The Taizé Hillside Light

The Taizé Community is a Protestant monastery founded by Brother Roger Schutz, about 10 km from Cluny in Saône-et-Loire. At Easter 1972, 16,000 young people from 80 countries came to celebrate there. On the evening of Friday 11 August 1972, about 35 young people gathered on a grassy hilltop beside the community buildings. They talked late into the night.

About 2 a.m. Renata de Faa, a student from Sardinia, saw what looked like a star coming down from the sky. Before the companions could turn round, the "star" had already "landed" on the slopes of a facing hillside called La Cras.

It was a dark mass. The witnesses put it at about 30 m long, perhaps 300, and bigger than a coach. Everyone heard a sort of whistling. Then it lit up. Seven yellow lights. Two orange lights to its left. Small domes at the far end of the row, and portholes showing in white light. The object seemed to rest on its own beams.

Five of the seven yellow lights began to sweep the ground. The beams looked solid, and each one turned around a vertical axis. Red sparks appeared at the right-hand end. They gave way to three small discs carrying red points of light, which began to circle the main object. The left-hand beam blazed, and red particles fell from it. A single red light wandered erratically around the dark mass. After about 20 minutes the portholes were gone.

Four of the group walked towards it while about 30 stayed behind. Close up, they saw a dark shape like a haystack, some 5 to 6 m high, about 3 m away behind a hedge. One of them shone a flashlight. The beam suddenly rose about 50 cm above the hedge and was lost in the darkness.

When François Tantot, a psychology student from Mâcon, switched on his lamp, the object answered. It turned its bright beam on the group. They covered their faces against the light and the heat. Tantot and a young man from Dijon felt tingling in their hands and knees while the object was lit.

At 4:40 a.m. it took off. It disappeared quickly in the direction of Cluny.

The witnesses filed a detailed report with the Cluny gendarmerie. They also gave their account to Jean Tyrode, a schoolteacher who investigated cases for the French magazine Lumières dans la Nuit. Tyrode had already worked on Evillers and Arc-sous-Cicon. No copy of the gendarmerie report has surfaced online, and no matching file has been found at GEIPAN. No conclusion from Tyrode on Taizé is known.

No hoax has ever been claimed. On one French forum, the idea of a farmer setting fire to hay was raised and rejected. Other ordinary candidates, such as farm machinery working at night or the difficulty of judging size in the dark, remain untested against the full account.

In 2014 the case reached television in Close Encounters on the Science Channel, paired with the Belgian wave. That retelling said the flashlight beams bent, as though repelled by the object. The original French account only says the beam rose and vanished. The programme closed on a simple verdict. The mystery remains unsolved to this day.