What happened
At dawn on 1 July 1965, lavender farmer Maurice Masse was starting work on the Valensole plateau in Provence when a sharp whistling drew his attention to what he first took for a helicopter landing in his field. Instead, he said, he found a dark, matte, rugby-ball-shaped craft about the size of a Renault Dauphine car, standing on six thin legs around a central pivot. Beside it were two small beings, the build of eight-year-old children, with oversized heads, examining a lavender plant. When he crept closer, one pointed a tube at him and he was frozen in place, unable to move for several minutes after the craft whistled away. In the soil he found a shallow bowl with a cylindrical hole at the centre and four grooves forming a cross. He confided in a friend, rumour spread, and the gendarmerie opened an inquiry. Lavender reportedly would not grow on the spot for years, and Masse kept to his account until his death.
The official explanation
No official body has explained the case. Some French skeptics, including Claude Maugé, have argued Masse saw a military helicopter and embellished the encounter, though officials said no helicopter landing was logged in the area. Others suggest the landing marks were made by people or machinery and that the case grew in the retelling once the press arrived. Critics also note that the site was trampled by sightseers before the gendarmes examined it, so the trace evidence was compromised from the start.
The anomalous case
Masse was by every account a quiet, sober farmer who did not want publicity; according to Futura-Sciences, gendarmes confirmed he had neither drunk nor eaten that morning and townspeople vouched for his honesty. He dismissed the helicopter theory flatly, saying the craft had no rotor or blades. The gendarmerie documented a shallow depression about 1.2 m across with a central hole and radiating grooves, and later analysis reported unusually low calcium in the soil. Jacques Vallee interviewed Masse, and Futura-Sciences reports that successive French investigators reached the same conclusion: the case remains inexplicable. The paralysis by a pointed device and the small occupants also parallel the Socorro landing in New Mexico just ten weeks earlier.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- 5 histoires extraordinaires et non résolues d'ovnis : le cas toujours « inexpliqué » de Valensole Futura-Sciences
- Close encounters of the 3rd kind: Valensole, France, 1965 Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
- UFO sightings in France Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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