Alencon’s Alien Visitor

Alien visitation generally has an association of bizarre creatures with mysterious and inexplicable features complete with massive eyes, strange stature, and often completely different skin tones.  And more often than not these creatures have made their most recorded appearances in modern times.  But one such visitation actually took place in 1790 in a small town known as Alencon that seemed both years ahead of its time in terms of strangeness and read much like a modern UFO encounter would today.

The morning was punctuated long before the sun even rose with a loud crash.  It was the beginning of a long summer, that morning in June 12th.  Those who had been up looking to the sky in preparation for the day had noted the source of the crash had been a large metal sphere descending from the sky much like a bird with an injured wing would fly and flutter to the ground, undulating as it did.  As the sphere crashed into the Earth it sent soil in every direction around it showering huts with hot dirt and mud.  As the remaining locals were called out, they approached and crowded around the strange object that had landed near their village.

As they crowded around the globe they noted the mysterious object was emitting a large amount of heat, which was radiating so fiercely that it lit the surrounding vegetation and sent it smoldering as if retreating from the strange vessel.  The town’s officials were some of the last on the scene and pushed through the crowd just as the lower part of the globe slid open.

“What sort of meteor is this?” some of the more learned townspeople whispered amongst themselves, “It is as though the meteor is hollow.”  Others would note how perfectly round the object was, as though it had been fashioned rather than cut by the natural cosmic displays that normally create meteors.  A bucket crew by now had extinguished the small fires around the object and now all watched the hatch that had opened beneath it.

Much to everyone’s surprise a man leapt out and excitedly began shooing everyone away from the device warning them in a language none understood.  Quickly he took off and ran for the woods, and the last of the spectators followed him in his expeditious retreat.  The sphere began emanating a strange sound and exploded, each fragment quickly dissolving and burning up before any evidence could be gathered.  The strange man who had exited the vehicle was never found.  Later, a few would speculate the possibility that the man had been from another planet.

Of course this story comes from a time long before the science fiction genre was in full swing, though it seemed to share many similarities with traditional sightings of aliens crashing to the planet’s surface.  Who was the man from the stars that fell on Alencon?  And was he human or something else?  Perhaps the final bit of the story rings just as true as the rest, for when this close encounter long before its time reached the ears of the regional authority, it was dismissed despite the entire town stating it had happened.