Yves David's "Diver" Encounter on the Cenon to Vouneuil Road

Autumn 1954 brought France a flood of reports of landed craft and small occupants. The road from Cenon to Vouneuil-sur-Vienne crosses the Vienne department. The man at the centre of this story lived nearby, at Les Brouloux, in the commune of Vouneuil-sur-Vienne.

Sunday 19 September 1954. About 10 p.m. Yves David, a 28-year-old farmer, was riding his moped home from a brother's house in Targé. The headlight of his moped was pointing down at the road. He could not see very far.

Between the hamlets of Le Pontereau and Les Rabotes, a figure came toward him. He described "a kind of robot, with the approximate figure of a deep-sea diver." It was "the height of a child of about fifteen years." It stroked his arm and emitted unintelligible sounds. Then it went back toward its craft. David was about to follow.

He never could say what shape the craft had. "But what I can assure you is that the green light impressed me most of all." The light was so intense that he froze, hands on his handlebars. "I was paralyzed and incapable of anything."

About 15 seconds passed. "Without any noise, the craft rose vertically into the sky and disappeared." David restarted his machine and "sped down the road without caring what might be happening around me."

His mother said he came home "all shaken." He told no one. "They would have taken me for a madman." He asked a friend to find out quietly whether anyone else had seen something. "After a few days, the friend talked a little too much." An AFP dispatch carried the story into more than 20 papers. On 29 September, David told it before several thousand people at a Radio-Circus show in Châtellerault, hosted by Zappy Max and broadcast on Radio-Luxembourg.

The details shifted from paper to paper. Paris-Presse dated it Friday, September 17, around 10:30 p.m., and described "a bizarre craft about 3 meters wide." Samedi Soir made the being "about 1 m. 50" tall and printed its words as "Oumph ... Grobezabri Trobobranana!" Jimmy Guieu later called the craft a long brown "cigar," and Aimé Michel added a tingling, "as if I had been electrified." The Bonneuil-Matours gendarmes knew nothing about it, and the story gave them quite a laugh. No official file was ever opened.

Neighbours suspected a secret weapon under testing. Samedi Soir wondered whether David had known of the earlier adventures of Marius Dewilde at Quarouble and Antoine Mazaud at Mouriéras. In 1969 Jean-Claude Baillon tried to meet him. David refused. In 1979 Gérard Barthel and Jacques Brucker called the sighting "a journalistic invention."

Jean Sider disagreed in 1997. Le Libre Poitou had interviewed David, his family and his neighbours, who found him serious and "not a trickster." Patrick Gross calls the journalistic theory "among the flimsiest there is." David was named, interviewed, photographed and heard on the radio. What remains, Gross writes, is either an invention by the witness or a genuine encounter.

The diver of the Vienne passed into the classic catalogues, from Harold T. Wilkins and Aimé Michel to Vallée's Passport to Magonia and Charles Bowen's The Humanoids. It shows how a private fright on a dark road became a national story in ten days.