A true but strange occurence in Alencon, France (1790)

One of the best documented reports of a possible visitant from another world landing in Earth came from the little French town of Alencon, which is situated about thirty miles north of Le Mans. The town is nowadays solely famous because of its fine lace, but over two hundred years ago, Alencon became renowned for something much less mundane that occurred within its vicinity.

At around 5 a.m. on June 12th, 1790, peasants watched in awe as a huge metal sphere descended from the sky, moving with a strange undulating motion. The globe crash-landed onto a hilltop, and the violent impact threw up soil and vegetation which showered the hillside. The hull of the globe was so hot (possibly from a rocket motor or because of the rapid descent through the atmosphere) that it ignited the surrounding dry flora, and a grass fire quickly broke out. The peasants rushed up the hill carrying pails of water, and within a short time, the fires were extinguished.

A large crowd encircled the crashed globe, and some of the more adventurous people present stepped forward to touch the hull of the unearthly craft to discover that it was quite warm. A physician, two mayors from nearby towns and a number of officials turned up to see what had descended from the morning sky, and these important witnesses arrived just in time to see something sensational.

A hatch of some sort slid open in the lower hemisphere of the globe, and a man in an outlandish, tight-fitting costume emerged through the hatchway and surveyed the observers with an apprehensive look. He started mumbling something in a strange language and gestured for the crowd to get away from him and his vehicle. A few people stepped back, and the man ran through the break in the circle of spectators and fled into the local woods. Some of the peasants ran away from the globe, sensing that something dangerous was about to happen. The remainder of the crowd decided to follow suit, and seconds after the last members of the multitude had retreated from the sphere, it exploded with a peculiar muffled sound, creating a miniature mushroom-shaped cloud. The debris from the craft 'sizzled' in the grass, and gradually turned to powder.

A police inspector named Liabeuf travelled over a hundred miles from Paris to investigate the crash, and he quizzed many of the witnesses, including the mayors and physician who had been present at the strange spectacle. The inspector organised a thorough search of the woods where the oddly-dressed man had taken refuge, but the hunt resulted in nothing. There stranger seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived.

In the report to his superiors, Inspector Liabeuf put forward the suggestion that the man who had landed in the globe could have been 'a being from another world' - but the high-ups in Paris dismissed the intimation as 'a ludicrous idea'.