The Cussac Close Encounter

Cussac sits on a plateau of the Massif Central, near Saint-Flour in the Cantal. In 1967 it had 282 inhabitants, at 1,045 metres. Tuesday, 29 August began clear, with a light westerly breeze and fog in the distant valleys. François Delpeuch, aged 13 and a half, and his sister Anne-Marie, aged 9, took the family's cows to a pasture called Les Tuiles, about 800 metres west of the village.

About 10:30. The children were playing cards behind a low stone wall, out of the wind. Their dog, Médor, barked, and the cows grew restless. François stood up to stop them crossing into the next pasture and saw four small beings about 80 metres away, across the road and partly behind a hedge. At first he took them for children.

They stood about 1.0 to 1.2 metres tall, uniformly black, with a glossy, silky look. They had long thin arms, short thin legs, slightly elongated heads and pointed chins. One bent over something on the ground. The tallest held a rectangular, mirror-like object. "I had the impression he was looking at me in a mirror," François said.

Beside them was a sphere, so brilliant it was painful to look at. The beings rose from the ground and dived into it head first, from the top, and one came back out, took a few steps and dived in again. Then the sphere climbed in a widening spiral, growing brighter, with a soft, high-pitched whistle, and left at high speed toward the north-west. A smell of sulphur drifted over the children, and in a nearby pasture all the cows started bellowing. The sighting lasted about 30 seconds.

A farm worker met the children in tears. François's eyes watered, then stung in the mornings for days, and his father compared it to looking at arc welding. Anne-Marie did not sleep for two nights. Gendarmes from Saint-Flour arrived at about 16:00. They found a patch of yellowed grass behind the hedge and confirmed the lingering sulphur smell. The rural constable, about 500 metres away, had heard the whistle.

The civilian group GEPA studied the case that winter, and its report reached English readers in Flying Saucer Review as "Encounter with 'devils'". In April 1978 GEPAN, the CNES unit that became today's GEIPAN, returned to Les Tuiles. Claude Poher led a team that included a magistrate. They interviewed the witnesses, now adults, and rebuilt the scene with a theodolite. The magistrate found "no flaw or inconsistency", and the report concluded that the Cussac observers had witnessed "the hasty departure of a completely unknown inhabited vehicle."

The debate came later. From 1996, Éric Maillot of the Cercle Zététique argued for a military Alouette II helicopter. No flight record has been found and no rotor noise was reported, but a counter-inquiry by Thierry Pinvidic and colleagues called the helicopter idea "indefensible". In 2009 the Skeptical Inquirer argued the story had grown with each retelling. Others have pointed to a 1967 comic strip, or a Cold War spy balloon. Neither child has ever retracted their account.

Jacques Vallée included Cussac in a 1972 book, and the COMETA report of 1999 cited the 1978 reconstruction. When the CNES archive opened to the public in March 2007, the case was called "one of the most astonishing observed in France". In France, this close encounter became as famous as Kelly-Hopkinsville.