It happened very early in the morning, around 4:30 a.m. on November 26, 1979, in the town of Serqui-Pontuas, not far from Paris, France.
Nineteen-year-old Frank Fontaine and his two 25-year-old friends, Jean-Pierre Prévot and Salomon N’Diaye, were standing near Prévot’s house, loading packages of clothes into a red Ford to take them to the flea market in Jizor.
Suddenly, they saw an unidentified object in the sky, resembling a brightly glowing cylinder. The object was moving, and they observed it for 3-4 minutes.
The object seemed to descend to a point very close to the road. Fontaine then said, “I want to go there, I want to find out what it is.” But he stayed in the car, while the other two men decided to film the UFO with a movie camera that was in Prévot’s house.
They ran into the house and were absent for several minutes. When they returned, they saw that their car was not in its usual place and that it was standing on the road about 200 meters away from them, surrounded by dense glowing fog.
And something was moving in this fog. They clearly saw three or four small figures moving back and forth inside, resembling humans. Fontaine was nowhere to be seen.
Then the glowing fog suddenly shot up into the sky and disappeared, leaving the car undamaged on the road. Fontaine was not inside the car, nor nearby. Prévot and N’Diaye searched all around, but their colleague seemed to have disappeared without a trace.
A week passed, and on December 3, 1979, at the same time of 4:30 a.m., Frank Fontaine found himself standing in the same spot on the road where he had disappeared. He did not know what had happened and didn’t even realize that seven days had passed; for him, only a few minutes had passed at most.
He didn’t feel hungry or thirsty and only remembered driving along the road and stopping when he saw a glowing sphere in the field. This sphere suddenly began to “expand” until its light engulfed the car with Fontaine inside.
He only felt a stinging sensation and an inexplicable irritation in his eyes, and then he was standing on the road, with neither the car nor the glowing sphere nearby.
Fontaine’s first thought was that someone had stolen his car. So he ran back to Prévot’s house. But the house was locked, and no lights were on in the windows. Then he ran to N’Diaye’s house, which was nearby.
N’Diaye remembers that when he opened the door and saw the missing Fontaine, the first thing that struck him was that his friend was wearing the same clothes he had disappeared in a week ago, and that they were in the same condition—clean and unwrinkled. There was no dirt on his shoes either. Later, it turned out that Fontaine had the same amount of money in his pockets as he did on November 26, and he was still cleanly shaved.
Fontaine was very surprised to see N’Diaye standing before him in pajamas. Just a few minutes ago, as he remembered, they were standing by the car dressed and watching the UFO.
“Why are you wearing pajamas?” Fontaine asked his friend, and he couldn’t believe what he was told. Then Fontaine and N’Diaye went to Prévot’s house, woke him up, and then went to Fontaine’s family home, where his mother and fiancée were beside themselves with joy that he was found. Then the whole company went to the police station.
Of course, nobody believed them there. What little people? What UFO? You’re just a bunch of hooligans making fun of law enforcement, they were told. But they continued to insist on their story, claiming it wasn’t fiction.
They were even brought to court in Pontuaze, but they still stuck to their story. It was only then that the police chief concluded that there was something more to it than just hooliganism or malicious intent.
When their story hit the press, it caught the attention of France’s official government UFO group, GEPAN, which thoroughly investigated all the data and testimonies but found no signs of hoax.
They even offered all three guys sessions of regressive hypnosis, and it is known that during the session, Prévot repeated everything he had said before. What N’Diaye said is unknown, but Fontaine refused hypnosis, saying:
“If I talk under hypnosis, everything that happened to me will become known. And I don’t want all of this to become known.”
Apparently, he was afraid that under hypnosis, he would remember something particularly disturbing and wouldn’t be able to calm down because of these memories later. Because later, he told journalists the following:
“When I sleep, all this comes back to me, but it’s not a nightmare. It’s something unusual.”
And four years after the incident, Prévot unexpectedly claimed that it was all just a setup on his idea and that Fontaine hadn’t disappeared anywhere but had been hiding in his acquaintance’s apartment for a week.
However, his confession looks very murky. The fact is that Prévot tried to make money on what happened to Fontaine, even founded his own publishing house to publish books with UFO eyewitness testimonies, but things didn’t go well for him, and he only accumulated a lot of debt. Perhaps only out of desperation and anger did he claim that the whole story was a fake; otherwise, he would have probably confessed during the hypnosis session. Who knows…
