The Alien. France

This article is taken from the November 1968 issue of the French magazine Lumieres dans la Nuit. Translated by Gordon Creighton.

The most important spectacle took place on the island of Reunion [which is located in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Madagascar] on the plain known as La Plaine de Cafres. Date July 31, 1968, time 9.00 am.

Witness, Luce Fontaine: 31 years old, farmer, married, has a family, his wife works as a teacher. Everyone agrees that he is considered a serious, hardworking person, quite trustworthy.

He says:

"That morning I was at [mark] 21, in a small clearing in the middle of an acacia forest, and I was bending down and picking grass for my rabbits when I suddenly saw a sort of oval cabin in the clearing. She was 25 meters away from me and was suspended at a height of four to five meters from the ground. Its edges were dark blue, the central part was lighter, more transparent, like the windshield of [Peugeot] 404. Above and below there were something like two glass legs made of shiny metal.

There were two people standing in the center of the object, their backs turned to me. The one on the left turned to the right and turned to face me. He was standing, small, about 90 centimeters tall, wrapped from head to toe in some kind of one-piece jumpsuit, a bit like a Michelin man costume. The one on the right just turned his head towards me, but still I managed to catch a glimpse of his face, partially masked by something like a helmet.

Then they both turned their backs to me, and then there was a flash, strong as an electric arc of a welding machine. Everything around me turned white. A strong heat rose, and then, as it were, a gust of wind, and after a few seconds there was nothing there.

Then I went to the place where the object was. There were no tracks. The object had a diameter of 4 or 5 meters and approximately 2 1/2 meters when measured from top to bottom. It was bluish in color, with white on the top and bottom.

I told my wife all about it, and then the gendarmerie, and everyone immediately believed me."

These were the first indications Fontaine, and the next day the investigation began. 

Then he explained in more detail to the investigators that if you look "face to face", this egg-shaped machine actually looked like two whitish saucers shining like aluminum, placed face to face.

An investigation was conducted by the gendarmerie, during which they found a certain degree of radioactivity within a radius of 5-6 meters from the intended landing site, as well as even on the clothes worn by M. Fontaine that day. (...) And], it seems that Lucy Fontaine suffered from exposure to radiation…

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Newspaper (N.Z. Press Aesn) JOHANNESBURG, September 18, 1972.


Notification for unidentified flying objects: Try to avoid South Africa.


Gunshots, not a red carpet greeting, greeted a UFO that landed without warning on Smith's farm near the remote village of Fort Beaufort.


No one disputes the fact that Mr. Bernardus Smith, several of his workers and two policemen saw something, but the national debate concerns the proper protocol for receiving extraterrestrial guests.


The police insist that they had every right to shoot at Fort Beaufort. Scientists say the shooting was stupid, if not dangerous. And one newspaper complained that an unfriendly reception could scare off messengers from another planet. Mr. Smith, who is 40 years old, says that one of his farm workers noticed a UFO around 8 a.m., and he took out his rifle and called the police.

"It seemed to glow red in the bushes, and as I watched, it turned from bright red to dark green, and then to whitish yellow," Mr. Smith said.

After the police arrived, several farmers tried to drive the UFO out of the bushes as they drive away cattle.

"As they approached, it veered towards the trees," Mr Smith said. "At the right end of the oval-shaped object there was a protrusion similar to a star - it seemed that it was increasing in size as the intensity of the white light emitted by it increased.

We couldn't shoot at it at that stage because people were in the line of fire, but when the object disappeared below, I shot at the star." Mr. Smith used his rifle, and the police fired their pistols from a distance of 7 meters."

About 15 shots were fired, while the UFO stood in the bushes under bright sunlight for more than four hours.


Mr Smith said the object, which was about a metre wide and two metres long.


The UFO eventually flew away, crashing noisily through the undergrowth. A dozen more hastily assembled police officers combed the area. They photographed and made plaster casts of several triangular prints on the ground and sent soil samples for laboratory analysis.


According to one of the policemen, the prints indicate that the object had three legs arranged in a triangle, like a tripod for a camera, and that it touched the ground several times.


Now there is a debate about what to do when a UFO comes. "I do not know of a law that prohibits shooting at an invader from outer space," says the deputy police commissioner.

"Anyone who shoots UFOs should be warned against it," says Professor Arthur Bleksley, former director of the Johannesburg Planetarium.

What is surprising about these aliens, who are supposed to have traveled millions of miles to see us. They always land in strange, wild places like Fort Beaufort, where they hide until the police shoot at them," he says.

Mr. Wil Resnick, an astronomer and psychologist, claims that the shooting was dangerous because the UFO could explode.

"But," he told reporters, "the creatures who sent UFOs to Fort Beaufort are more likely to be amused than angry. Many South Africans consider the UFO a fake because it was so small. But why? Is it funny? We're sending capsules filled with tiny instruments to explore outer space, aren't we?

Obviously, it was an unmanned space laboratory sent to study conditions on Earth or, possibly, to establish contact with us."