Sighting in Estang, October 8, 1977

At about half past midnight, a driver and their passenger were on the road when they were startled by a luminous object. As they described it, it flew over their vehicle and then landed in a field beside the road. It looked rounded and had two nozzles spitting flames that lit up the whole horizon. Both witnesses were left badly shaken by what they had seen.

The gendarmerie carried out an investigation. The witnesses eventually acknowledged that they had been fooled: what they had taken for an object was a pair of lit gas flares, which at times threw tall flames into the sky depending on the wind direction. The flares belong to a gas station and stand on the crest of a field, roughly where the two witnesses placed their sighting. GEIPAN classified the case as A: it was an optical effect caused by the two flares.