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In 1968, an anonymous French physician saw two luminous UFOs from his living room window,
and watched them merge into one.
He was immediately healed of two serious injuries, and had a range of other anomalous experiences
in the following years, first documented by the famed ufologist, Aimé Michel.
Though typically associated with faith healers and miracle claims, spontaneous healings are alleged
in hundreds of UFO reports, and claims of other anomalous phenomena are very common as well.
The case of Dr. X suggests that these anomalies - and the effects that they have on witnesses -
may actually be as important to understanding UFOs as the UFOs themselves.
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In the fall of 1968, a 38-year-old physician identified publicly only as Dr. X,
was living in southern France with his wife and sixteen-month-old son.
The doctor had muscle problems on his right side and a limp on that leg
after stepping on a landmine in the Algerian war 10 years earlier.
He had also recently cut himself above his left ankle while chopping wood,
resulting in severe swelling and a hematoma.
Between the two injuries, it was painful for him to walk or stand.
On the morning of November 2, just three days after slashing his ankle,
the doctor awoke to his son's calling around 3:45 a.m.
He went to the boy's room and found him standing in his cot,
excitedly pointing at the shuttered window and repeating the word, “rho!,”
which the doctor identified as a proto-word for shiny or radiant.
There was a storm outside, with strong winds and rain, and what appeared to be frequent flashes of lightning.
However, Dr. X later recalled that these flashes occurred at odd intervals,
and didn't correspond with claps of thunder.
After filling his son's bottle, the doctor heard banging sounds against the house
and followed them to some open shutters on a second-floor window.
Through this window he could see that the valley around his hill-top home
was being illuminated by quick flashes of light, the same color and intensity as the full moon.
The flashes occurred roughly once a second, and extended for three to four kilometers,
or about two to two-and-a-half miles.
There was no thunder at all, and he couldn't see a source of light.
The doctor went back downstairs when the kitchen clock read 3:55 a.m.
He poured a glass of water, and looked out the kitchen window,
where he could still see the flashes of light, but not the source.
He limped through the living room and opened two French windows facing S.S.E.
The rain was now stopped, and the doctor could see two identical luminous objects
over the valley about 2 kilometers, or 1.2 miles away.
They were moving east in perfect unison, each shining a bright, cylindrical white spotlight from its underside.
Viewed in profile, the objects were elliptical in shape, with two distinct parts.
The upper part was a luminous, silvery white, dimmer than the full moon, but of a similar color.
The slightly-smaller lower section was a “deep sunset red,” darker at the bottom
and lighter at the top, and he could see some movement on it.
Each object had three rod-like protrusions that the doctor called antennae:
a vertical one on top that was tapered towards the end, and a straight, horizontal one on each side,
sticking out from between the two layers.
All protrusions were approximately as long as the object was tall, and the same color as the top.
There was also a darker bulge on the underside of the objects where the beams originated.
The doctor said that the flashes appeared to be entering back through the antennae
and creating a smaller, secondary flash between the UFOs.
This lead him to believe that they were “sucking in atmospheric electricity.”
None of this made any noise at all.
The UFOs slowly turned north towards the doctor while simultaneously drifting closer to each other.
The two spotlights came together and formed a single beam, and soon after,
the two inner protrusions touched and the flashing stopped,
though the objects continued to move together.
But rather than crash, they simply overlapped each other in space,
and merged together as a single identical object.
The combined UFO then flew straight towards the doctor,
coming to a stop just 200 meters, or 656 feet away.
Dr. X could now see that the lower red half glowed like incandescent metal, or like it was lit from inside.
It was also divided into eleven sections by vertical lines.
In five of these sections were dark-red horizontal lines
cycling from top to bottom every four seconds, each at different times.
The doctor said that they looked similar to the lines that moved across
TV screens of the time when the image was adjusted.
Dr. X was frightened but transfixed, and watched the cycling lines for several minutes.
The object then tilted in the sky, revealing its circular underside and shining its spotlight directly at the doctor.
There was a loud bang as it "dematerialized," as the doctor put it,
leaving behind a fleecy, white cloud that blew away in the wind.
As this happened, a fine, white, luminous thread flew several hundred meters into the sky.
Looking up, Dr. X saw a white, shining dot
which vanished with a crack like a firework, and the UFO was gone.
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In a state of shock, Dr. X checked the kitchen clock, which now read 4:05 a.m.
He immediately began taking notes and drawing sketches of the UFO,
then woke his wife to tell her what had happened.
His wife noticed that he was walking without a limp,
and when he rolled up his pant leg he found that the cut on his ankle had completely healed,
and that the swelling and the pain was gone.
That night, his wife heard the doctor talking in his sleep,
and saying that “contact will be re-established by falling down the stairs on November 2nd.”
The doctor continued sleep-talking for a few hours, then slept until 2 p.m.
He said that he felt great when he awoke, but when his wife asked about the UFO,
it was clear that he did not remember anything, even when she showed him his notes.
He was alarmed to see these as he recognized his handwriting but could not remember making them.
His wife decided not to upset him any further by revealing what he'd said in his sleep.
However, later in the afternoon, the doctor felt a hook in his leg,
causing him to trip on the living room stairs and knock his head on the floor.
Immediately after, he regained all memories of the morning's events.
Urged by his wife, the doctor wrote to French ufologist Aimé Michel, a longtime friend, on November 5.
Michel arrived at the Doctor's house three days later with a physicist he had worked with in the past.
At this point, Dr. X was sick from shock, and still had trouble accepting the events of that night.
Michel interviewed the couple and the physicist took photos of the valley,
to which Michel added sketches of the UFOs in their approximate locations.
Michel also inspected the doctor's legs, finding only the faintest sign of scarring on his ankle,
as if the wound had been healed for years.
Though it had not improved in the 10 years since he got it, the doctor's limp was gone,
and he regained full control of his muscles, but that day, he started to feel cramping and pain around his navel.
This pain persisted for the next week and a half, and the area became itchy, prickly, and red.
On November 13, the doctor had a dream in which a triangle appeared in relation to the UFO he saw,
and a few days later, the redness developed into a perfect isosceles triangle around his navel,
and the discomfort stopped entirely.
The doctor had a dermatologist inspect the triangle, but even he had no explanation for it.
Though Michel tried to convince him that it was only psychosomatic,
a triangle appeared in the same place on his son the next day.
For at least the next two years, these triangles appeared on the doctor every three weeks or so,
and usually on his son about 12 hours later, and they appeared more sporadically for the next 20 years.
The triangles typically lasted between two to three days then faded away completely in a few hours.
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Many strange things happened in the next few months.
On Dec 21 and 22, 1968, Dr. X had three deep hypnosis sessions conducted by a specialist in Bordeaux.
During the preceding week, Michel had a popular song stuck in his head
all day and night, and whistled it endlessly.
Then, after the first hypnosis session, Michel suggested that the doctor play some piano to help them relax,
and Dr. X. immediately began playing that very song, claiming that he'd been practicing it all week.
Michel noted that many other people around Dr. X
who had no knowledge of his experiences reported similar coincidences.
Things got stranger from there.
Objects appeared in random places around the doctor's house, and an old mechanical clock
with weights and a balance-wheel once fell three hours behind in a night.
The house's electrical current would come and go, even when the breaker was tripped:
inspectors from the French Electricity Authority called it "witchcraft" and gave up on fixing it,
though the anomalies eventually ceased on their own.
On multiple occasions, Dr. X also reported spontaneously levitating in his bed,
and elsewhere in the house.
During one of these episodes he had flypaper in his hand, so he stuck it to the living room ceiling,
6 meters, or or nearly 20 feet off the ground, and left it for Michel to see.
Several times the doctor heard a voice say that "something would happen" on November 1, 1969,
the first anniversary of the UFO event, so he invited Michel and his wife to spend the night at his house,
while his son stayed with his grandparents.
When he got there, Michel asked the doctor if he had any navel geometry to show him,
and Dr. X unbuttoned his shirt to show him that he didn't.
But as he was playing piano for his guests later that night, he suddenly stopped, whispered to himself,
then stood up, opened his shirt, and said: “It’s here. It’s beginning again.”
Just then, everyone could see a precisely outlined triangle take shape
on his abdomen, red like a mild sunburn.
The next morning, his mother found the same triangle on his son.
Though no one ever spoke to the boy about the UFO, he experienced insomnia for the next two years,
and repeatedly told his teacher that he would "go off into the sky with the big red machine...”
the one that “made a fou-fou noise in the sky, with flashes.”
But despite the initial shock, Dr. X felt that the event had mostly positive effects on his life.
Aside from regaining his pre-war mobility, the doctor and his wife claimed to have gained
a greater appreciation for the unexplained, and a sense of peace with the fact
that whatever happened to them was beyond their understanding.
Michel shared the details of his investigation in a special 1969 issue of Flying Saucer Review,
and he published a follow-up in the same journal two years later.
The famed ufologist Jacques Vallée included the case of Dr. X in a list of notable UFO sightings
in Passport to Magonia, and discussed it further in his later work,
helping to popularize the case outside of France.
In 1993, the doctor appeared on the French show Mystères with a triangle still on his abdomen.
Most recently, the case was dramatized - and heavily abridged -
in a 2015 episode of Close Encounters, although not entirely accurately.
In 2003, ufologist Bernard Bidault published a revealing interview with Dr. X in a French-language book on UFOs.
The doctor claimed that for 25 years a man who never aged
would occasionally appear in his house and invite him out for a walk or drive.
The doctor would often experience missing time during these outings, and had some incredible experiences.
The details revealed in Bidault's interview may seem to stretch credulity,
but they fit well-established patterns in the alien abduction literature.
As Michel noted, on the same night of the doctor's UFO event,
there were multiple sightings of similar objects in Spain, and more in Morocco on December 7.
Newspapers also reported on a sighting in Peru on December 9,
in which a man saw a UFO from the terrace of his home in Lima, and felt its radiant heat,
though it was two to three kilometers, or a mile or two away.
Like Dr. X, the man watched it for several minutes, transfixed,
and has since been cured of rheumatism and a bad case of myopia.
And these cases are only two of many UFO reports that involve spontaneous healings.
Gordon Creighton, editor of the Flying Saucer Review,
published one of the first articles on UFO healings in 1970, and in the next few decades,
distinguished abduction researchers like Budd Hopkins and John Mack encountered a number of healing claims,
often linked to memories of invasive medical procedures in alien labs.
In his 2019 book, The Healing Power of UFOs, ufologist Preston Dennett
identifies 309 different cases of spontaneous healing during or after a UFO or entity encounter.
Anomalous healing experiences have been reported by shamans and faith healers for thousands of years,
but are now commonly associated with Christian miracle claims.
The bible states that Jesus cured blindness and leprosy,
and many evangelical pastors claim to heal similar things today, all by the power of God.
At the same time, Lucid dreamers such as Robert Waggoner claim that it's possible
to heal serious ailments in a single lucid dream exercise, and many attest to having done so.
In the realm of anomalistics, spontaneous healings are relatively common,
and they are attributed to many different forces.
It's also quite common for UFO sightings to be accompanied by other anomalous events.
The doctor's case involved skin marks, levitation, and poltergeist-like activity,
but other cases involve psi phenomena, or strange entities and apparitions.
Whitley Strieber, the acclaimed fiction writer and abductee,
once saw a recently deceased friend during an abduction experience,
and received hundreds of letters from readers who saw apparitions and ugly blue "kobolds" as well as UFOs.
In an effort to preserve their credibility, witnesses often decline to share these kinds
of accompanying anomalies in UFO reports, but there is reason to believe that they are common.
In fact, many UFO sightings are part of a broader pattern of anomalous activity,
in which witnesses are subjected to a range of unsettling experiences - some positive, others negative -
that challenge their core assumptions about the universe,
and begin a long-term change in their worldview.
Whatever the doctor saw that night, it seems to have taken an interest in him specifically,
and manipulated not only his body, but his thoughts and memories as well.
If there is an intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon,
then it has at least a casual interest in humankind, if not a deep investment.
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Though it's not as well known as some other "classic" UFO sightings, the case of Dr. X
is one of the most prominent examples of a spontaneous healing occurring with a close encounter.
The case also exemplifies the "high strangeness" of many UFO experiences,
and the baffling anomalies that accompany them.
For all the similarities of UFO reports around the world, many contain something totally unique
- often very personal - and they frequently provoke strong responses from the witnesses,
or effect lasting changes in their lives.
By examining their effects on witnesses, we probably won't learn where UFOs come from,
but we may explain what they are doing here.
(Sources are listed in the video description.)
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