The Merxheim cabbage-picking landing

Autumn 1975. Merxheim is a village in the Haut-Rhin, in Alsace. Guebwiller lies to the west, Réguisheim to the east. German television reaches this corner of France, and its shows are well known here.

Thursday, 6 November 1975. Around ten at night. Ten-year-old Denis Dubich was alerted by the barking of his dog. He went down and found the animal burrowing in its kennel, as if it were frightened.

Then he saw a luminous ball descending from the sky, coming from the direction of Guebwiller. It was the size of a large balloon and whistled like a siren. It grew. It landed in a cabbage field about fifty meters from his parents' home.

He described a circular machine about two meters high, rimmed with square bright windows and surmounted by a dome. Three hatches opened underneath and three legs unfolded onto the ground. The dome rose. A form resembling the head and torso of a human being emerged, "completely white" in the newspaper's words. It turned toward him, then went back inside and closed the dome.

Meanwhile a clamp at the end of an arm took three cabbages, one at a time, into the machine. The craft began to hum again, lifted slightly, folded its feet and took off diagonally toward Réguisheim. He remembered a strong, indefinable smell. And a strong heat.

Patrick K., also ten, woke because it was too hot and opened his shutters. He saw a bright ball coming from Guebwiller, gradually descending, "just like the German films titled 'Space Patrol'". Christine R., nine, saw a round luminous object with colored lights toward Réguisheim. Denis's mother told the press of a very strong light through the shutters. To the gendarmes, the parents described a dim light they took for car headlights.

The gendarmerie of Bollwiller questioned the children separately, and they did not change their statements. The field held no landing trace or burns. The owner could not confirm that three cabbages were missing. Technicians from the Pégoud centre found no unusual radiation and no residual magnetism. Air Base 132 at Colmar-Meyenheim had no unidentified tracks, though the Contrexéville radar centre said its radars are blind to craft at very low altitude.

The school principal said Denis drew the saucer as it is represented in the comics. Later, Raoul Robé argued that the craft and its cabbage-grabbing pincer closely match the ship Orion from the 1966 West German series Raumpatrouille Orion, shown in France as Commando spatial. In one episode the crew collects plant samples on a planetoid. Patrick Gross, who compiled the case for ALSACAT, received word that Denis was known for telling tall stories. Gross rates it a "Probable children invention", while noting there is no proof of a hoax, and no proof of a visit.

In 1976 Jean-Claude Bourret published the gendarmerie file as "La soucoupe qui a volé trois choux !", the saucer that stole three cabbages. Michel Figuet and Jean-Louis Ruchon included it in their 1979 catalogue of French close encounter cases. In 2009, Christian Valentin interviewed the adult witness, who said gendarmes returned to question him several times over ten years. Valentin judged that the media attention, more than the event itself, was what proved traumatic for him as a teenager.