Sighting in Nancras, September 16, 1996

Around 5 a.m., a lone witness was driving to work. Along the way, they first noticed a bright point of light in the sky, whose brightness and unusual size intrigued them. A few kilometres further on, they saw an egg-shaped craft on their left, stationary, with three square portholes giving off a strong orange light. The witness kept driving and, on the outskirts of Saintes, spotted two shapes in the sky identical to the one just seen.

Only one account was collected. For the first bright point, the witness most likely saw the planet Venus, which was rising in the east-northeast, directly ahead of their direction of travel. The gendarmes mentioned in their report a radio relay carrying three orange lights, as well as another antenna. Both can be seen from the third observation point but not from the second, even though the witness seemed to see the same features again there, so they do not appear to explain the sighting. For the egg-shaped craft, no explanatory hypothesis was possible, given its description and apparent immobility.

The information gathered at the witness interview lacked quality and reliability, and an on-site night-time reconstruction, which would have allowed angle measurements and more thorough questioning, is no longer realistic more than 20 years later. Under the current classification method the case would rate as D1 in strangeness, but it is too weak to confirm that the observation is truly unexplained. GEIPAN therefore classified it C, for lack of reliable information.