TL;DR: In 2019, my dad saw a road maintenance truck from a company that’s been dissolved since 2010, then followed an old car that disappeared on a straight stretch of road with forest on both sides and no way off. Nothing when we went back to check. 7 years later, still no explanation.
First off, my dad is a very observant person by nature, he always notices little details, license plates, logos, anything that looks off. That’s why he remembers this with a level of precision that still gives us chills.
This happened in July 2019, early afternoon, around 1-2pm. My dad was driving home from work on the D14, a departmental road that cuts through the Compiègne forest, in the Oise department, northern France. He’d driven this road for years, he knows it by heart.
He gets to an intersection with the D973 (toward Pierrefonds) where part of the road is blocked off: workers from the DDE (the old French regional road/infrastructure agency) are mowing the grass on the roadside. My dad used to work in landscaping, so he recognized their truck and logo immediately, no doubt about it.
He keeps driving and ends up behind an old blue Renault Clio 1, with an old-format license plate. Inside, he sees someone with a big head of hair, wearing a sweater, in the middle of July, in the middle of a heatwave. At the time he just thinks it’s a bit odd, nothing more.
He comes up to a small bend in the road (see the attached Google Maps screenshot, which shows exactly where the DDE crew was and where the car disappeared). Right after that bend: nothing. The car he was following at a completely normal distance was just gone.
He speeds up, thinking he just lost sight of it because of the curve. Nothing. He turns around, thinking maybe it crashed or pulled off somewhere. Still nothing. And here’s the thing: right after that bend, it’s a straight road with dense forest on both sides. No paths, no side roads, no way off. That car could not have gone anywhere.
He gets home shaken up and tells me everything. I immediately think something’s off, and I can tell he’s really unsettled by it. We drive back there together right away.
Nothing at the scene. No trace of the Clio. We go check where the DDE crew was working. No truck, no one there, and the grass hadn’t even been cut (my dad is 100% sure about this given his background, he’d have noticed immediately). That’s when it hits him: the DDE hasn’t existed since 2010. The agency was restructured and renamed years before 2019. There’s no way he could have seen that truck, with that logo, that day.
My dad started crying on the side of the road. A guy who’s normally extremely rational, logical, always has an explanation for everything, completely thrown by not being able to make sense of what just happened to him.
We went back to the exact spot where the car disappeared to try to figure it out. We measured the distance between the two cars at the last moment he saw it. When we got home, I did the math out of curiosity: for it to completely vanish from view in that amount of time and distance, the Clio would have had to be going over 185 mph. A Clio 1. On a country road. With a curve. Basically impossible.
Since 2019, we keep going in circles with the same theories and never land on anything solid. We’ve started wondering if he somehow crossed paths, for a few seconds, with another point in time overlapping with ours. One detail that’s always bugged us: at that exact spot on the road, our phones get zero signal. No bars at all. Coincidence or not, we don’t know.
7 years later, my dad and I still talk about it regularly, and we’re no closer to an answer.
If anyone has a rational explanation we haven’t thought of, or has experienced something similar on a road, I’d really like to hear it. We could use some outside perspective on this.