Mareil-Sur-Loir, FR being encounter — November 3, 1954

At about 6:30 a.m. on November 3, 1954, fifteen-year-old farmhand Roland Poirier was fetching cows for milking near La Grange farm at Mareil-en-Champagne, Sarthe. Carrying a lantern through fog, he had travelled roughly 500 metres when he said he encountered two extraordinary figures. They had hairy faces, prominent noses, narrowed eyes, metallic-looking clothing and round transparent helmets. Poirier described their movement as resembling skating. When he cried out, the figures circled him in opposite directions. He fled to his employer, Raymond Baré, who saw the boy breathless and terrified but was not reported to have seen the beings himself. Poirier remained upset and unwell afterwards and was reluctant to sleep alone. Local newspaper accounts from November 6 and 7 are cited through Jean Sider’s later work. The first paper confused the boy’s surname with his employer’s. Subsequent databases also shifted the location to Mareil-sur-Loir, counted two direct witnesses and introduced possible missing time. Those additions are not established by the fuller quoted newspaper narrative. No craft appears in that narrative, and the figures’ height is unspecified. The illustration therefore retains the lantern, fog, suits and helmets without inventing a landed vehicle or an abduction.