The Prémanon Landed Object Stoned by the Romand Children, Jura, 1954

Autumn 1954. France was deep in a wave of saucer reports. The Romand family lived on an isolated farm near Prémanon, in the Haut-Jura, a few kilometres from Morez and Les Rousses and close to the Swiss border. On the evening of Monday, 27 September, a storm broke. Heavy rain fell. It would continue for about 36 hours.

Around 8:30 pm the dog started barking, and Raymond Romand, usually given as 12, went outside. About 10 metres from the building, lit by the farm lamps, stood something upright and box-like, about 2 metres high and 1 metre wide, partly split down the middle. Aluminium-coloured and shiny, on angled supports, "three legs" in Raymond's telling. The press later compared it to a sugar lump.

He threw stones. They rang like tin. He fired a rubber-tipped dart from a toy gun. Then the thing moved toward him.

The gendarmes wrote that it "appeared to slide slowly." Accounts differ on what came next: a blast of air, a strange grunt, a cold touch. Raymond fell, unable to call out. He fled to his bedroom and told no one at home.

His sister Jeannine heard his cry and saw the object too. Afterwards the children watched a red glowing ball low in the meadow below the farm, swaying like a falling leaf. Then it disappeared suddenly. The children had a word for what they had seen. Ghosts.

The next day they told their teacher, Huguette Genillon, and she alerted the gendarmerie. Captain Brustel of the Saint-Claude company questioned the children separately and had them re-enact the scene. Their accounts matched. They spoke, the report said, "in a seemingly sincere manner." Their parents did not believe them.

A supplementary report described flattened grass over 3.50 m by 2.50 m, "oriented in a counterclockwise direction," with four holes at "the angles of a large trapezium." The local priest agreed ordinary trampling could not explain them. Charles Garreau found the marks still visible about a week later. Around 2014, GEIPAN published both reports and classified the case C, for lack of sufficient information.

The press mocked it. Libération said the marks "might just as well have been left by rabbits." La Gazette de Lausanne spoke of "le canular de Prémanon."

In November 1954 two members of the Geneva group Cosmos visited. Their report says Raymond told them he had dreamed it. In 1991 he told Yves Bosson: "I invented the affair from start to finish." Bosson concluded it began as a school composition that adults shaped into a saucer story, and that everyone, Raymond included, was sincere. Others held out: Jean Tyrode found "no evidence of trickery," and Jean Sider argued the debunking versions contradict one another.

Aimé Michel called it "the most poetic undoubtedly of all the history of the Flying saucers." Jacques Vallée noted that "the children themselves never used the term 'saucer' or 'Martian.'" In 2026 the Centre de la Photographie Genève exhibited Florian Luthi's Meteor Ghosts, which quotes Raymond in 1991: "One of the lessons is seeing how information can be distorted."