<>#8THE MYSTERY OF THE LOST WEEK @3Three young Frenchmen hit the news headlines in early December 1979 with a tale about a UFO abduction at Cergy-Pontoise. But was their amazing story a fabrication. This text sorts outs the facts from the fiction. @2'FRENCHMEN BACK TO EARTH with a bump' was the headline in the London Times - and across the world the media reported the news with the same uncertainty whether to take it seriously or not. But this much was certain: Franck Fontaine, who had allegedly been kidnapped by a UFO a week before, had been restored to friends, family, and a wondering world in the early hours of Monday, 3 December 1979. Where had he spent those seven days? @2The world, hoping for a story that would make the Moon landing seem tame, was disappointed. Fontaine's recollections were few and confused. It seemed to him he had simply dropped off to sleep for half an hour: he was astonished and dismayed to find he had been away for a week. He attributed the strange images in his mind to dreams: he was bewildered to learn that he might have been abducted by extra-terrestrial aliens and carried to their distant world. Fontaine was no less dismayed to find himself the focus of the world's attention. During his seven-day absence, it had been his friends Salomon N'Diaye and Jean-Pierre Pre'vost, witnesses of his abduction, who had been the objects of attention. Ever since their first startling telephone call to the police - 'A friend of mine's just @2been carried off by a UFO!' - they had been subjected to interrogation by the police, by the press, and by UFO investigative groups ranging from the scientific to the bizarre. If Fontaine's return brought renewed publicity and fresh problems, at least it cleared them of the suspicion that they were responsible for their friend's disappearance - perhaps even his death. The life-style of the three young men was not of a sort to dispel suspicion. All three - Pre'vost, aged 26, N'Diaye, 25, Fontaine, 18 - scraped an uncertain living by selling jeans in street markets. They drove an old car that was unlicensed and uninsured, none of them having a driving licence. Pre'vost was a self- declared anarchist. He and N'Diaye lived next door to each other in a modern block at Cergy-Pontoise on the @2outskirts of Paris. Fontaine lived 2 miles (3 kilometres) away. According to their account, Fontaine had spent Sunday evening in Pre'vost's flat because they wanted to be up by 3.30 a.m. to travel the 35 miles (60 kilometres) to the street market at Gisors. The market didn't start until 8 a.m. but they wanted a good place. Besides, their Taunus estate car had been acting up lately, so they thought it prudent to allow extra time. At 3.30, after only about four hours' sleep, they were up and ready to load the car with clothes. First, though, they gave the car a push-start to make sure the engine would function. Having got it going, they decided that Fontaine should stay in the car to make sure it didn't stop again while the other two @2got on with the loading. Fontaine had leisure to look about him, and so it was that he noticed a brilliant light in the sky some distance away. When his companions arrived with their next load, he pointed the object out. It was cylindrical in shape, but otherwise unidentifiable. When it moved behind the block of flats, N'Diaye rushed upstairs to fetch a camera, thinking he might take a photograph of the object to sell to the newspapers. Pre'vost went in to get another load of clothing while Fontaine, hoping for another view of the mysterious object, drove up onto the main road that ran close by the flats. Hearing the sound of the moving vehicle, his companions looked out of the windows of their respective flats. Both saw that Fontaine had stopped the car on the main road and @2noted that the engine was no longer running. Pre'vost, angry because they would probably have to push-start the car a second time, rushed downstairs again. He called to N'Diaye to forget about his camera because the UFO had vanished. N'Diaye came after him saying that in any case he had no film in his camera, and adding that from his window it had looked as though the car was surrounded by a great ball of light. Outdoors again, the two young men stopped in amazement: the rear of their car was enveloped in a sharply defined sphere of glowing mist, near which a number of small balls of light were moving about. While they stood watching, they saw the larger globe absorb all but one of the smaller ones. Then a beam of light emerged, which grew in size until it was like the cylindrical shape they @2had seen earlier. The large sphere seemed to enter this cylinder, which shot up into the sky and disappeared from sight. The two hurried to the car, but found no sign of Fontaine. He was not in the car, in the road, or in the cabbage field beside the road. Pre'vost insisted on calling the police immediately and N'Diaye went off to do so. Pre'vost, remaining near the car, was the only witness to the last phase of the incident: a ball of light, like those previously moving about the car, seemed to push the car door shut. Then it too vanished. Such was the account that the two young men gave to the police on their arrival a few minutes later. Because UFO sightings are a military matter in France, the police instructed @2Pre'vost and N'Diaye to inform the gendarmerie, which comes under the Ministry of National Defence. The two spent most of the day with the gendarmes, telling and retelling the story. The interrogators stopped for lunch, during which time the witnesses telephoned the press with their story. Latter, Commandant Courcoux of the Cergy gendarmerie told the press that there were no grounds for disbelieving the young men's story, that he had no doubt 'something' had occurred, and that he could give no indication of what that 'something' might be. In a later interview he admitted, 'We are swimming in fantasy.' For a week, that was all the world knew. During that week, the young men were questioned over and over again. Some people accepted the UFO story as it stood. Others suspected it to be a @2smokescreen, perhaps a cunning plan to help Fontaine avoid doing his military service, perhaps something more sinister. But one fact stood out clearly: Pre'vost and N'Diaye had informed the police promptly and voluntarily. Given their backgrounds, wasn't this convincing proof of their sincerity? When Fontaine gave his version of the story, there seemed no reason to question his sincerity either. He told how he had woken to find himself lying in the cabbage field. Getting to his feet, he realised he was just across the main road from the flats, close to where he had stopped the car to watch the UFO. But the car was no longer there. His first thought, as he hurried towards the still-darkened building, was that somebody had stolen their car and its valuable load of clothing. Neither Pre'vost @2nor N'Diaye was to be seen, so he rushed upstairs and rang the bell of Pre'vost's flat. When there was no reply, he went to N'Diaye's. A sleepy N'Diaye appeared, gawped at him in amazement, then flung his arms round him in delighted welcome. Fontaine, already surprised to find his friend in his night clothes, was even more amazed to learn that an entire week had gone by since the morning of the Gisors market. He had little to tell the press or the police. The world's media reported his return but reserved judgement till they heard what the authorities had to say. But the police declared it was no longer their business: no crime had been committed. Apart from the inherent improbability of Fontaine's story, they had no reason to doubt his word or that of his friends. @2So now it was up to the UFO organisations to see what further light could be thrown on the case. From the start, the witnesses had been besieged by the various French groups; there are dozens of these, most of them fiercely independent and reluctant to co-operate with the others. One of the most reputable of all is Control, to whom we owe most of what we now know of the inside story of the Cergy-Pontoise case. But another group declared its interest before Control, while Fontaine was still missing: the Institut Mondial des Sciences Avance's (World Institute of Advanced Sciences). Its co-founder and spokesman was the well-known science fiction writer and author of two books about UFOs, Jimmy Guieu. Before he had carried out an investigation, Guieu affirmed his belief in the @2story: 'No question of it, Franck Fontaine has been abducted on board a UFO,' he stated in an interview. 'Admittedly I haven't questioned the young man's two companions, but I hold their account to be true a priori.' Delighted to have their story accepted without reservation by so eminent an authority, Fontaine's two friends agreed to co-operate with Guieu. When Fontaine returned, he too was taken under IMSA's wing. Guieu offered them a secret refuge in the south of France where they could work on a book together, Guieu writing it and all sharing the proceeds. Guieu's book, Cergy-Pontoise UFO contacts, was rushed into print with astonishing speed, appearing a bare four months after Fontaine's return. Thanks to the combination of Guieu's @2name and the intense interest in the case, it was an instant best-seller. But readers hoping for a conclusive verdict were disappointed. The book was padded out by Guieu's journalistic style and disgressive accounts of other cases, and there was an almost total absence of first- hand testimony from the principal witness - the abducted Fontaine - whose story the world wanted to hear. Such revelations as the book contained were of quite another nature. Guieu had hopped that Fontaine would be able to recall more of his adventure if he were hypnotised, but the young man obstinately refused to submit to hypnosis. The Pre'vost suggested that he should be hypnotised instead. What resulted was truly amazing. It now emerged that Pre'vost, not Fontaine, had been the @2true object of alien interest. Now, speaking through him, the aliens explained all. Fontaine had simply been the means to establish communication: Pre'vost was the channel through whom they could communicate to help save Earth from impending disaster. The aliens identified themselves as 'the intelligences from beyond' but gave no clearer clue to the whereabouts of 'beyond' than that it is 'a planet like yours'. Their spokesman was Haurrio, a friendly if somewhat garrulous character. In Guieu's book, Pre'vost becomes the hero of the story and the only evidence we have for the events is his word. His two companions seem to have became irrelevant. This book having raised more questions than it answered, much was @2hoped for when Pre'vost announced that he was writing his own account of the event. But 'The truth about the Cergy-Pontoise affair', released later that same year, was even less satisfactory. It was a rambling, incoherent farrago in which great doses of alien 'philosophy' - transmitted by Pre'vost - show that pious platitudes about the need for more love and less science are not confined to planet Earth. There is virtually no mention of Franck Fontaine's abduction: indeed, he and Salomon N'Diaye are scarcely referred to. But Pre'vost's visit to a secret alien base is described in some detail, and this gives us a good yardstick for evaluating the rest of the material. It seems that one morning soon after Fontaine's return, there was a ring at Pre'vost's door. The caller was a travelling salesman, @2a total stranger who said he had to make a trip to Bourg-de-Sirod and invited Pre'vost to come along. Now, Bourg-de-Sirod is a small village near the Swiss border some 225 miles (360 kilometres) from Cergy. On the face of it, there is no conceivable reason why a salesman should go there, nor why he should think that Pre'vost might wish to go there given that they were strangers in the first place. However, there was a reason for interest by Pre'vost. Bourg-de-Sirod was a specially significant place for him because as a child he had gone to a summer camp nearby and had later worked there. More recently still, he and Fontaine had spent a camping holiday there. So Pre'vost, though surprised at the stranger's offer, cheerfully accepted it. The salesman dropped him off at the village and he @2set off up the hill towards a particular site that had always fascinated him - a railway tunnel containing an abandoned train carriage from the Second World War. Arriving at the tunnel in late evening, Pre'vost found that other people were there before him: a group of young men gathered round a fire in the open. One of them called out his name; he was from the Sahara and had recently written to Pre'vost. It turned out that he and the others had come there from many parts of the world, thanks to the 'intelligences from beyond'. Each spoke his own language - but was understood by the rest. When Haurrio, the alien representative, arrived, he informed them that they had been chosen to spread the philosophy of the @2'intelligences' on Earth. A beautiful female alien then took them on a tour of the tunnel, now being used as a UFO base. They saw several spacecraft, similar to ones that Pre'vost had seen as a child. After their tour, the young men returned to their camp fire and went to sleep on the ground - which, on a December night in the mountains, must have been less than comfortable. Next morning Pre'vost found his friendly salesman waiting to chauffeur him back to Cergy. Whether Jimmy Guieu and Jean-Pierre Pre'vost seriously expected their account to be believed, we may never know. But the more they provided in the way of checkable statements, the harder it became to accept the original account of the alleged abduction. Doubts grew even more when an investigative team from Control @2persisted in taking up the case without the co-operation of the witnesses - checking all the conflicting statements and fragmented testimony as best they could. end.