Valensole Encounter (Maurice Masse)

Valensole sits on a high plateau in Provence, in what was then the Basses-Alpes. It is lavender country. Maurice Masse farmed it. He was 41, married with two children, a former Resistance fighter with a good name locally. The Washington Post called him "a sober, level-headed person, unlikely to deceive himself or others."

Thursday, 1 July 1965. About 5:45 in the morning, at a spot called l'Olivol. Masse was in his field before work. He heard a whistling sound and went to look. A strange machine sat on the ground. Its shape "vaguely recalled that of a rugby ball." It was the size of a Dauphine car, matte in colour, with a sliding door on the side and a transparent upper part. It stood on six legs and a central pivot the colour of steel.

Two beings were near it. About 1 m tall, stocky, in one-piece suits. Pumpkin-shaped heads, fairly large ears, no chin, a round hole in place of the mouth. They were looking at plants.

Then they saw him. "When I was seven meters away, one of them noticed me… the other turned and raised his right arm with an object in hand, and I became completely immobilized." For several minutes he could not move. He stayed conscious. The beings climbed back aboard. The craft left at a slant, its legs seeming to turn in the same direction. At 6 to 8 m up it vanished toward Manosque. No smoke. No dust. "In a fraction of a second, it was over."

The next evening Masse went to the gendarmerie. Captain Valnet found traces that could fit a landed craft. A hole 20 cm in diameter and about 50 cm deep, with X-shaped marks spreading from it. The earth was "hard as cement." One gendarme said: "The traces on the ground are very clear and very precise." No radioactivity was found. Along the departure path the lavender withered and did not grow back until 1975. For months, Masse suffered abnormally heavy sleepiness.

At first Masse left out the beings. "It was so extraordinary I feared being thought insane or institutionalized," he said. On 18 August 1965 he added them, and the paralysis. Aimé Michel, Charles Bowen and Jacques Vallée came to interview him. In 2015 GEIPAN, the UFO office of the French space agency CNES, published the gendarmerie reports. Its classification is "D". Unexplained after investigation.

On 4 July the ORTF news said the inquiry leaned toward a military helicopter. Army exercises were under way nearby. Dominique Caudron later argued for an Alouette II, whose turbine whistles as the rotor stops. Masse was firm. "I have the pretension of knowing how to recognize a helicopter. It was not one. I am emphatic." The objection remains that a helicopter does not explain the ground trace.

Other theories followed. A US 6th Fleet spy helicopter. A fertilizer tank. A hoax inspired by a 1950 comic story with a Provence landing, small beings and a paralysing ray. Sceptics note that the number of legs and beings shifts between versions.

His wife told researchers he saw it as a spiritual experience, and the site as hallowed ground to be kept in the family forever. He died in 2004. Newsweek has called the case France's Roswell. In 2025 it reached French cinemas as the film Valensole 1965.