All UFO stories focus on the aftermath, never on the prelude. In each one of these stories, the consequences are always more consistent and dissectible than the causes, for the simple fact that there are no comprehensible causes. It just happens. The moment of the first sighting of the UFO, that is the farthest that our senses dare to take us.

The account that I have documented here interested me for a number of reasons, but mostly it did so for the fact that, unlike most of these types of accounts, this case did not begin with the sighting of the UFO. It culminated with it.

Bourg-Madame, France

Bourg-Madame is a quiet villa on the French side of the Pyrenees. Its residents don’t care much for the world on the other side of the mountains. Most of the young people have fled to bigger cities like Perpignan, Toulouse and even Paris. What remains is an aging core of a little more than eleven hundred citizens that lead isolated but not lonely lives. The 2000 provincial census predicted that, judging by the average age of its people, Bourg-Madame will become a ghost town by the year 2036.

Although for some, it seems that the ghosts have always been around.

On the 5th of March of 1982, at four in the morning, a farmer named Jean Paul Granau came out of the house to begin his work day, only to find Fede, his German Sheppard, lying dead on the road adjacent to his house. There were no wounds on the dog’s body, except for the fact that his spine was literally liquefied. An odd detail, if you consider that all the other bones in the animal seemed to be in perfect shape.

The killing of the dog was attributed to vandalism or the actions of some ritualistic sect, which are not a rare in that part of France.

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