What happened
On a sunny morning on the Cussac plateau in the Auvergne, 13-year-old François and his 9-year-old sister Anne-Marie were minding the family's cows when the boy saw, through a hedge, four small figures dressed in black, about 120 cm tall, and took them for other children. He shouted to his sister. The figures, they said, grew agitated, rose into the air and slipped into the top of a brilliant sphere about four to five metres across that was resting on or hovering just above the field. One came back down to pick something up, then darted inside. The sphere climbed in a spiral, glowing ever brighter, and left with a sharp whistle, leaving a strong smell of sulphur. The children came home in tears and could not sleep. A rural constable alerted the gendarmerie, who noted the sulphur odour and a patch of yellowed grass. France's official UAP office, GEPAN, re-investigated in 1978, and the case was among the files released by France's space agency in 2007.
The official explanation
Skeptical French researchers, notably Éric Maillot and the authors of Les OVNI du CNES, argue the children saw a helicopter and that later retellings added detail; they note François was short-sighted, that the 1978 inquiry came eleven years after the event, and that the villager who heard a whistle later said he had attributed it to a helicopter passing over. Ufologists Thierry Pinvidic and colleagues, re-investigating in the 1980s, questioned some details but could not agree on what was seen.
The anomalous case
The case rests on more than children's imagination. The gendarmes recorded a sulphur smell and a circle of yellowed grass at the spot, and a local man independently reported hearing a whistling sound he had never heard before. The original civilian investigators found the two children consistent, unembarrassed and unlikely to have read flying-saucer literature in rural Cantal. When GEPAN, the official unit of France's space agency CNES, investigated in 1978, its team concluded, according to Les OVNI du CNES, that the witnesses had seen the precipitous departure of a completely unknown occupied vehicle with performance far beyond known technology. Former GEPAN head Jean-Jacques Velasco later wrote that whatever the right hypothesis, investigators were once again confronted with the unknown.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Les OVNI du CNES, chapter 10: « Cussac » (1967) (skeptical analysis quoting the 1978 GEPAN report) report, zetetique.fr
Sources
- Close encounter of Cussac Wikipedia
- UFO secrets told in French The Philadelphia Inquirer (AP)
- Les OVNI du CNES, chapitre 10: « Cussac » (1967) Déguillaume, Maillot and Rossoni (zetetique.fr)
- Cussac 1967: GEPA investigation documents Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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