Sighting in Cergy Pontoise, November 26, 1979

At about 5 a.m. on 26 November 1979, the local police station received a call from a witness saying that their friend had just been abducted by a UFO. Seven police officers and gendarmes went to the scene and found three friends of the missing person. They explained that they had been getting ready to sell jeans at the nearby market when they noticed a glow above the road. The driver had steered the car toward it. The glow then positioned itself above the vehicle, surrounding it with fog and small flashing balls. When the fog cleared, it shot off into the sky "like a flash", and one of the witnesses realised the driver was no longer in the car.

In front of the authorities, the three witnesses behaved very differently, ranging from indifference to great agitation. Their accounts diverged from the first interviews, and reconstructions revealed contradictions about how they had spent the previous day and that morning, the position of the car, and the path of the glow. The Gendarmerie alerted the GEPAN that same day, but one of the witnesses had also contacted the press, and by the next day journalists and private investigators were arriving. On 3 December the missing person reappeared, saying they had found themselves in a cabbage field near a friend's apartment block.

The GEPAN found it very hard to gather objective evidence, as the witnesses kept evading requests and preferred talking to journalists and private investigators. Their story changed over the course of press conferences. A blood analysis made it unlikely that the person had spent time in weightlessness. A row of cabbages said to have been withered by the luminous ball turned out to be normal: the owner had left them to serve as fertiliser, and analysis of samples confirmed this. Although the witnesses stood by their account, even before the public prosecutor, the GEPAN concluded that it was a hoax. The case is classified B.