Poncey-sur-l'Ignon Landing Traces, the Fourneret Case (1954)

Autumn 1954. France was in the middle of a wave of saucer reports. Poncey-sur-l'Ignon, in Côte-d'Or, had about 140 inhabitants. Within forty-eight hours, it produced two sightings that the press of the day ran together.

Saturday, October 2, about 19:40. Mathilde Guainet, 52, the wife of the former mayor, had just finished milking. Her dogs ran toward the woods, barking. Above the wood she saw "a flying cylinder, orange in color, surrounded by a square of pale green light."

About 80 cm in diameter and 1.5 meters high. Nearly vertical. Silent. Her husband, her daughter Yvette and a neighbour watched it for about 10 minutes. Then it left "at the speed of a large plane, silently, in the direction of Chanceaux."

Monday, October 4, around 7:30 p.m. Thérèse Fourneret, 23, was closing the shutters of her room, in a house beside the asbestos works. About fifty meters away, above the tree in the courtyard, she saw "a fairly bright yellowish light, oval in shape at the top and round at the bottom, about the size of a stove." It looked "more like a transparent globe lit from within." No sound came from it. She judged it still about fifteen meters above the ground.

She fled with her child to a neighbour's house, going around the back to avoid it. "She kept repeating, 'I'm scared,'" the neighbour said. The women locked the door. All the men were in the village.

Later, François Bouiller, 18, saw a luminous "cigar" without wings cross the sky from north to south, at least twice the speed of a jet, turning from orange to green. A brother returning home at about 21:30 reported a glowing sphere moving rapidly south.

About an hour after the sighting, neighbours went to the spot. A rectangle had been dug into the ground, about 1.5 m long and 0.5 to 0.7 m wide. Clods of soil and grass lay around it, "forming what looked like a circle with a diameter of 7 to 8 meters." A dandelion and a wild chicory were still rooted in the bare patch. Live white grubs lay in the earth. The grass under the clods was still wet with dew. No burning. No oil. Mayor Cazet was firm: "These are not tool marks... It's too perfectly done."

The gendarmerie of Saint-Seine-l'Abbaye, under Chief Clément, took statements and photographed the traces on October 6. Major Viala in Dijon had the reports sent urgently. Soil samples went to the Faculty of Science and the Institute of Geophysics in Dijon. The result: "No trace of radioactivity. No trace of metals."

A prank had been planned. A son-in-law and a 13-year-old boy meant to scare the women with a saucer story, "but only in words." The tavern keeper confirmed they left at about 19:55, after the sighting. The gendarmes concluded that "any idea of a hoax should be ruled out." A helicopter and an aeroplane were dismissed too. Major Viala still listed helicopters, pranksters or "an extraterrestrial object." General de Chassey put the wave of reports down to "saucer psychosis."

The case lived on through Aimé Michel. His neighbour, the ceramist Pierre Mestre, studied the sighting map on Michel's wall and suggested checking Poncey for October 2. Michel found the Guainet cigar there, where "nine orthotenical lines" crossed, and built it into orthoteny, his straight-line theory. Critics later called such lines chance alignments. The sightings entered the catalogues of Jacques Vallée and Claude Poher. Fourneret did not see the object touch down. The landing is what the meadow seemed to say.