Chabeuil "child in a cellophane bag" landing, Mme Leboeuf (1954)

September 1954. France was in the grip of a wave of saucer reports. Chabeuil is a small town in the Drôme, about 14 km east of Valence. Beside its cemetery runs a sunken lane, next to a field of maize and alfalfa edged with acacia and hawthorn.

Sunday, 26 September. Around 14:30. Mme Leboeuf, a resident of Valence, was in the lane. "Sunday afternoon, I was in the path, I was picking up mulberries in the hedge. Suddenly, my dog started to bark." The dog, a black dog named Dolly, began to howl as if at a death. Dogs nearby joined in.

She saw a figure about 2.5 metres away that she first took for a scarecrow made of cellophane. "It was a small being; it hardly measured more than one meter." "What struck me, it is very human face … I had the impression that it was a kid locked up in a cellophane bag." It was wrapped from head to foot in a transparent suit, its head inside a dome, with fixed and shining human eyes and a blackish mass in place of hair.

It came towards her, hopping, with a sound like crumpling paper. It never tried to communicate. "I yelled and I hastened to throw myself in the hedge."

From behind the maize rose a circular craft about three metres across. "The craft flew away initially in skew, it did not go fast, it made the noise of a spinning top which whirrs and one also heard a whistling sound. The craft changed then from the horizontal position to the vertical position. It then rose straight at a tremendous speed." It left towards the northeast.

Her husband, a former aviator about 200 metres away, confirmed the sound was not like a jet. Visitors to the cemetery heard the howling and the whistle. Others in Chabeuil said they saw "a flying saucer maneuvering over the countryside" that same day.

Local farmers walked the site with her. Corn lay flat, the grass was pressed and small hawthorns were broken. The Berry Républicain described a "clearly visible circular trace about 3 meters in diameter", and an acacia branch 8 cm thick was snapped. There was no debris or burning. Mme Leboeuf ran a fever of 39 °C, while Dolly trembled and whimpered for three nights.

Gendarmes and members of the public examined the site, though no gendarmerie conclusion has surfaced. The fullest inquiry came from R. Arnaud, an engineer with the Ouranos committee, whose report appeared in 1955. He held her in real esteem, he wrote, as a witness with an open and objective mind.

L'Humanité met the whole wave with doubt: "Collective hallucination?" The accounts also differ on details. Berries, or flowers for the family vault. One dog or several. A disc of three, three and a half or four metres. No hoax claim and no specific conventional explanation have been found.

The case passed through Aimé Michel into HUMCAT, the catalogue of humanoid reports. In 1983, Claude Maugé reviewed 29 French trace cases from that autumn in Magonia. Of them all, he judged "only one (Chabeuil, 26 September 1954) or perhaps two" to be sound. The child in the cellophane bag remains a touchstone of the close encounter literature.