The Prémanon encounter: the "giant sugar lump"

Autumn 1954. France was deep in a wave of saucer reports. That same night, others came from Lanta and Lemps. Prémanon sits at about 1,000 metres in the Jura, near Les Rousses and the Swiss border. On an isolated farm in the hamlet of Sous la Roche lived a farming family who never wanted their name revealed, and four children: Raymond, 12, Jeannine, 9, Ghislaine, 8, and Claude, 4.

Monday 27 September. Around 8:30 pm. A storm. "It was raining like loads of buckets!" The dog barked. Raymond went out and saw, about ten metres from the building, an object that "shone in the light of the lamps on the farm."

He ran inside. Then he came back, "armed with all his courage and a few stones." They struck with "the characteristic sound of a struck metal piece." He stepped closer and felt "something cold, impalpable and icy pressing on his shoulder." The object set in motion, with what the gendarmes called a sort of grunt. Raymond was knocked to the ground. Terrified, he fled.

"You would have said it's a sugar lump," he said. "It was not taller than me." The gendarmerie recorded a rectangular, aluminium-coloured machine, partly split in the middle, about 2 metres high and 1 metre wide. It stood on three feet. "It did not have arms."

His sisters saw it on the threshold of the door and hid in the hay until it had gone. Jeannine said it "moved with a hardly perceptible noise." Then, in the meadow, a red glow swung at ground level, rocking from side to side. "Then, it all disappears."

Captain Brustel of the Saint-Claude gendarmerie inspected the site on 29 September and again on 1 and 2 October. Where the red glow had been, the grass lay in a crown, its circles 3.50 m and 2.50 m across, swirled counterclockwise like a frozen whirlwind. Flattened, not torn. Four triangular holes, about 10 cm across, marked the corners of a large trapezium. A nearby pole had lost 15 cm of bark. After more than 36 hours of rain, the marks were still distinct. Investigator Charles Garreau checked them again a week later. In the yard, the rain had erased everything.

Raymond, the press reported, had been stuttering ever since. His mother did not believe him and confined him to the house. The children's first words to their teacher, Mme Genillon, were: "We saw ghosts last night." She called Raymond "not imaginative." He had apparently never heard of flying saucers. The village priest vouched for the children too.

Then the newspapers took over. Ghosts became a saucer, then a robot, then, in Ici Paris, a "Martian" who had kissed the boy. The Nouvelle Revue de Lausanne satirised the affair. The gendarmerie drew no conclusion, though Brustel "had to admit that 'something' had actually occurred." Aimé Michel and Jimmy Guieu proposed a magnetic field of force to explain the flattened grass.

Decades later, photographer Florian Luthi's project claimed the story began as a school essay. The 1954 papers describe the children telling their teacher in person. In 1991 Raymond Romand reflected on how information can be distorted: "from absolutely nothing, a legend can be created." He did not retract the sighting.

Jacques Vallée catalogued the case as "phantoms in sheet metal." Aimé Michel carried it into Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery. ORTF television returned to it in 1965. In 2026, Luthi's Fantômes Météores went on show in Geneva.