Luce Fontaine and the "Babas Michelin": Plaine des Cafres, Réunion, 1968

Réunion is a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. High in its interior lies the Plaine des Cafres, part of the commune of Le Tampon. In 1968, Luce Fontaine was 22. A Creole farmer. On the morning of Wednesday 31 July he went into a small clearing in an acacia wood to cut grass for his rabbits.

It was about 09:00. In his own words: "I was at kilometer 21 in a small clearing … when I suddenly saw in the clearing a kind of oval cabin 25 meters away."

The object was ovoid. About 5 metres wide and 2.5 metres high. Blue and white, with dark blue ends and a lighter, more transparent centre. It did not land. It hung four or five metres above the ground, and it gave off a "raw whitish light compared with that of a welder" that troubled him.

Through the blue, see-through middle of the craft, Fontaine saw two figures. They seemed to measure approximately 90 centimetres. They were "dressed from feet to head in a kind of bumpy cosmonaut suit", with helmets that partly hid their faces. They reminded him of Bibendum, the Michelin tyre mascot. He called them "Babas Michelin".

At first they did not seem to notice him. Then they did. The two beings turned their backs to him. The machine disappeared in a few seconds in a dazzling flash of light and a hot air blast. The whole sighting lasted about fifteen seconds.

Afterwards, his nose bled for eight days. Captain Léopold Legros, director of Réunion's fire and rescue service and trained in nuclear, chemical and biological matters, borrowed detection equipment from Gillot airfield. Fontaine's hat and trousers read above natural background. In the clearing, Legros found abnormal radioactivity at six points "aligned three by three". Another account of his words speaks of "eight points of radioactivity". "On grass tufts, on stones, we detected up to 60 milliRöntgens," he reported, within about a 5 metre radius.

The gendarmerie company at Saint-Pierre, under Captain Maljean, took Fontaine's statement. In the words of researcher Patrick Gross, the inquiry "did not end in the publication of a commonplace explanation nor in the exposure of a hoax." A civilian report with a drawing followed from J.P. Lavilgrand. M. Albany of GEPA wrote the case up in Phénomènes Spatiaux in March 1969. Le Journal de l'île ran the story on 10 August 1968, and mainland papers followed.

Not everyone was convinced. Some sources described Fontaine as "a farmer considered as sober and honest". Others, making fun of the event, called him a "drunk cowboy" on his way back from a boozy dance. Doubters point to a single witness, fifteen seconds, radiation readings taken about ten days late with no published background level, and the conflict between six points and eight. No hoax was ever exposed.

The case entered the classic catalogues. Jacques Vallée listed it as case 917 in Passport to Magonia. It appeared in Flying Saucer Review, Lumières dans la Nuit, HUMCAT, and Figuet and Ruchon's 1979 catalogue of close encounter cases in France. A nightclub called "La Soucoupe Volante" was later built on the very spot. In 1975, at Petite-Île, another young man reported small Michelin-like beings, and the gendarmerie files recalled "a flying saucer seen in 1968 in the plain of Cafres". In 2016, William Cally's docu-fiction OVNI sous les tropiques : l'affaire des Babas Michelin brought the story to television. In 2018, La 1ère reported that Fontaine had died.