The Lavoux "Diver": Roger Barrault's Mustached Martian

Autumn 1954. France was in the middle of its great wave of sightings. Newspapers carried report after report of strange objects and stranger visitors, from Quarouble to Carcassonne.

Lavoux is a village in the Vienne, some 12 to 14 km east of Poitiers. Its roads run beside a forest. On Saturday, 9 October, one of them became the stage for a story that would travel far.

Roger Barrault was a labourer, riding his bicycle near the forest. Most reports put the time at about 7 p.m. Something stopped him. A double beam of light, coming from what Le Figaro called "a strange being."

It looked like a diver. It stood barely 1.50 m tall. It wore heelless boots. It had very bright eyes and a strong mustache. For about a minute it walked along the road. Then it suddenly disappeared towards the nearby forest. Barrault was the only witness.

Within days it was "Un Martien à moustache" in Le Figaro, a "flying diver" near Poitiers in L'Écho Républicain, and a fixture of a string of regional papers. Samedi-Soir then wrote that Barrault had been paralysed by a luminous ray. Time said the being wore rubbers and spoke Latin. No French source mentions Latin.

Aimé Michel gave it a head like a large tuft of hair and claimed it was identical to the being reported the day before at Pournoy-la-Chétive. Vallée catalogued it in Passport to Magonia with a hairy chest. Coral and Jim Lorenzen described shaggy hair and a diver's suit.

In 1969 Jean-Claude Baillon of the Lumières Dans La Nuit group tracked Barrault down on a farm south of Chauvigny. The labourer's story was simple. "I was passing in the vicinity of Lavoux when I saw a 17-year-old young man whom I recognized perfectly."

The youth wore a paratrooper outfit, a German helmet "sawn on the sides," and a kind of shiny box. Barrault chased him into the woods but lost sight of him. The prankster, he said, wanted to scare the women in the area. Barrault had told the tale in a bar. It was distorted before it reached a journalist. He complained in person to the newspaper in Paris and got only vague excuses. Baillon's verdict: "Mr Barrault seemed sincere to me."

INFO-OVNI later called the paralysis an invention of a journalist in search of material. Patrick Gross sums the case up as a prank found out at the time, followed by a journalist's lie. Dominique Caudron notes that no one could see a hairy chest under a diving suit, and argues the "hairy Martians" of 1954 never existed as a group.

Still, the mustached diver kept appearing in books, from Charles Bowen's The Humanoids to the Lorenzens' Encounters with UFO Occupants. It remains a lesson in how a story told in a country bar can become a catalogued alien encounter.