of Ernolsheim, M. C. saw a "thing" following them. A large, very bright ball, with "luminous antennae" and a semicircle of luminous dots above it. It kept about 100 m up, sometimes to the right of the car, sometimes to the left.

At the edge of Dossenheim-sur-Zinsel, by the campsite, it suddenly veered left and appeared in front of them. It passed two or three metres above the car. R. B. saw something the size of an egg. Yellow-white, very bright, with a bluish and reddish halo.

His radio, he said, was swamped with noise. Dazzled, he made a U-turn. M. C. put it simply: "it became very small, like an egg, and burst like a flash." Then the ball climbed again and followed them by another route.

At her parents' house in Monswiller, the ball hung 40 to 50 m above a neighbour's roof, moving very slowly. Through binoculars, Mrs C. thought she saw a disc rush at her, and went inside. Beneath the ball a small light turned red, then orange, then yellow. Around 1 a.m. the family called the Saverne gendarmerie. Two gendarmes came, watched it, and took statements.

R. B. drove home to Ingwiller. There he flagged down a night patrol from Bouxwiller, Adjudant Le Martret and Gendarme Paicheler. Their first question: "Didn't you drink a little too much white wine?" "In reality, there were several lights," Paicheler said. "It was not a star, it was too big, but like headlights."

Fearing an aircraft in trouble, they drove up CD 28 to the hill between Ingwiller and Rothbach. To the east hung a triangle of lights. Sheaves of fire appeared at its base, and the whole thing brightened into a ball. Every 3 or 4 seconds.

Paicheler took two photographs. Both came out completely black. From Bouxwiller, the gendarmes kept watch through binoculars until about 4 a.m. The light was gone around 6 a.m., at daybreak. Not once did it make a sound.

The Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace reported an object that changed "from an 'egg' to an 'elongated cigar'". In June 1977 Philippe Wiedenhoff published the fullest account of the night in Lumières Dans La Nuit. M. C. had headaches in the days that followed, and Paicheler revealed he had seen a cigar-shaped object at Obernai in 1953. The gendarmerie report has never been published, and GEIPAN has released nothing. The CNEGU catalogue lists the case as unresolved.

Wiedenhoff, Christian Valentin and Patrick Gross all suspect several separate events. Gross, who catalogued the case in ALSACAT, points out that Jupiter stood low in the east around 1 a.m., and the Moon rose around 2 a.m. Either could explain the slow later lights, while a helicopter might explain the chase but not four hours aloft. Valentin judged the couple sincere, their story partly backed by the parents and the gendarmes. ALSACAT still rates it "Unidentified, possible extraterrestrial craft".