Ardennes, France · 1954-10-27 · from the GEIPAN archive
Boom in Ardennes, France
On October 27, 1954, returning from a night shift, two gendarmes cycling with all lights off at around 5:15 a.m. exchanged a few words out loud about a white spot seen in the grass on the right side of the road. They were then surprised to hear a detonation and then immediately see on the left side of the road, about 150 meters away, a shower of sparks 1 to 5 meters long, 1 to 1.5 meters off the ground, accompanied by a whistling sound and then a purring noise. The sound quickly moved away toward the northeast. No shape was seen by the gendarmes. They approached but found nothing other than frightened cows bellowing. The gendarmerie investigation of the time reports that the brigade commander went to the scene with one of the witnesses at 7:45 a.m., and that the section commander did the same with the other witness at 1:30 p.m.; the two accounts from the two witnesses thus collected independently are in no way contradictory. On site, the gendarmes noted that the grass was flattened over an area of 1.6 by 1.3 meters, and that a fence located 3.5 meters from this spot was torn out over a length of 25 meters (4 posts were damaged, 2 of them broken at ground level). Neither the owner of the pasture nor the gendarmes thought these damages were caused by livestock. The grass may have been laid down by cows before or after the observation. It is not certain that the ground traces are related to the phenomenon heard. A detonation followed by a shower of sparks and a whistling sound obviously suggests the explosion of a pyrotechnic device. The observation took place in a geographic area traversed by various armies during the different wars. Could the self-priming of an abandoned military explosive have produced this kind of phenomenon without producing a crater? It is surprising that the gendarmes considered the ground traces of this phenomenon to be the landing of an unidentified craft when they observed no shape. Could this idea have been prompted by the particularly intense media frenzy over flying saucers in that month of October 1954? GEIPAN classifies this case as C due to lack of information and cross-checking.
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This is an official case file of GEIPAN, the French space agency's unidentified aerospace phenomena office, machine translated from French. The original text and the full investigation file are at geipan.fr. We reproduce it with thanks and remove anything on request.
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