Valea Plopului landing (Poseşti, Romania, 1972)

The report

In early September 1972, Vasile Cărăbuş, a night watchman at the agricultural cooperative in Poseşti, in Prahova County, Romania, reported seeing a shiny object cross the sky shortly after midnight. According to the account preserved by the Romanian case catalogue asfanufo.ro, he described a yellow "star with a tail" that hovered and then came down smoothly in an orchard roughly two kilometres away, on the hill known locally as La Odaia. The object then disappeared without any noise. The catalogue dates the night to somewhere between 2 and 6 September 1972. Other summaries give only the month, and one gives autumn.

The location is in the Valea Plopului area of the Prahova valley; the sources give no more precise geography. The coordinates in this entry are approximate, placed on the commune rather than the orchard.

Why it is remembered

The case is best known in Romania as the first UFO "landing" with some claim to scientific examination. Antena 3 CNN Romania describes it as the first attested landing in the country, and Adevărul calls it the first documented and scientifically examined landing case. Jurnalul describes it as the most famous such event in Romania.

The case also had a lasting effect on local ufology. The most prominent figure linked to it is Professor Călin Turcu (1942–2006), who taught in Vălenii de Munte. The asfanufo.ro case page says the event "changed the fate" of his life. Turcu founded the Romanian UFO Researchers group (RUFOR) and published its samizdat magazine from 1979 to 1986, typing and duplicating the 27 issues himself because he had no printing budget. Later he assembled a UFO archive that he described as the largest in Romania. These details come from the same popular and fan-run sources and have not been checked against independent records.

The case for and against

The evidence supporting the account is thin. It rests on one witness, and the surviving description is brief. No photographs, physical traces, or radar records have been published. No investigating body, method, or written finding is named in any source found. The phrase "certified and scientifically investigated" appears in the case summaries, but none of them names who certified it or what they concluded. The only reference given is an observatorulph.ro article, which was not reviewed for this entry.

The sources also disagree about priority. Jurnalul credits a 1984 landing at Alexeni, as the first expert-examined landing in Romania. Antena 3 notes that the Alexeni case is also much disputed. A separate Jurnalul claim that Turcu was killed in Saudi Arabia after leaving Romania is not confirmed by any other source found, and this entry does not rely on it.

The usual skeptical explanations for night lights reported by a single observer apply here: aircraft, meteors, stars or planets near the horizon, and airborne or ground lights from the surrounding agricultural area. None of the sources discuss these alternatives. The absence of documentation means the case cannot be strongly tested either way.

Current standing

The case is remembered mainly inside Romanian ufology and in Romanian popular media, and it is usually cited as an early national landmark. Outside that circle it is little known. Its credibility is contested: the basic report is specific enough to be remembered, but no independent documentation has been located. Anyone pursuing the case further should look for the observatorulph.ro article, Romanian archival or press coverage from 1972–1973, and any papers held in Turcu's former archive.