An account in Loire-Atlantique, France

On the evening of September 7, 1987, the eldest of two children in a farming family, aged 10, goes to bed, listens to a cassette on his cassette player, and feeling tired, stops the device and falls asleep. Around 5 in the morning he is woken by a noise: the child then makes out a light through the shutters. He gets up, takes his cassette player and switches it on to record the noise while at the same time he observes an orange luminous disc with a flashing light. The recording lasts about twenty seconds and the luminous phenomenon disappears shortly after. When GEPAN intervened, several reconstructions were carried out without any of them being truly conclusive. Samples of foliage were taken from the birch trees where the light had appeared. GEPAN also took charge of the original cassette for expert analysis. The analysis of the cassette focused on determining how the noise had been recorded before trying to identify it. The expert examination, carried out with a device identical to the one used by the child, showed without ambiguity that it was a recording made internally by the device and not via its microphone. The noise therefore has nothing to do with the luminous phenomenon observed but comes from internal reception noise, possibly on shortwave, but its identification is no longer of any interest to GEPAN's investigation. It is therefore at best a mishandling, at worst a hoax. The biochemical analysis of the birch leaves was carried out and gave mixed results, with one of the samples showing, for some of its characteristics, a deviation from the others that could possibly be explained by thermal or light stress, while no deterioration appears on the foliage. These results are not really conclusive, as the analyses are not entirely consistent depending on the parameters examined. The witness, a pre-adolescent at the time of the events, later admitted that he had imagined this event to draw his parents' attention to himself, during a difficult period of his childhood. Afterwards, caught up in the chain of events, he could not turn back. This case, initially classified in category D, is reclassified as A: a case of observation perfectly explained.