The 'Amarante' case, Nancy
Around midday on 21 October 1982, a biologist in the Nancy suburbs (Laxou) watched a small ovoid metallic object hover about a metre above his garden for some twenty minutes.
1982 CE · 48.70, 6.14 · status: unexplained
The account
The object, about 1.5 m across, rose vertically and vanished. Afterwards the witness found that amaranth plants beneath it had withered. Gendarmes and the French space agency's UFO unit GEPAN took plant samples for laboratory analysis, and GEPAN published the investigation as Technical Note 17 (March 1983). It became one of the best-known French cases with physical traces, alongside Trans-en-Provence.
The sceptical view
There was a single witness, who stayed anonymous, and the plant analyses were never independently replicated. Critics argue that drought, frost or a chemical cause could account for the dried plants.
The researched reading
A single scientist’s close sighting with plant samples analysed by France’s official UFO unit. The traces are suggestive but unreplicated, and one anonymous witness keeps the case weak.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Genuinely anomalous | 30% | GEPAN’s Technical Note 17 documented the sighting and found biochemical changes in the plants under the object, making it one of the few trace cases with laboratory work. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 18% | The withered amaranth could reflect drought, frost or ordinary plant stress; GEPAN found dehydration but no radiation, and the plant analyses were never independently replicated. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 15% | With one anonymous witness, the only checks are the plant samples; a hoax by the witness, perhaps to test GEPAN, cannot be excluded, though investigators found him credible. |
| Something known, misidentified | 12% | A small, shiny ovoid hovering a metre above a garden for 20 minutes fits no common object well, but a toy balloon or a reflective item caught in a garden draft has been suggested. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 10% | A single witness, a biologist who knew of UFO cases; nothing suggests confusion, but no one could check his account. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 8% | A small ball-lightning-like plasma has been proposed for close, small luminous objects, but a 20-minute daytime metallic ovoid does not fit it well. |
| Undetermined | 5% | The share the reading had given to fabrication on doubt rather than evidence: the record does not settle it either way. |
| Secret human technology | 2% | There is no plausible secret device of this kind hovering in a suburban garden in 1982. |
Official position: GEPAN published the investigation as Technical Note 17 (1983) and did not explain it.