Sighting in Saint-Hilaire-lez-Cambrai, March 31, 1975

At around 3:30 in the morning, the witness was woken by their dog barking violently in the bedroom. Looking out of the window, they saw a luminous craft in the street, roughly 80 metres from the house. They described it as a parallelepiped with rounded edges, giving off coloured lights (red, green, blue, then all white). The object moved slowly and silently along the street toward Avesnes-les-Aubert. The sighting lasted about half an hour. The witness's wife and daughter also came to look at the object. The gendarmerie was only informed in May. No trace and no other testimony from the neighbourhood was collected.

According to GEIPAN, the description in the official report fits a phenomenon on the ground: neither adult witness mentioned any lift-off, and the witness said they were certain it was not a motor vehicle. Only the daughter, who gave no statement and whose words were relayed by the gendarmes, placed the object 80 cm above the ground with no feet. GEIPAN considers this cannot be confirmed, since the object was seen against the ground and the absence of visible feet does not make it airborne. With that part set aside, finding an explanation goes beyond GEIPAN's competence. The case was classed C.

The case's consistency was judged poor. Nobody described how the object disappeared. In addition, the wife went back to bed while the object was still clearly visible, and the witnesses did not go to the gendarmes on their own: the gendarmes were alerted by private investigators who had already met the family.