1965.07.01
05.45
Just over a year after [the Zamora incident], at 5.45 am on the morning of 1 July 1965, a farmer at Valensole in France had a remarkably similar experience. There had been mysterious disappearances of his lavender crop…
(UFOs and How to See Them, Randles)
Farmer Maurice Masse grew lavender for use in the perfume industry and on 1 July 1965 he left his house very early in the morning to walk to the fields to begin work. He had stopped in the shade to smoke a cigarette before starting when he heard the sound of an object above him which he thought might be a military helicopter. He walked towards the field to see it.
[Click image to clarify and enlarge]
Some 100 yards (92 metres) away he saw an object unlike anything he had seen before. It was oval-shaped with a small dome on top… It stood on six legs radiating out from a central spike.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
It stood about 2.5 metres/eight feet high.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
The craft was… a white egg the size of a car…
(UFOs and How to See Them, Randles)
In front of the machine were two figures, apparently examining plants in the field. On first sight, Masse suspected they were two small boys who had vandalised his crop the week before.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
But, as he put it, “From the moment I started out… I knew that it wasn’t with men that I had to deal.”
The two entities were dressed in green one-piece suits; they had huge bald heads, large slanting eyes and lipless mouths. Their skin was chalk white.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
They appeared to have no necks, their heads and torso merging into each other at the shoulders.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
On their belts they carried small cylinders which Masse would have been well advised to take more notice of!
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
The farmer approached the beings with concern…
(UFOs and How to See Them, Randles)
When Masse was around twenty yards (18.3 metres) away from the entities one of them spotted him, took the cylinder from his belt and fired a beam at Masse, who was paralyzed immediately…
Approximately a minute passed and the entities boarded their craft .
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
“The strangers had such a calm and peaceful aura about them,” he said later, “that I was not in the least bit afraid.”
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
Despite the nature of the encounter… Masse said he never felt fear and believed that the entities had no animosity towards him.
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
He was able to watch as the beings entered their craft through a roller-blind-type hatch and saw them looking back at him from the transparent dome of their craft. A moment later – still rooted to the spot – he saw them take off in their strange-looking craft.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
The object… took off with a terrific whistling noise.
(UFOs and How to See Them, Randles)
Their craft… took off at an incredible speed. It took something like fifteen minutes for the paralysis to wear off and Masse returned to Valensole where he discussed the story with his friends. They were impressed by Masse’s state of mind and did not doubt that he was telling the truth.
Subsequent investigation found traces in the soil where the craft had landed; the soil was hard and crumbly with a high calcium content. Lavender on the site died and even future crops were affected until the field had been thoroughly ploughed. [Cf the Loxton incident]
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
Years later his lavender crop would still not grow properly at this spot…
(UFOs and How to See Them, Randles)
At a landing site in France, only weeds grow in a nine-foot circular area where a disc was seen to land two years ago, despite efforts to replant.
(Flying Saucer Review 14,1 1968.01 – 02 cover and p 6 – 12)
(UFOs: What to Do? {RAND Corporation document}, Kocher)
There is an as yet unknown detail to the story. Masse has admitted that there was something else of importance which he has kept to himself ever since…
Masse has stated the immovability of his stance indicating the seriousness of his reaction to the experience: “I have not told anybody, not even my wife, and nobody will make me tell it.”
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
[Click image to clarify and enlarge]
Valensole was not the first instance of a close encounter on French soil.
Both Valensole and Quarouble [1954.09.10] are typical of those who claim to have seen alien beings at first hand. The same description of the creatures has been reported time and time again by people scattered all over the globe…
As a footnote, an object similar to the one seen by Maurice Masse was spotted by another French farmer, Renato Nicolai, in 1981 in the village of Trans-en-Provence.
(Fact or Fiction: UFOs, Blundell)
For ufologists the importance of the encounter is its similarity to many cases that occurred earlier in France during the 1954 wave of entity reports. Masse himself was also impressed by the similarity between the object he described and the one seen by officer Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico in the United States only one year earlier (see 1964.04.24).
(UFOs: The Definitive Casebook, Spencer)
This region in the extreme south-east of France stretches eastward from Marseilles and inland towards the Alps. It has by far the most focussed group of close-encounter activity in a country that has produced many important cases. It challenges Britain for the European record.