Sighting record / 1976
Thursday, 25 March 1976. About 14:30, in daylight. A driver and their passengers are travelling the CD48, the departmental road between Thuir and Camelas in the Pyrénées-Orientales. Then something appears in the sky. A luminous craft. Large. Oval. A dome on top. It moves from east to west and stays in view for about a minute. Then it is gone. Abruptly. The gendarmerie took statements. The file went to the French space agency's UFO unit, which classed it D1: strange, and unidentified. Half a century later, a sceptic still argues it belongs among the explained. Nobody has proved him right.
Thuir lies in the Pyrénées-Orientales, in the Occitanie region of southern France. A few kilometres to the west is Camelas. The CD48 departmental road runs between them. The town had appeared in the sighting record once before, with a "barrel of fire" in September 1954. That was a different story.