Blue light in Ardennes, France

GEIPAN continues to publish all of its archives on its public website www.geipan.fr. Among its publications are old cases classified at the time (A, B, C, or D) that are now being re-examined, with the sole aim of being more relevant in the conclusions. Thanks to new technical means (software) and the investigation experience gained over all these recent years, this re-examination sometimes leads to new remarks or even a change in classification. This observation case, previously classified D and named MONTHERME (08) 1980, is part of a set of cases recently re-examined. On 12 October 1980, a teenage girl goes to the gendarmerie to report an observation made the previous evening from her home. She places the presence of a UAP in a field 200 meters from her dwelling. The whole family is interviewed. On 11 October 1980 at around 11:40 PM, T1 (14 years old) is lying in her bed in her room and sees through the window a ball resting on the ground 200 meters away, shaped like a flying saucer or a large cigar with a yellow rim lighter than the orange center. After 2 minutes of observation, the UAP rises while projecting blue lights and with an engine noise, and heads in the direction of "La Roche" at "7 o'clock." 15-20 minutes later it passes back over the house while lighting up the garden in the direction of La Roche. T2 (her sister, 15 years old) comes down to T1's room when the latter calls her parents. T2 sees a large ball with strong yellow light lighting up the garden and the neighbor's, and the "Roches" at "7 o'clock" 500 meters away. The UAP stays a few minutes in the meadow behind the house then leaves toward the Roches with a car noise. A few minutes later it passes over the house heading toward the Roches. At around 11:30 PM, T3 and T4 (parents), alerted by T1, see for 10-15 minutes at 200-300m a rotating long-range blue light beam. A short starting noise is heard by T3 (but not T4, who is somewhat hard of hearing). The ball is not seen by T3-T4 because it is masked by trees. The gendarmerie finds no trace at the scene, nor any related observation in the neighborhood. These testimonies carry real strangeness only for what is testified by the children T1 and T2, who say they saw the ball that was the source of the glows, both on the ground and in the air above the house. This is probably the origin of the initial classification of the case as D. The present re-examination notes this strong strangeness but also the low level of consistency of the testimonies insofar as nothing allows understanding why the parents did not see the ball on the ground or in the air. - For T1 and T2, the UAP stayed on the ground only 2 or a few minutes before leaving the ground, while T3 and T4, who necessarily began observing after T1, were able to observe (therefore in T1's company) for 15 minutes glows and rotating beams whose origin was not visible ("hidden by trees" for T4) and implicitly or explicitly (for T4) on the ground or nearby. - T3 and T4 therefore stopped observing without ever having seen the UAP rise. T3 does not say what constituted the end of his observation, while for T4 it was the extinguishing of the lights on the ground that led him to return to his room. - For T1 and T2, the starting noise is associated with the rising and beginning of the UAP's flight. For T3, the noise is associated with the beginning of his observation of glows that never rose, and T4 (who did not hear the noise but says he is somewhat hard of hearing) understood that the noise had come later once he had returned to his room. - The possibility must be excluded that the UAP had already left by the time the parents (T3 and T4) arrived and that the latter focused on residual lights on the ground. Indeed, T1 and T2 do not mention residual glows on the ground and would have drawn the parents' attention to the strangeness in the sky, and the parents would then have seen it, like T1 and T2, pass back over the house. - It is curious that the parents T3 and T4 describe glows seen (on the ground) without making reference in their statement to the flying UAP testimony of their children, if only to place the observations sequentially or to report their children's emotion and words. There is a form of distance of the parents from the children's testimonies. They strictly stick to what they saw. - It is also noted that the testimony was initiated by the child T1 at the gendarmerie. The gendarmerie then requested the statements of the other witnesses. T4 (the father) refused a first summons to the gendarmerie. There are too many inconsistencies between the testimonies to be able to validate the main strangeness of the observation, constituted by these glows or balls or cigars that take off and fly over the area. The most likely is that there were indeed glows on the ground for an unknown reason. The observation of a flying glow is highly suspect. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as C, as lack of information.