CERGY PONTOISE (95) 1979

Before dawn on November 26, 1979, three young men in the Cergy-Pontoise area said they were preparing to take jeans to a nearby market. Their later account described a glow over the road. One of the men, identified in the official summary as T1, drove toward it. The light moved above the car, surrounding it with mist and small flashing points. When the mist cleared and the light shot away, another participant, T3, said T1 had vanished from the vehicle. At about five o'clock in the morning, T3 telephoned local police to report that a friend had been abducted by a UFO. A patrol was diverted, and a total of seven police officers and gendarmes eventually assembled around the incident. The published GEIPAN summary contains an internal identification problem: it lists T1 among three people at the scene while also using T1 for the missing person. The Atlas preserves that contradiction rather than inventing a clean cast list. The men reacted differently during questioning, ranging from apparent indifference to extreme excitement. Their accounts conflicted about what they had done the previous evening and that morning, where the car had been positioned and how the light had moved. The gendarmerie notified GEPAN on November 26. One participant contacted the press, bringing journalists and private investigators into the case almost immediately. Extensive national coverage began on November 28. For a week the disappearance remained the public center of the story. On December 3, T1's mother informed the gendarmerie that her son had returned. T3 announced the return to a radio station. Gendarmes found T1 at T2's home with family members and a journalist. T1 said he had reappeared in a cabbage field near the building. GEPAN attempted to secure objective information. Its technical review states that the protagonists repeatedly avoided specific investigative requests while speaking more openly to journalists and selected private investigators. Their story changed across interviews, public statements and press conferences. Investigators came to regard the account as not credible. A blood analysis was also discussed, although such a test should not be generalized into a universal detector of alleged weightlessness or abduction. The cabbage field briefly created a possible physical-evidence claim. A row of dried plants was attributed to the luminous ball said to have returned T1. Investigation established that they were ordinary cabbages left by their owner as fertilizer. GEPAN's sample analysis supported that mundane explanation. The plants therefore do not survive as unexplained trace evidence. The protagonists maintained versions of their story, including in statements before the public prosecutor, but GEPAN concluded that the affair was a hoax. Technical Note 6 and associated police, interview and sample-analysis documents preserve the reasoning and source record. CE4 remains in the Atlas because it classifies the claimed disappearance and return; it does not signal that the abduction was accepted as genuine. This distinction matters for readers. The case is historically significant as a major French UFO-media episode and as an example of how rapid publicity, changing testimony and apparently physical traces can be tested. The official finding is not hidden beneath a neutral-sounding mystery label. The portrait reconstructs the protagonists' initial claim without depicting an alien abduction: exactly two men stand beside the open, empty period car loaded with jeans, mist dissipates, and a bright light with small flashing points rises over the cabbage fields and distant apartment blocks. The image is an illustrative reconstruction of the reported scene, while the narrative clearly records the official hoax conclusion.