The alleged sighting at Cussac, France, August 29, 1967:

RENCONTRE "DIABOLIQUE" SUR LE PLATEAU DE CUSSAC

par Joël MESNARD et Claude PAVY

August 29, 1967 - On the Cantal plateaus in a landscape of pasture separated by small stone walls and trees curtains, there is a tiny village on a hill: Cussac, 20 km W-SW from Saint-Flour. It is 10:30 a.m.. In a meadow on the edge of the Departmental Road 57, a dozen cows graze in the custody of Francis [X], 13-year-old and a half, and his sister Anne-Marie, 9-year-old, accompanied by their little dog Médor. The weather is beautiful, clear skies, gentle winds from the west.

As the cows prepared to cross a wall, François gets up to take them back, looks back and sees on the other side of the road, what he first believes to be four kids, behind a hedge at forty meters. He climbs one some stones to better distinguish these children that he does not recognize. They are strange: all black in clothing and face. François and Anne-Marie distinguish near them, half hidden by the hedge, a large extremely bright sphere, painful to watch as it sparkles so much.

One of the little beings is bent down and seems fussing down while another one, holding in his hand an object reflecting the sun that François compared to a mirror, waves his hands seeming make

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gestures to his companions.

Francis then exclaims "Would you come to play with us?" At this time, the little creatures who had not seemed to be interested in the children, become aware they are being observed.

The first (see sketches) takes off vertically and plunges head first into the top of the sphere. The second follows in the same way and the third, after standing up, did the same. As for the fourth, he takes off, bu before diving into the craft, he comes down again and appears to pick up something from the ground (his "mirror", François believes), then flies back and catches the ball that during this time, had started rising in small circles and was already about fifteen meters above the ground. He disappears inside the same was his predecessors did.

In rising, the sphere emitted a soft and high pitched whistling sound, mixed with the sound of a gush od air that none of the children had felt.

It flies in some more circles, still going up, whereas the intensity of the light it radiates strongly increases. Then, the noise disappears and the ball flies away at full speed toward the northwest.

At the same time, a sulfur smell spreads and comes to the children. The cows begin to bellow and to stir. Twenty-five cows, located in a nearby meadow, about three hundred meters away, also bellow and come to gather near the cows of François and Anne-Marie. Médor the dog barks at the object and want to follow it.

The children do not see the object disappear, because they have to take care of the cows; which are very agitated, and they get home half an hour before the normal hour.

The details on the object are poor. It is a perfect sphere, two meters in diameter, a light silver color, very bright, dazzling. Francis, who wears glasses and must have fragile eyes gets watery eyes during the quarter of an hour that follows the appearance, and in the morning upon awakening, for several days. His sister, who does not wear glasses, did not feel anything.

On this sphere, no detail was noticed. It is perfectly smooth, no marks, no opening: the little beings had seemed to enter through the wall. The only detail noticed is one of the two points by which children stories differ, it was by Anne-Marie who said she had seent landing gear under the craf, consisting of 3 or 4 legs straight fitted with circular 10 cm diameter pads. Francis did not see them. They were no longer visible when the craft was in flight. Anne-Marie had not seen them retract into the apparatus. At one point, they were there, the next moment, they were gone. Presumably, the craft

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[Caption for sketch 1:]

Topographie des lieux

[Sur le dessin, la distance entre les témoins et la haie en suivant la route est donnée comme étant de 50 mètres environ.]

[Caption for sketch 2:]

BOARDING IN THE SPHERE

(1) The first character rises, toggles and gets headfirst into the sphere, imitated (2) by the second; the third is stands up (3) and does the same; the fourth rises then gets down again (4).

[Caption for sketch 3:]

DEPARTURE OF THE SPHERE

(5) The sphere spirals up; the fourth character is above it during its ascent (5 bis) and enters the inside by reversing his body upside down; the sphere disappears towards the Plomb du Cantal (6).

rising and the intensity of its light is growing to become unsustainable, visible details of the object were drowned in the violent light, explaining that, already at the start, Francis, with his fragile eyes, was unable to observe the crutches, the craft being from that moment, very bright.

The sulfur smell spread when the object began to rise in a spiral or, more exactly, helical. The gentle wind from the west corresponded to the children-to-object direction. The cows began to bellow as soon as the craft took off. It should be noted that at a sufficient concentration, ozone has a smell that can be confused with sulfur smell - that is to say sulfuric gas - and an ozone odor was previously been reported in some landings cases.

Details about the little beings are more numerous and interesting. These beings are approximately 1 m to 1.20 m. They do not all have the same size. The first and second (see sketches) are the smallest and the largest is the fourth, the one who holds a "mirror" in a hand. They are "all black", but of a shiny look that Francois compared to that of silk. Children cannot specify whether the color is the skin of the beings or the color of some outfit, as there is no visible line of demarcation between potential clothing and the heads of the beings, bare heads. If it is an outift, it is perfectly tight-fitting.

The proportions of the members do not entirely match with the standards of our species. The arms are too long and thin (see sketches). The children were unable to distinguish what could have been the hands. The legs are short and thin. Contrary to what happened to the "hands", the children were able to observe the feet of the fourth character, when he caught the ball which was beginning to rise. In the words of the children, they were "webbed" (see sketches). Perhaps this look was was due to the presence of some shoes.

Relative to the body, the head appears of normal proportions, but the skull is pointed and the chin is also very marked. The nose is too sharp, and this is the second point on which the accounts differ. Anne-Marie is the only one who saw the nose, when the fourth character flew to catch the ball and was then shown in profile. Presumably it was quite fleeting and that is why François has not noticed this.

The last point, very interesting, is the "beard" that, according to the children, these beings were wearing. It is located on each side of the head and there is also a small patch under the chin. The children could not distinguish eyes in the faces of these little creatures and did not see their ears.

Though not appearing to have any backpack, the beings still flew very easily and quickly. Presumably they were equipped with similar devices to those evoked by Jean Goupil in his article on repellents fields ("Phénomènes Spatiaux" #11, p. 22), and miniaturized, or these phenomena were produced by the luminous craft on some signal, or via a fifth supernumerary being located inside the craft.

We arrived there to investigate without informing anyone. The children were not exepcting us and it is out of the question that they could have revised their story. We first went to the police, where we were courteously received and where we were confirmed what we originally knew of this case. That is what we had learned with "Radio Luxembourg" - from which we had very kindly received the recording of a telephone conversation between one of their reporters and the children's father, following the incident - and the article in "Paris-Jour" for 2-3.9.67. Confirming to us the outline of this observation we discovered by these sources, the police told us that the investigators who went on site the same day at 16 pm had noted the existence of a sulfur odor. In addition, the police and investigators at the time, regarded the case as relatively serious.

We then went to Cussac where we found the young Anne-Marie, with her mother and a brother, André, who kindly welcomed us.

We interrogated Anne-Marie for about an hour. We were two and we asked questions in turn, in a continuous stream, periodically returning to the same points but with different formulations in order to try to make the child contradict herself. She is a rather shy child, however, she never contradicted herself.

After this examination, she took us to look for her brother François, who was working in the fields with his other brother Raymond.

We came back with François to the home of his parents, questioning him as we had dome with his sister. He too, never contradicted himself.

Also, interviewing them together, both at the scene of the incident and at their parents' home, and asking them more and more details,

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we noticed no looks of connivance between them. They never seemed embarrassed by our questions; either they had seen the details requested or they had not seen it. For example, Francis said: "From day one, Anne-Marie said she saw crutches on the object, but I did not see them, so I cannot tell you anything!" In this regard, however, he thinks that she mistook branches of the bushes in the hedge for crutches.

Also, we learned by the parents that Anne-Marie was unable to sleep the first two nights following the observation and they had to take her with them; François could not sleep the first night either; and that Mr [X], a resident of Cussac who was trying to move hay into the barn, heard the sound from the ball as it was rising. We also learned from them that the children were in tears when they came home with the cows; domething that, perhaps for pride, the children had not told us.

All this, admittedly, is in their favor. On the other hand, if they had invented this story from scratch, it fits so well - apart from the smell of sulfur which, to our knowledge, is a new fact in the history of flying saucers - with the general structure of the "flying saucer" phenomenon, with what so many people claim to have seen, we could almost qualify it a classical observation, and it should be assumed that François and Anne-Marie had read the specialized literature on the matter. Certainly, more and more people take an interest in these issues, but the distribution of the magazines that deals with it remains very scarse and we doubt that children of a farmer in Cantal, one of the least populated regions in France, may have had knowledge, through one of these journals, of all the details they provided and were already more or less known.

The parents reported that François is in the fourth class and his a hard working pupil. Asked about his reading he gives us titles such as "Treasures of French poetry," "George Sand", "Chateaubriand" which must be in the class curriculum. On the other hand, he does not seem to have the kind of imagination that would bring him to invent such a story and - apart from the fear he felt at the time - he does not seem to have grasped the importance of all he saw and all that it implies. In any case, the whistling sound heard by Mr [X], and the persistent smell of sulfur found by the police, would remain unexplained.

All of the above only confirmed us in the feeling we have had throughout the investigation, to be confronted to an exciting and most serious event, we can not overemphasize its significance and importance. We rarely found before a testimony in which many major indications are gathered and raises so many issues. Issues that for the most part are already known, but about which we cannot, alas! speculate.

Here we have again: the systematic refusal of the contact, even with children; the mystery of the propulsion of the craft - though on this point, the articles of Jean Goupil, published in issues 11, 12

[Photo caption:] Claude Pavy and the children on the landing grounds.

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and 14 of "Phénomène sSpatiaux" may bring us some lights; the humanoid and rather disturbing appearance of the being. The questions about the origin and intents of these characters have, again, no response.

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