What happened
Building a pump shelter, Nicolaï heard a faint whistle and saw a device land briefly on his land. He told gendarmes it "had the shape of two saucers, one inverted on top of the other," with two circles like trapdoors underneath. It left a ring about two meters across. GEPAN, the French space agency's UFO unit, ran a two-year study of soil and plant samples and found no explanation. Skeptics, including Erick Maillot and Jean-Michel Abrassart, argue GEPAN arrived about 40 days late, did not check the witness's own garden work, and that the case may have been a joke.