by Charles Lear
On November 26, 1979, police in the French agglomeration community of Cergy-Pontoise received a strange missing person report from two distressed young men. According to Jean-Pierre Prévost and Salomon N’Diaye, their friend, Franck Fontaine, disappeared after a ball of light that was accompanied by three or four luminous spheres engulfed the car he was in. This resulted in not only an investigation by the police but also GEPAN (Groupe d’Études des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés), the unit of CNES (Centre National D’études Spatiales) tasked with dealing with UFO reports.
According to an article on the case titled L’Affaire de Cergy-Pontoise, posted on rrO.org, Fontaine, 18, Prévost and N’Diaye, both 25, were loading a Ford station wagon with jeans they were going to try and sell at Gisors market. They saw a light heading towards the ground at a “not too fast speed.” Fontaine drove towards where he thought it might have made impact after telling the other two to meet him there. Prévost and N’Diaye went back to their nearby apartments, N’Diaye to get a camera and Prévost to get another load of jeans. Read more


We’ve written
With UFO reports, there are common elements that give one a sense of the nature of the phenomenon. However, there are some reports that contain elements that are unique to the point that a researcher might be inclined to dismiss them. The case of Herbirito Garza is one of these.
In the 1950s, the first reports of cars shutting down in the proximity of UFOs started hitting the news, most memorably those from
When a nine-year-old boy in Harrah, Washington, approximately 12 miles west of the city of Toppenish, told his mother a story about seeing strange creatures and their vehicles on the morning of a school day, she heard him out, and then sent him to school. His story would likely have gone no further, had it not been for a teacher’s aide who went with him back to his house during recess after hearing his story and believing him. This lead to the discovery of physical traces that backed up his story and an investigation by members of the Center for UFO Studies and a reporter from a local paper.
In mid December of last year, we wrote about a woman, Irma Rick, in the province of La Pampa in Argentina, who, after seeing a bright light outside her house, suddenly found herself the next morning almost 65 km (40 miles) away sitting on the side of the road in the town of Guatraché with no memory of how she got there. Most of us here in the United States got the news from
The sources are listed as Luis Burgos and the online La Pampa news publication InfoHuella. InfoHuella posted an
As mentioned last week, in
In last week’s
For researchers, UFO trace cases make up a welcome, science-friendly aspect of a phenomenon that often eludes scientific study. Researcher Ted Phillips specialized in trace cases starting in the mid-1960s on the advice of Project Blue Book scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek. In the course of his investigations, Phillips was able to note commonalities, one of those being that soil samples taken from alleged UFO landing sites were unable to absorb water. While UFOs have been reported to leave physical traces on the environment, they’ve also been reported to leave physical traces on witnesses. A common report of this sort is what is medically known as “actinic conjunctivitis” or “klieg conjunctivitis.” This is a painful condition where the eyes become red and intensely irritated due to exposure to ultraviolet light. 