Saint-Stanislas-de-Kostka landing and the small wrinkled being

Saint-Stanislas-de-Kostka is a farming village in Beauharnois County, Quebec, about 45 miles southwest of Montreal. Sunday 28 July 1968. The parents were out. At a farmhouse overlooking oat and corn fields on the sixth rank, five young people from two neighbouring families were together: Denis Léger, 12, his brother Régent, 15, and Paul, Nicole and Joanne Sauvé, aged 20, 14 and 9.

About 9:00 p.m., nearly dark, in fine, dry weather. Denis saw it first. A kind of circle, girdled by a shining red halation. Seconds later, a second object, just like the first.

They moved slowly and continuously, without sudden starts. Then one stopped while the other descended vertically. "You would say a crown slipping quietly towards the ground, without noise." It came down in an oat field about 1,000 feet away. Ten minutes later, the luminous object was still there.

The children went into the yard with a flashlight. Denis turned the beam on a wooden fence about 50 feet away. A figure was standing there. They panicked and ran inside. It moved back quietly towards the barn, taking very small steps.

It was about 4 feet tall. Bald, with a head slightly larger than a human's, set between unusually broad shoulders with no visible neck. A flat nose and round, wrinkled eyes. Dark brown skin, wrinkled, scabby and bumpy. Its raised right hand was very broad, black and lumpy, "scabby like a toad's skin," and it opened and closed like the hand of a baby who wants to greet.

Upstairs, Régent saw it again as that hand knocked at the window pane. He heard a growl like a cow mooing. Joanne locked herself in the bathroom while Nicole phoned the parents. Minutes later the saucer rose slowly and vertically, without noise or flash, until it disappeared into the sky. After half an hour, all was normal again.

Jacques Hébert broke the story in La Presse on 7 August 1968. Henri Bordeleau of Montreal, interested in flying saucers for 20 years, questioned the children in three separate interviews and examined the oat field. A circle about 15 feet across lay crushed in a swirl. From it ran a track about 4 inches wide and 60 feet long that stopped abruptly.

"It is certain that these children are not lying," Bordeleau said. He called it the most beautiful, clearest and most explicit case in 20 years. The HUMCAT catalogue names Wido Hoville as investigator. No official investigation is known.

No one has claimed a hoax, and La Presse, asking whether this was orchestrated imagination, concluded it did not seem so. Henri Léger stood by his son: "He is not a 'shy' kid who is easily impressed." The parents accepted the saucer but were more doubtful about the creature. The sharpest question is Denis himself, who in July 1967 had reported a saucer with three small black occupants following him on his bicycle. René Fouéré observed that two such sightings is a lot for one man, and Scornaux noted there were no footprints in the strict sense.

The press called the being the "crapeauïde", the toadoid. It passed through Flying Saucer Review, Magonia, HUMCAT and the humanoid catalogue of Albert Rosales. Bordeleau's verdict endures. Never was it possible to gather so many details.