Coudes, FR being encounter — 1954

The Coudes record concerns children on the slopes below the Château de Buron, near Yronde-et-Buron in Puy-de-Dôme. Its year is uncertain: the fuller R. Eyraud account places it in summer 1954 or 1956, while other catalogues use 1955. Around 3 p.m., about half a dozen boys were climbing a path during a game when they reportedly noticed two small figures twenty-five to thirty metres away. The figures, estimated at ninety centimetres to a metre tall, wore shiny silver coverings and enormous helmets with broad reflective visors. Faces could not be seen. Beside a collapsed dry-stone wall was an open rectangular box. The figures allegedly lifted basalt stones with both hands, walked slowly to the box and bent from the waist without obvious knee movement to put them inside. After approximately two minutes, one boy fled in fear and the others followed. The report surfaced twelve to fourteen years later through a witness identified only by initials. Eyraud revisited the location, but no craft had been observed in the original encounter, either on the ground or in the sky. A later suggestion that the children saw beekeepers is a proposed explanation, not an established identification. The plate consequently retains the reported silver coverings and stone collection while explicitly showing no spacecraft.