The Prémanon encounter: the giant sugar lump

Autumn 1954. France was living through a wave of saucer reports. On the night of 27 September alone, sightings came from Pau, Rixheim, Lanta and near Perpignan. High in the Haut-Jura, near Les Rousses and the Swiss border, the Romand family's farm stood isolated in the commune of Prémanon. The children there were said never to have heard of flying saucers. They did not go to the cinema.

About 20:30. Dark, and the rain was coming down like loads of buckets. The dog began to bark. Raymond Romand, 12, went out into the farmyard. About ten metres from the building, something stood on three legs. Two metres high. Metallic. Shining in the light of the farm lamps. "It was like an enormous sugar lump, very shiny, split in its bottom, about my size," he said.

Raymond threw stones. They rang like struck metal sheet. He fired rubber-tipped wooden arrows from a toy gun. The same sound, softer. He moved closer. The thing moved too, and a blast threw him to the ground. "I feel an icy pressure which lays me down on the ground." He ran into the house in terror.

His sister Jeannine, 9, saw an aluminium-coloured object moving silently and hid in the hay. Little Claude, 4, pointed to the meadow below. A fireball, more than 200 metres away, swaying left and right just above the ground. Waltzing like a dead leaf. Then it rose into the air and disappeared.

The children told their parents nothing. Next morning they told the school they had seen ghosts. The teacher, Mme Huguette Genillon, drew the story out of them and called Raymond "not imaginative". On 29 September, after some 36 hours of rain, Captain Brustel of the Saint-Claude gendarmerie walked the site with the children. His men noted a circle of flattened grass about 3.5 to 4 metres across, laid counter-clockwise, "frozen in the motionless image of a whirlwind". Four triangular holes formed a square. A fir mast had lost bark at about 1.5 metres. One report read: "A scenario cannot be a priori so well mounted, if it were simply the fruit of the imagination of these young children."

The press seized on it. Paris-Presse wrote of a three-legged saucer in the Jura. Libération joked that rabbits could have left the marks. Ici Paris reported that Raymond had been spanked by his mother, a devout Catholic who rejected "Martians". Copycats followed, from a café "Martian" in Lons-le-Saulnier to a rain gauge mistaken for a saucer at Les Rousses. In the books, the sugar lump became a being. Gray Barker and Antonio Ribera made it the occupant. Aimé Michel called it "the most poetic undoubtedly of all the history of the Flying saucers". Jacques Vallée counted it among the first landings of the wave.

GEIPAN, at CNES, first classed the case PAN D. Unexplained, despite good data. Then it learned that the ufologist Yves Bosson had met the witnesses in the 1980s. They confirmed, it says, that they had staged a prank whose consequences escaped them. Pending verification, the case was moved to PAN C. In 1991 Romand reflected on "how, from absolutely nothing, a legend can be created." In 2026, Bosson and Rospars published a study that rejects the simple choice between real landing and children's prank. They trace the creative mechanisms that produced a surprising collective narrative.

Vallée wrote that the boy always maintained he had seen it. Now the case stands as a lesson in how stories are made. In 2026 it reached a gallery wall, in Florian Luthi's photography project Meteor Ghosts at the Centre de la photographie Genève.