The Alençon "fiery globe" landing and Inspector Liabeuf's report

June 12, 1790, about 5 a.m. On a hilltop near the city gates of Alençon, in Normandy, a whistling sound caught the attention of several farmers. They saw a huge ball coming down fast, seemingly surrounded by flames. At first they took it for a balloon, since the Montgolfier brothers had flown only a few years before. Then it slowed and oscillated, and struck the crest of the hill, uprooting the trees along the slope.

The heat set the grass and small trees on fire, and the peasants put out the blaze. The sphere was large enough to accommodate a carriage. It stayed on the ground all day. By evening it was still warm. And undamaged.

By then a crowd had gathered: two mayors, a doctor, three other local officials and dozens of peasants. A door opened, and a man came out. He was a person like us, the story says, in a tight-fitting suit. He looked at the crowd and muttered something incomprehensible, in words no one recognised. Then he ran into the woods.

The frightened villagers backed away. The sphere exploded. Silently. Its fragments burned until they were powder. No one was hurt, and a search found no trace of the man.

A few days later a police inspector arrived from Paris. His name is usually given as Liabeuf, though retellings also spell it Labeuf, Labeouf, Liabeut and Libeff. His report reportedly went to the Académie des Sciences, which did not take it seriously. That report has never been produced or located. Even one of the online retellings admits that, apart from the message of Professor Fenoglio, nothing more is known.

Every version leads back to Alberto Fenoglio and his 1966 article "Antichi visitatori dal cielo" in the Turin magazine Clypeus. He gave no source, and did not answer when asked where he found the story. In October 1968, John A. Keel retold it in MEN magazine. In 1969 Jacques Vallée included it in Passport to Magonia, probably the main route by which it reached English-language ufology.

The story kept growing. Web copies turned its author into "Antonio Fenoglio" of the University of Bologna. One blog made the occupant a woman. Another site added a crater that remained in the hillside for years. On 27 November 2016 Iker Jiménez told the tale on Spain's Cuatro channel and asked whether it was a Roswell more than two centuries early.

Researchers went looking for the paper trail. French ufologist Jean Sider reported that Patrick Cubeau, who lived near Alençon, searched the departmental archives' library in 1970 and found no reference to the event. Belgian ufologist Christiane Piens searched the Orne archives. Again, nothing.

Then there was Fenoglio's own record. Jason Colavito says he fabricated a 1966 text about UFOs harassing Alexander the Great at Tyre, and that the 1790 landing "appears in no known text." Chris Aubeck and Edoardo Russo concluded the Alençon account was invented, and was not Fenoglio's first fabrication. If anything real lay behind it, a bolide or a runaway fire balloon would fit. Neither is recorded at Alençon in June 1790.

So the Alençon globe sits in the archive as a cautionary tale. A fiery landing, an occupant, officials as witnesses and a report from Paris. Every element is vivid. None of it can be found before one magazine page in Turin.