Four Tonnes on a Garden Terrace: The Case France Studied for Two Years and Never Closed
Trans-en-Provence is a small commune in the Var, in the hills behind the French Riviera. On the afternoon of 8 January 1981, at about five o'clock, a fifty-five-year-old farmer named Renato Nicolai was working on a terrace beside his house, building a shelter for a water pump. What happened over the next few minutes became the most intensively investigated physical-trace case in the history of official French research into unidentified aerial phenomena, and it is still open.
Nicolai's account, given to police the following day and repeated consistently afterwards, was straightforward. He heard a faint whistling sound, low and continuous, unlike anything he associated with the aircraft that passed over the valley. Turning toward it, he saw an object descending through the air toward the lower terrace of his property, roughly fifty metres away and below him. It came down and settled on the ground.
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