On 1 July 1965 a farmer near Valensole reported an object in his lavender field, and two small figures beside it. He was not a man seeking attention, and the account he gave the gendarmerie that day did not grow in the retelling.
What makes the case worth filing is what happened next. The gendarmes went back the next morning and measured. They recorded the state of the plants, the marks in the soil, the farmer's condition. That file still exists. France's GEIPAN, the state body attached to the space agency, keeps it and classifies the case as D, meaning unidentified.
Unidentified is not a synonym for extraterrestrial. It means the record was good enough to rule out the ordinary explanations and not good enough to settle on one. That distinction is the whole discipline. A file that says we do not know is more honest, and more useful, than one that says we do.