Four black figures rose into a bright sphere. The smell remained in the field
On the morning of August 29, 1967, François and Anne Marie Delpeuch were tending the family cattle near Cussac. They said four black figures entered a brilliant sphere that left the field. Gendarmes arrived that day, but the detailed state report came eleven years later and was not adopted as the final position of the French space agency.
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The morning beside road 57
François was thirteen and a half, while his sister Anne Marie was nine. They took their dog Médor and about ten cows to a pasture called Les Tuiles, about 800 metres west of Cussac. At around 10:30 the cows approached a low stone wall and the dog barked. François turned and noticed four small black figures across the road. At first he thought they were children he did not know.
What the children described
In the account preserved by the later report, the figures stood between one metre and one metre twenty. Their arms appeared long and thin, their legs short and thin, and the skull and chin slightly pointed. The children could not make out eyes or ears. One figure held a rectangular object that reflected the sun, while another knelt near the ground. Beside them was a very bright object partly hidden by the hedge.
Entering the sphere
The children said the figures rose and entered the top of the object head first. One returned for the reflective item and then joined the others. The object climbed in a spiral and vanished toward the west and northwest. François described a whistle and a rush like a motorboat starting. He said the glare hurt his eyes and made them water for about fifteen minutes.
Panic seen from outside
An adult working on a tractor did not see the object, but met the children minutes later when they were frightened and crying. The children said the cows bellowed, the dog barked and cattle from a nearby field came toward their herd. A village warden told later investigators that he heard a whistle mixed with a hum from about 500 metres away. In another later account he said he had thought it was a helicopter at the time. This partly supports the reported noise, not the sphere or figures.
What the gendarmes found
The children's father, who was the village mayor, called the gendarmerie. Officers from two stations reached the field at about 16:00. One later recalled a circular area four to five metres wide where the grass looked more yellow and a strong smell. Yet the first newspaper report on September 1 said no traces were found and nearby field workers heard nothing. The 1978 report also judged the colour difference too weak to count as a trace. No formal gendarmerie statement from the visit has been found.
The official investigation came late
In April 1978 the French research group inside the national space agency sent four people to Cussac, including its director Claude Poher, an optical engineer and a retired examining judge. They spent two days interviewing the siblings again, measuring sight lines and timing a reconstruction. Their calculations placed the object between 71.5 and 82 metres from the children and the central event between 21 and 35 seconds.
The forceful conclusion and its caveat
The report's authors wrote that the witnesses had observed the rapid departure of an unknown inhabited vehicle with characteristics and performance beyond their technological knowledge. They examined a helicopter and rejected it because of the combined shape, brilliance, path, silence on the ground and reported figures. But the public copy carries a caveat from the French space agency. It does not represent the agency's final position, and the scientific council urged great caution in interpreting the account. Cussac also carries no official unexplained case rating in today's public database.
The helicopter that was never found
Critical researchers proposed that the children saw a light helicopter behind the hedge. Sunlight on a glass canopy might explain the glare, partly hidden adults could look short and flight helmets could alter the head shape. Manure spread in a nearby field was proposed as the odour source. The reconstruction explains some details, but no flight log, pilot, unit or helicopter has been matched to Cussac that morning. It is a developed hypothesis, not an identification.
How the story changed
Some famous lines do not belong to the earliest account. The claim that the children invited the figures to play was later identified as a journalistic invention and denied by the witnesses. The complete image of all four figures flying also appeared only through later investigations. The name Four Little Black Devils came from publications about the file, not from the children themselves.
The gap left at Cussac
Two young witnesses maintained the core of their account for decades. Adults saw their panic, another person heard a noise and a gendarme reported an odour and a slight change in the grass. There is no image, preserved sample or same day official record that closes the file. After both the state reconstruction and the helicopter proposal, neither side placed an identified object in that field. What stood across the road remains unnamed.
Sources and context
The two children gave their account to family, gendarmes and the press soon after the event. Site photographs survive, together with a thirty page report prepared by a government research team in 1978 under reference CNES/CT/GEPAN 0140, annex 8.
No photograph records the figures or sphere. No formal gendarmerie statement from that day has been found, no soil or odour sample was preserved for testing and no known aircraft has been matched to the testimony.