The Ouzouer-sur-Loire Gendarmes' Hovering Cone

December 1973. France was in the middle of a wave of strange lights. Fishermen at Carteret had reported an intense light on the beach. A "ball of fire" had been seen off the Glénans Islands. And on the evening of 9 December, four people in the Loiret watched a light like a star surrounded by flames move slowly over the Loire. The next evening, it was the turn of Ouzouer-sur-Loire, a village on the river between Gien and Orléans.

Monday, 10 December 1973. About 18:20. Two local people were driving back from Sully-sur-Loire along chemin départemental 119, some 2 kilometres west of the village. The driver noticed a red light on top of something.

The passenger described the rest. A conical object, about 5 metres across at the base and 2.50 metres high, hung some 20 metres above a meadow. At its centre, a blinking white light. Around it, red lights blinking too, forming a triangle. It flashed without pause and made no sound.

The witnesses watched, breathless. Le Parisien said for three minutes, La République du Centre around twenty. Then the object rose, "lentement, très lentement," slowly, very slowly, in the words of Le Parisien.

A neighbour had seen it five minutes before the two witnesses. To them it looked almost like a rugby ball, one point carrying a very bright flashing light, with two red lights blinking beside it.

Adjudant Gauthier, commander of the Ouzouer-sur-Loire gendarmerie brigade, drove to the scene with the witnesses and one of his gendarmes. "Et l'adjudant confirme le fait. Lui aussi a vu," wrote Le Parisien. He saw it too. By now the craft was at 400 or 500 metres, a white light that blinked inside a kind of red halo. It hovered silently for several minutes, then tilted toward the south-east of Gien and left, at high speed according to L'Ardennais.

The gendarmes searched the meadow. No landing trace, not the smallest imprint, no burnt grass. Regional military authorities said their radars had at no time detected a flying object, and they could offer no explanation. The story ran in Le Parisien, France-Soir, La République du Centre, L'Ardennais and the magazine Nostra. GEPAN, France's official UFO study office, did not yet exist and would only be founded in 1977.

No one has alleged a hoax, and no one has proposed a conventional explanation. The accounts do not agree on everything, though. Twenty metres up or 400 to 500, two red lights or three, three minutes or twenty, a slow climb or a fast exit. The NICAP chronology even sends the object south-west. Some of this may simply be the difference between the first close view and the gendarmes' later one, from further away.

The date caused its own confusion. Patrick Gross's press archive lists the L'Ardennais article twice, once under 1973 and once under 1979. Every contemporary source points to Monday, 10 December 1973.

The case never reached books or television. It survives in press clippings, gathered by Yves Herbo on Sciences-Faits-Histoires from the archives of Patrice Seray and his own. Its weight lies in one plain line from the press. The commander of the local gendarmerie went to look, and saw it too.