Sion-les-Mines: The Car Swallowed by an Orange Ball

Late November 1979. France was talking about one story. At Cergy-Pontoise, Franck Fontaine was said to have been abducted on 26 November. Eight days later, the strangeness reached a quiet corner of Loire-Atlantique, a crossroads between Ruffigné and Sion-les-Mines. The press would soon call it the "carrefour de l'extraordinaire", the crossroads of the extraordinary.

Tuesday 4 December. About 6:20 pm. The sun had already set. Henri Lucas, a 37-year-old self-employed mason, was driving home. Another car was on the road, about 100 m in front of him. He said he saw it "surrounded by a red-orange ball". According to Le Méridional, the ball was 2 to 3 m across and particularly bright. It left a meadow and moved onto the car. It capped the automobile. Then it went back into the field, giving off a big cloud of smoke. In Lucas's own words, "an enormous cloud of smoke, then nothing at all." The car was gone.

Lucas went home and fetched his sons, Christophe, 8, Didier, 7, and Frédéric, 5, and drove back to the crossroads. The ball had not moved. Then it took off after them. Lucas and the children said it chased their car for nearly two kilometres before disappearing. He said it prowled around the area for more than an hour.

About 200 m away, Lionel Simon, 9, was closing the shutters of his house. He saw an orange ball moving from east to west. The Journal de l'Ouest stressed that he had no particular connection to the Lucas family. Captain Lambert of the gendarmerie added that several people in Châteaubriant and Sion-les-Mines reported an unusual light in that direction, precisely between 6 and 6:30 pm.

Gendarmes from the Derval brigade and the Châteaubriant company opened an inquiry. At the corner of the Sion road and the La Bénestais road, grass was burned along about 14 m of the bank, with an unburned strip of about 3 m. The blackening was mostly on the side facing the crossroads, and there was no smell of burning. At the roadside lay glass from a rectangular headlight, probably from a Renault or a Simca, in line with the vanished car's supposed path. The paper itself said it might come from an earlier accident.

The gendarmes said they could for now neither deny nor confirm the presence of a UFO. No complaint was ever filed about an abduction or a missing person. National television and the press covered the story, and the crossroads became "a real place of pilgrimage". Lucas was stung by the doubt: "It makes me furious that nobody takes me seriously." The final result of the inquiry was never documented, and GEPAN, the official French UFO bureau, appears to hold no file.

In 2014, the sceptic Bob Rekin offered an answer. The Moon. It rose at 18:23, in the east-north-east, the day after full Moon. A rising Moon fits the orange colour, the timing and a light that seems to follow a car. It does not obviously explain a ball enveloping a car 100 m ahead, or the smoke. Rekin also said ground tracks at the site were made by a roads department bulldozer, and called it yet another case heavily inspired by the Cergy-Pontoise affair.

Three days earlier, a driver at Annot reported being chased by a ball of fire. GEIPAN later reclassified it as the Moon. At Sion-les-Mines, the burned grass has no explanation on record. The vanishing car rests on Henri Lucas's word alone. The wrecked Citroën van that marked the spot is gone now, and wind turbines stand over the crossroads of the extraordinary.