The Palau-del-Vidre Black Triangle

Palau-del-Vidre is a village in the Pyrénées-Orientales, near the Mediterranean coast in the far south of France. The N114 runs to it from Elne. The story reached the public through OVNI 66, a local blog that tracks sightings in the department, and through the files of GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerospace phenomena.

Late October 2008. About 6:30 in the morning, before dawn. Two employees in a work van were driving in early from Elne. Low on the eastern horizon, above the coast between Saint-Cyprien and Argelès-sur-Mer, hung a light. Bright white. It did not blink. They took it for a star. Then for an airliner coming in to land.

At the entrance to Palau-del-Vidre, it seemed to come towards them from their right, descending as it came. Trees and buildings hid it now and then. Then it was over them. Almost directly overhead, very low, moving at about walking pace. Up close it was a huge black triangle, about as big as an airliner, with a fixed red glowing globe underneath.

There was no sound at all. "Quelqu'un la tête baissée n'aurait pas remarqué son passage silencieux," one witness said. Someone looking down wouldn't have noticed it go silently past.

The object slipped out of sight behind the buildings. The two tried to follow it. For about a minute they searched for the road it had taken. It was gone.

GEIPAN opened case 2008-10-02513. The report had come late, and that closed one door. The late date of the testimony did not allow aeronautical checks, so air traffic records could not be compared with the sighting. No photograph or video exists, and no radar data or physical trace was reported.

On 24 January 2013, more than four years later, GEIPAN classified the case D1. Unexplained after investigation. As OVNI 66 explains it, D1 marks a case that is strange but only moderately consistent, for example one with no photo or video.

GEIPAN kept an ordinary answer in view. Its investigation noted that the movement could match that of an ordinary aircraft, and the witnesses' own first thought was a landing airliner. But the rest of the account pulls the other way. Something the size of an airliner, almost overhead, very low, at walking pace, in complete silence, without the navigation lights and strobes an aircraft would show. No other explanation has surfaced in the coverage of the case.

In 2016 OVNI 66 listed Palau-del-Vidre among the few cases in the Pyrénées-Orientales that GEIPAN has held as unexplained since 1976. The department has no D2 cases, the stronger grade. French Wikipedia counts it among the French GEIPAN black triangle cases.

The region has other stories. In September 2001, a woman in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Salanque saw a dark triangle with a light at each corner. A reader of OVNI 66 described a slow, silent, low triangle near Montséret, in the Aude, around the summer of 2008. And in September 1954, grape pickers at the Château de Villeclare, in Palau-del-Vidre itself, watched a craft hover about 300 m above them before shooting off towards the Pyrenees. None is linked to the 2008 sighting. All of them share the same sky.