One of the most famous cases of French ufology will soon resurface on the screen. Back to the craziest testimony of an extraterrestrial appearance ever elucidated in France.
In France, the GEIPAN (Group for studies and information on unidentified aerospace phenomena) collects via its website or a police report testimonies of unidentified aerospace phenomena (PAN) in France and analyzes them scientifically since 1977. Among the 700 reports collected each year, about fifty cases remain unexplained for the GEIPAN, despite a field investigation, a cognitive interview of the witness and very valuable expertise that can be carried out by the Air Force, Météo France or internally by CNES. Here is the craziest case that still remains unexplained in France:
“The Valensole encounter”: the famous French case of encounter of the 3rd type
On July 1, 1965 at 5:45 a.m. in Valensole, a place particularly popular for its lavender fields as far as the eye can see in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, a farmer, Maurice Masse, would have seen two extraterrestrials near a machine in form of a giant spider in a field in the Olivol district. While busy hoeing that morning, he hears a shrill whistle. He sees a kind of dull-colored aircraft “in the shape of a rugby ball” and the size of a Renault Dauphine. The two small beings, barely a meter tall, have oversized “pumpkin-shaped” heads, a gaping hole in place of a mouth, and are clad in some sort of overalls.
Maurice Masse barely has time to get closer to the hallucinating scene when one of the two humanoid passengers, squatting in front of a lavender plan, points at him an object that paralyzes him for about fifteen minutes. The two characters observe it and a form of gurgling emanates from their throats, then board their machine which suddenly disappears at the speed of lightning. The forty-something thinks he is dreaming. He scans the ground and sees “star-shaped tracks with a cylindrical hole in the middle, in soggy earth”. Maurice Masse makes his statement at the gendarmerie the next day at 8 p.m. and in the meantime confides in the inhabitants of the village, distraught. On the spot, despite the trampling of the curious, Captain Valnet notes “traces that may possibly correspond to the actual laying of a machine” including a cylindrical hole 18 centimeters in diameter and 40 centimeters deep, in the center of four shallow furrows forming “a kind of cross”.
A case filed in the category of “unidentified phenomena” and a film in preparation
Journalists from all over the world jostle in Valensole and Maurice Masse, who must constantly defend his testimony, ends up withdrawing into himself, but without ever going back on his initial testimony, until his death in 2014: “No need to cook myself, I will not say anything more. Besides, I said everything. You know everything. Everything has been written. I do not deny anything either” he confided in 1990 to the newspaper The Provencal. The case having never been elucidated, in 2015, the GEIPAN classifies it in category “D”: “unexplained observation despite the elements in its possession”. The lavender will take ten years to grow back where the mysterious machine had landed. Documentary director Dominique Filhol is currently making Valensolea feature film on the story of this strange encounter which should see the light of day this year 2023, telling the impact that this event had on the life of Maurice Masse, his family and his village.