One of the most famous cases of French ufology will soon resurface on the screen. Back to the craziest testimony of an extraterrestrial appearance ever elucidated in France.
In France, the GEIPAN (Group for studies and information on unidentified aerospace phenomena) collects via its website or a police report the testimonies of unidentified aerospace phenomena (PAN) in France and analyzes them scientifically since 1977. Among the 700 reports collected each year, around fifty cases remain unexplained for the GEIPAN, despite a field investigation, a cognitive interview of the witness and very valuable expertise that can be carried out by the Air Force, Météo France or internally by CNES. Here is the craziest case that still remains unexplained in France:
On July 1, 1965 at 5:45 a.m. in Valensole, a particularly popular place for its endless lavender fields in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, a farmer, Maurice Masse, allegedly saw two extraterrestrials near a craft in form of a giant spider in a field in the Olivol district. While busy hoeing that morning, he hears a shrill whistle. He sees a kind of dull-colored aircraft “in the shape of a rugby ball” and the size of a Renault Dauphine. The two small beings, barely three feet tall, have oversized “pumpkin-shaped” heads, a gaping hole in place of a mouth, and are clad in some sort of jumpsuit.
Maurice Masse barely has time to get closer to the mind-blowing scene when one of the two humanoid passengers, squatting in front of a lavender plane, points at him an object that paralyzes him for about fifteen minutes. The two figures watch it and a form of gurgling emanates from their throats, then board their craft which suddenly disappears at lightning speed. The forty-something thinks he is dreaming. He scans the ground and sees “star-shaped tracks with a cylindrical hole in the middle, in soggy earth”. Maurice Masse makes his statement to the gendarmerie the next day at 8 p.m. and in the meantime, confides in the inhabitants of the village, distraught. On the spot, despite the trampling of the curious, Captain Valnet notes “traces that may possibly correspond to the actual laying of a machine” including a cylindrical hole 18 centimeters in diameter and 40 centimeters deep, in the center of four shallow furrows forming “a kind of cross”.
Journalists from all over the world jostled at Valensole and Maurice Masse, who had to constantly defend his testimony, ended up withdrawing into himself, but never going back on his initial testimony, until his death in 2014: “No need to cook myself, I won’t say anything more. Besides, I said everything. You know everything. Everything has been written. I don’t deny anything either” he confided in 1990 to the newspaper La Provençale. The case having never been elucidated, in 2015, the GEIPAN classifies it in category “D”: “unexplained observation despite the elements in its possession”. The lavender will take ten years to grow back where the mysterious machine had landed. Documentary director Dominique Filhol is in the process of making Valensole, a feature film on the story of this strange encounter which should see the light of day this year 2023, telling the impact that this event had on the life of Maurice Masse , his family and his village.
