I am fascinated by the work of David Paulides in his Missing 411 series. Mr. Paulides has done very extensive research on his topic, and some of the cases that he presents are so puzzling that one has to wonder what in the world happened to the people involved. Given the volume of missing person cases across the globe, The Missing 411 series has had to present only those cases which fall within a certain set of parameters which separate these cases from the “normal” missing persons case.
The event I want to present in this blog post does not fit into the Missing 411 protocols. It has elements of several different mysteries in it, including an anomalous light, a sphere of fog, and the mysterious disappearance and appearance of a young man who lost several days in the experience.
The case comes to us from renowned Ufologist Jacques Vallee in his book Revelations and centres around three young men who lived in the housing estate of La Justice Mauve in Cergy, France, northwest of Paris. On Sunday, November 25, 1979, Franck Fontaine came home from a long day working with his mother. His roommates, Salomon N’Diaye El Mama and Jean-Pierre Prevost, watched a late show with him, then the group retired for a nap before rising at 0400. Their plan was to take a stock of jeans and sweaters to the market in Cagors and sell the items.
The trio had borrowed an old station wagon that had seen better days. Since it had no starter, the vehicle had to be push-started. The roommates partially loaded the car and got it started before they noticed “a strange luminous object in the sky”. They later stated that the object was “larger than the full moon, egg-shaped, and it was coming down behind the other building”.
Fontaine and El Mama wanted a better look at the object, and so El Mama went to their apartment for a camera while Fontaine stayed with the vehicle (presumably to keep it running). Prevost also returned to the residence to pick up the last load of clothing and supplies that they would need at the market.
Still wondering about the object they had seen in the sky, Prevost opened the living room window and looked out, hoping for a better view of the anomalous light. Instead, he noted that the car was stopped on the far left side of the road and the engine was not running. Angry because he would have to push the car again, Prevost went downstairs and found El Mama in a distraught state. The young man had seen a “large sphere of fog engulf the car”.
Vallee describes the scene when the two arrived:
They found the car on the right side of the road with its parking lights on. It was indeed surrounded with a large ball of whitish fog around which three or four smaller spheres were moving. These spheres entered the large ball, which itself was absorbed into a cylinder that flew off into the sky at very high speed.
Dumbfounded in the face of the phenomenon, they were unable to react while these manifestations were taking place. Eventually they rushed toward the car. Franck had vanished.
As you would suspect, the two remaining roommates summoned the police after they had searched for their missing friend and could not find him. In the days that followed, the authorities went from thinking that the trio were perpetrating a hoax to believing that Prevost and El Mama had murdered their roommate and dumped his body.
That all changed when, after an entire week passed, Fontaine reappeared with his side of this fascinating tale. The young man had driven to get a better view of the luminous ball that started the incident but had lost it, only to spot another anomalous light, about the size of a tennis ball, over a nearby field. This ball of light approached the vehicle, and Fontaine swerved to the left in panic. The light ended up over the hood of the car, which promptly died, and Fontaine found himself engulfed in the afore-mentioned fog.
He could no longer see the road or the landscape, and he could not open the car doors. His eyes itched, his eyelids became heavy, and he drifted into a deep sleep. He woke up in the cabbage field, unaware that a whole week had elapsed. The car was no longer there.
Fontaine returned to the apartment and got one of his roommates out of bed. The gendarmes were none too happy and seemed convinced that they were the victims of an elaborate prank. As is so often the case in UFO cases and other incidents of high strangeness, there seems to have been a cover-up. Police notes and reports about the incident fail to mention the crucial fact that not one, but two, witnesses testified to the mysterious fog that enveloped the car that night and one witness was a police officer on the Night Intervention Brigades who arrived on the scene less than a half hour after Fontaine’s disappearance. It seems clear that something very unusual happened to this young man.
UFOlogists might view this as a rare case of an alien abduction where someone besides the abductee was aware of the event and that is certainly a possibility since, despite the assertions of many in the UFO field, we do not know what these aerial phenomenon are. While the possibility exists that UFOs are from other planets in our universe, the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis, I think a civilization capable of interstellar travel might have better things to do with their time than monitoring and interfering with a species of hairless bipedal primate that seems intent on blowing themselves to oblivion on most days.
I think it far more likely that UFOs and their occupants are yet another manifestation of the endless variety of beings in the Otherworld (what some might call other dimensions). As Vallee and others have pointed out, human folklore reveals a long history of humans interacting with and even being kidnapped by beings of this Otherworld. I see no reason those beings, whether we call them faery or something else, would cease their commerce with us in the modern day. My book, Mysteries in the Mist, where I cover this case, revolves around the idea that mysterious fogs are a sign of incursion from the Otherworld.
I find it interesting that the craft of UFO lore have evolved over the history of this mystery – from the airships of the late 19th century to the foo fighters of World War II to the ghost rockets of post-war Northern Europe and on to the flying saucers, black triangles and Tic Tacs of today. It is almost as though the intelligence behind these vehicles is developing them as human technology advances.
Tune in next week for an interesting story where the UFO occupants are not the all-powerful abductors we see in so many abductee encounters today.