LA Celle-Sous-Gouzon, FR being encounter — 1906

Jules Bouvier told investigators in 1972 that, as an eighteen-year-old apprentice carpenter in 1906, he had encountered a strange gathering while walking home near La Celle-sous-Gouzon. At about 10 p.m., he came upon ten or twelve men sitting silently in a circle at a road junction, apparently on or around a large cloth. The men seemed of ordinary stature and age, dressed alike in grey uniforms. They watched him pass without greeting or conversation. Bouvier continued in alarm. Roughly a hundred metres farther on, he reportedly saw another humanlike figure flying horizontally above the trees, its head raised forward and legs together. Two fixed projections at its back resembled outstretched arms or short wings. It passed with little more than a faint rush of air and descended toward the seated group. He fled; a later daylight visit revealed nothing unusual. Jean Giraud published the recollection after meeting Bouvier some sixty-six years after the claimed event. The seated men and flying figure belong to successive moments, not a documented simultaneous scene. No craft was described. Bouvier called them Martians retrospectively, while acknowledging that he did not know where they came from. The long reporting interval and absence of independent contemporary evidence remain central limits.