The Bird-Beasts of Var

When reading about UFO sightings, one gets a bit bored of encounters with the usual saucer-eyed little green men, so it’s always welcome when extraterrestrials think outside of the box and offer us humans a more novel spectacle.  In the November/December 1968 issue of “Flying Saucer Review,” a French UFO researcher named Lyonel Trigano presented a striking case which had been brought to his attention.  It was related by a businessman named only as “Mr. S.” who ran a successful garage in Herault.  Trigano described him as “a solidly-built man in his fifties, who is quite the opposite of an impressionable person!”  “Mr. S.” told him:

“One evening in November 1962 I was driving along a minor departmental road in Var.  It was a dark night, and raining in torrents, so that I was driving with my lights full on.  Rounding a bend, I saw, 80 metres ahead, a group of figures clustered in the middle of the road.  I slowed down to avoid the group, and at the same moment it split into two parts, suddenly and jerkily.  My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered in some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car.

“Terrified, I wound up the window, accelerated like a madman, and then stopped 150 metres further on.  I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road.  It resembled two plates upside down, and placed on one another.  On reaching it, these ‘birds’ were literally sucked into the underpart of the machine as if by a whirlwind.  Then I heard a dull sound (clac!) and the object flew off at a prodigious speed and finally disappeared.”

Trigano added that “Mr. S," out of the not-unreasonable fear of appearing to be barking mad, had told this story to very few people.  At the time of this incident, “S” had never heard of UFOs, and had not thought to connect it to extraterrestrial visitations until some time afterward.

Whatever you think of “Mr. S” and his story, you have to admit that it’s not the sort of thing you hear every day.