The Lezay Gendarmes' Landing Sighting (reported as Lagny), Deux-Sèvres, 1975

For years the case travelled under the wrong name. A dispatch from Niort, printed in La Liberté de l'Est on 4 May 1975, placed it at "Lagny (Deux-Sèvres)". There is no Lagny in Deux-Sèvres. Every detail points to Lezay, a commune in the arrondissement of Niort, whose gendarmes filed a formal report on that very night.

Thursday 1 May 1975. About 23:10. A patrol from the Lezay brigade was on the CD 15 near Bois-de-la-Trouille. They saw a bright yellow glowing ball moving east to west. It came down toward the ground at a steady speed. It seemed about to land a short distance from them.

From the junction with the CD 45 they looked west through the hedges. In a meadow at Vaugru, a shimmering light hung three or four metres above the ground. They got out of the vehicle. Gendarme Dutel, named in the press, approached to about 20 metres. The craft "sparkled, he said, with a thousand fires." Then a faint sound, like rustling wings. The press called it the noise of partridges taking flight. The object rose quickly, showing two faint red lights underneath.

Then it held steady, bright yellow again. Now it resembled a disc with two small vertical fins, one above and one below. Inside the glowing ball were fixed black points.

At about 23:25 the gendarmes reached the place des Halles in Lezay, where a pétanque final was finishing. The rural guard, a hardware dealer, the deputy mayor and a tax collector were among the witnesses. Each civilian statement described the same yellow ball with black points inside. For thirty minutes they watched. Only around 23:45 did the object vanish quickly to the west.

Their verdict made the paper. "Until now we laughed at flying saucers, but we have to face the facts." And then: "what we have seen is not a natural phenomenon."

At 08:00 on 2 May the gendarmes went back to the Vaugru meadow. Their report states that the grass lay flattened in a circle 3 metres across, 4 metres from the hedge along the CD 105. Nothing else was visible to the naked eye. The press dispatch, perhaps written before that visit, said no trace was found. Radio message no. 85 TRS went to the company commander at Melle that day. On 3 May at 17:00, Jean Chasseigne, regional delegate of Lumières dans la nuit (LDLN), came to the brigade with material from his own inquiry. The report, dated 11 May 1975, reached no conclusion about what the object was. No GEIPAN case page for it has been found.

No hoax claim has surfaced. No conventional explanation has been published. The sizes in the report are apparent ones: a ball about 20 centimetres across, fins of 10 centimetres. What the gendarmes actually watched for half an hour remains an open question.

The case survives mainly in Patrick Gross's transcription of the press story and in online reposts of the gendarmerie report. The repost editors could not resist the place name. The light first appeared near the bois de la Trouille, and trouille is French slang for fright. They also wondered whether the gendarmes would have dared to write it without civilians to back them. It belongs to the gendarme reports of the 1975 French wave, beside Revigny-sur-Ornain and Andelot, the kind of files later sent to GEPAN.