The Cergy-Pontoise Abduction: Franck Fontaine Vanishes for a Week

Cergy-Pontoise is a new town about 30 km north-west of Paris. Three friends there sold clothes at markets: Franck Fontaine, almost 19, and Jean-Pierre Prévost and Salomon N'Diaye, both 25. Before dawn on Monday 26 November 1979, at about 4:30, they were loading a Ford estate for an open-air market.

The men saw a light descending. Fontaine drove toward where he thought it had come down. Prévost later described "three or four small spheres rotating around the car." They merged, he said, into "a kind of luminous cigar."

Fontaine remembered a luminous sphere growing larger, enveloping the vehicle. His eyes stung, then a sort of fog came, and he lost consciousness. His friends came back and saw a milky halo about 4 metres across, with three or four luminous spheres. The light rose into the sky. The car door was open, the engine had stalled, and Fontaine was gone.

A 14-year-old girl, identified only as Lisette, said she watched something for about 15 minutes that morning. "It was blue, orange, red. It was very bright, very phosphorescent." A round object with a dome, moving slowly in a zigzag near electricity pylons.

Prévost phoned the police. The sceptical gendarmes searched widely, and Prévost and N'Diaye tested negative on the spot. Radar stations were checked, and a Geiger counter found nothing. One week later, at 4:30 in the morning, Fontaine was back, by one account standing in a cabbage field exactly where he had been with his car. His clothes were the same, neither creased nor muddy, and he still had his 100 francs, but at first he offered only this: "I do not know, I fell asleep."

GEPAN, the CNES unit now known as GEIPAN, interviewed Fontaine around 4 December 1979. He refused its medical and scientific examinations. At a press conference he said, "It was nice." He refused hypnosis and wanted guarantees from the State before telling everything. GEPAN called the story an affabulation, a fabrication, "without any value in furthering knowledge of UFOs."

On 26 April 1980, TF1's Temps X aired a reconstruction presented by Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff. Jimmy Guieu published Contacts OVNI Cergy-Pontoise with all three men. On 15 August 1980, around 2,000 people gathered at Cergy for a promised meeting with the extraterrestrials. Nothing happened.

By June 1983, the three-year limitation period for contempt of a magistrate had run out, and Prévost confessed on Radio Korrigan. Le Parisien Libéré printed it on 7 July 1983: "l'affaire de Cergy-Pontoise est bidon du début à la fin." "I am solely responsible." Fontaine had spent the eight days in a friend's flat in Pontoise, and Prévost had taken him there and brought him back. The motive, by differing accounts, was to draw attention to Prévost's channelled messages and help build an extraterrestrial-based religion, or to promote peace.

Fontaine and N'Diaye stood by their story. Jimmy Guieu would not accept the confession. A second rendezvous on 15 August 1983 also produced nothing.

GEIPAN treats the case as a hoax, and researcher Michel Piccin also concluded it was one. Jacques Vallée, in Revelations (1991), suggested a psychological operation by intelligence services, testing how the public, media and scientists would react. Critics argue GEIPAN cropped the dome out of Lisette's drawing and did not interview the first responders. In 1996, the Super Furry Animals single "Hometown Unicorn" carried the line: "Will you ever return me / Just like Frankie Fontaine."