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Gévaudan

added29 August 2026

A historical region of southern France where, between 1764 and 1767, something killed around a hundred people — mostly women and children herding livestock. Witnesses described a beast the size of a calf, russet-furred with a black stripe along its back. Louis XV sent royal huntsmen and offered a reward larger than an official's yearly salary. The killings stopped after a local hunter, Jean Chastel, shot a large animal; what it was is still argued over.

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A legend about a whole area — the pin is approximate

44.70000, 3.30000

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UFO sightingYellow

Cussac and the Four in the Field

On 29 August 1967 two children, thirteen-year-old François and nine-year-old Anne-Marie Coüetin, were minding cows near this village in the Cantal when, by their account, they saw four small dark figures beyond a hedge and a sphere some five metres across. The figures rose into the air and were drawn into the sphere, which went up with a whistle and a smell of sulphur. The gendarmerie questioned the children separately the same day; their accounts agreed on details that are hard to arrange between them. Their father noticed the same smell at the spot, and the dog would not go near the hedge. The case entered the French official statistics as unexplained and is still there.

43 km away

Abandoned buildingGreen

Oradour-sur-Glane

Oradour-sur-Glane is a preserved ghost village and national memorial located in the Haute-Vienne department of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France, situated along the Glane River roughly 22 kilometers northwest of Limoges. On June 10, 1944, the tranquil rural community was systematically liquidated by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, who massacred 643 civilians (including 247 women and 205 children) before putting every structure to the torch. Following the liberation, French Provisional Government President Charles de Gaulle decreed that the skeletal ruins remain entirely untouched as an open-air national shrine and enduring monument to Nazi wartime atrocities against civilian populations.

224 km away

UFO sightingOrange

Valensole and the Lavender Field

On the morning of 1 July 1965 a farmer named Maurice Masse walked out onto his lavender field on the Valensole plateau and saw an egg-shaped craft on six legs, with two small beings beside it examining the plants. By his account one of them pointed a tube at him and he could not move until the craft had gone. The gendarmes recorded a depression in the ground and the marks of the legs. The lavender at the landing spot grew badly for several years afterwards, which the neighbours noted too. Masse was a respected man, a member of the Resistance, and visibly disliked the attention: he refused journalists for decades. The case remains among the most cited in the French literature.

234 km away

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