Most stories about alien encounters start or end with a UFO sighting. They unfold from the incident, rarely toward it. In each one of these stories, the consequences are always more consistent and dissectible than the causes. This is due to the simple fact that there are no comprehensible causes for alien encounters of any kind.

  Alien encounters just happen.

  Bourg-Madame is a quiet village 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 who lead isolated but not necessarily lonely lives. The 2020 provincial census predicted that, judging by the average age of its people, Bourg-Madame will become a ghost town by the year 2046.

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

  On the 5th of March 1982, at four in the morning, a farmer named Jean-Paul Granau came out of his house to begin his workday, only to find Fede, his German Shepherd, lying dead on the road adjacent to the farm. There were no wounds on the dog’s body except for the fact that his spine was literally liquefied. An odd detail, considering that all the other bones in the animal seemed to be in perfect condition. The killing of the canine was attributed to vandalism or the actions of some ritualistic sect, which are not rare in that part of France. In my research of the village’s history, I didn’t find previous (official or unofficial) reports of animal mutilation or other phenomena that could be considered of a paranormal sort.

  In June of 2022, forty years after that incident, a bizarre discovery was made by workers of a construction company when they were excavating some wasteland for the building of an apartment complex in the neighboring town of Sainte-Leocadie, thirteen miles away from Jean-Paul Granau’s farm.

  They dug up the decomposed corpses of approximately two hundred and fifty sheep.

  Henry LeChetite, the local chief of police, didn’t consider it necessary to add in his report that among all the sheep bones, they could not find a single vertebral spine. It was also established that the common grave, so to speak, was much more recent than the bones buried in it.

  By suggestion of the local pastor, Père Gus Galattout, LeChetite contacted the department of Pagan Religions and Medieval Rites at the Universidad de Bilbao, where I was working at the time. The case captured my interest instantaneously, and a week later, I was on a plane to Barcelona, which is about three hours from Bourg-Madame by car. It was Commissary LeChetite himself who gave me a detailed report of the facts. He also showed me pictures of the sheep carcasses when first discovered, and took me to the site where the grave was encountered. There was more than enough evidence to recognize the classic patterns of animal mutilation generally associated with alien abduction. Still, I regarded as curious the detail that, either in the present or the past, there were no accounts of UFO sightings in Bourg-Madame or in any of the nearby localities.

  This is an infrequent factor, I would concede, in scenarios where these aberrant defacements take place. I therefore disregarded linking the Bourg-Madame mutilations to extraterrestrial intervention. Such a postulation was based on three premises:

  1) Choice of Animal: Sheep do not fit the archetypal profile of animal mutilation. Cattle and horses are the victims in approximately 90 percent of cases. The remaining 10 percent of cases are represented by random animals, including domestic pets.

  2) Typology of mutilation: The corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition, but there were neither signs of genitalia removal nor of muscular or organ evisceration.

  3) No reports of UFO sightings, abrupt climate or astronomic variances, or other so-called paranormal activity could be detected in the history archives of the entire Cerdanya region.

  I decided to focus on the ritualistic explanation of the case, as well as facts closer to my field of expertise. After talking to some of the reluctant inhabitants of Bourg-Madame, and with the kind assistance of the pastor Gus Galattout and commissary LeChetite, I came to learn that an abandoned Masonic facility had been used in recent years by another pagan sect, which I gathered, by the nature of their rites, was a faction known as Theistic Satanists. I visited the Masonic temple, which was hidden in the basement of a deserted apartment complex located on the outskirts of the French town of Vall de Llous. I did recognize the classic Masonic symbols and arrangements underneath the leftovers of what undoubtedly had been an improvised Black Mass service: a ceremonial altar (not the sacrificial type), blasphemous inscriptions, and sexual drawings on the walls, inverted crucifixes, brutalized rosaries, and other profanations of Christian emblems. I did not see signs of ritual slaughter or other sadistic sacraments. It was evident to me that these Devil worshipers were the passive kind and did not have the elements or the knowledge to execute dissections of the sort performed on the sheep. That brought me back to the explanation that Chief LeChetite wanted me to have and felt more comfortable with: plain, mindless vandalism. His stubbornness was understandable. He was, after all, the man with the responsibility to keep things the way they were in that forgotten part of the world.

  I can't blame him, as after a couple of days in the village, I could already appreciate and envy the simplistic and unquestioned lives people lived there. Gus Galattout asked me as a personal favor not to take pictures of the temple until LeChetite's men had had all of the anti-Christian profanations removed. I appeased him, thinking that a few snap-shots of that tasteless scenery would not add or detract from my investigation.

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  Suddenly, I was where I had started, which is an uncomfortable place for an investigator to be. Experience has taught me that when a famished mind doesn't find evidence, it creates it. I didn't want that to happen to me. And I guess I would have let the whole business end right there, if it weren't for a phone call that I received that same night at the lodge where I was staying.

  A local young reporter named Sebastien Clairemount, who was helping me with the investigation, put me in contact with Marcel Pitouf, a former high-ranking constable who lived in a nursing home and claimed to know what really had happened to those sheep. It was Marcel Pitouf indeed who introduced me to the story of Jean Paul Granau and his German Shepherd, Fede.

  The next morning, I went to pay a visit to Marcel Pitouf, who claimed to be 99 years old, though he looked much younger to me. He was amazingly lucid and coherent, and even though he tended to trail off into fascinating crime stories, his testimony was of great value to my investigation.

  Back in 1982, Marcel Pitouf's farm was the closest one to Jean Paul Granau's. Unlike the rest of the residents of Bourg-Madame, he did experience something that can be considered to be of extraordinary circumstances. It started the week that followed the demise of Fede. Most of the animals on Pitouf's farm got strangely sick. Or, using his words: "they went stupid." The cattle turned estranged and apathetic. First, they refused to eat. Their attempts to drink water ended, in most cases, in bloody, gelatinous vomit. The cattle excretions also presented signs of hemorrhage and internal tissue damage. The sheep presented a similar symptomatology, including a remarkable loss of wool. Curiously, his chickens, three dogs, and one cat did not undergo any biological mutation, although they grew rather aggressive toward each other and particularly toward human visitors. Marcel Pitouf remembered this anecdote clearly for the simple reason that in the course of one month, seven of his animals died of what he described as: "not wanting to live anymore." He had to sacrifice another five animals, including his only goat, by blowing their brains out with a shotgun and incinerating all of their bodies. The surviving animals remained in a state of constant panic for more than three months. The financial debacle that the loss of his animals brought to Marcel Pitouf destroyed his business and nearly made him lose his farm. I inquired about other past or present incidents he may have considered strange in the same or in any other unrelated fashion, but he could not provide further information. He did mention that the animals had not been the only victims of this unfortunate event, but also the life of the pasture and some trees in the surrounding areas of his and Granau's farms had disappeared and never came back. "They took those trees down some years ago to build something, but for over twenty years those dried trees stood there like bones stabbed on the hills. I've not seen such a desolate spectacle since my childhood during the war." Marcel Pitouf was a colorful character, but he didn't strike me as a senile man or someone with a proclivity to fantasy. On the contrary, he rationalized the 1982 incidents by convincing himself that his animals were poisoned by some vandals with nothing better to do.

  I spent most of that day with Constable Pitouf. He told me fascinating stories about his days in the service. I have treasured that day as one of the highlights in the investigation of this case. The next morning, I visited what used to be Marcel Pitouf's farm, now owned by a nice Spanish couple, I?aqui and Conchi Cajeta. They assured me that things had been running smoothly since they purchased the farm from Pitouf back in the early nineties.

  My last day in Bourg-Madame was spent wandering around the town, its mountains, and valleys. I also visited Sainte-Leocadie, where the corpses of the sheep were dug out. Interestingly, I noticed something that I had not before. The tops of some trees and patches of pastures looked indeed of an exhausted color and texture, following erratic patterns. I could not help thinking of Marcel Pitouf's bleak metaphor comparing the castigated landscape after the 1982 incidents with WWII battlefields.

  I had come to this hidden village in the Pyrenees with so many questions, and now I was about to leave with a new set of them and not many answers.

  Were the 1982 incidents and the spineless sheep related? No hardcore evidence indicated such a correlation. Were the animals on Marcel Pitouf's farm poisoned with radiation, as the pathology of symptoms clearly suggested? What was the explanation for the burned trees and dehydrated meadows? Despite all the signs and the case profile, I did not have consistent data to propose alien intervention. At the same time, I was absolutely positive none of these were SRA (Sadistic Ritual Abuse) cases. But, as I came to learn after years of scientific investigation, sometimes facts are harder to probe than theories.

  Five years after the exhumation of the sheep corpses, I received an email from Sebastien Clairmount. He attached to it an article published in Bourg-Madam’s local newspaper. The article reported a car accident in which three teenage boys died. The vehicle was crossing the Pyrenees on its way back from Barcelona around midnight when, seemingly, the driver lost control of the car and drove it off the cliff, crashing and killing its occupants. Unfortunately, this type of accident is very common on the high and narrow roads that circle the Pyrenees.

  What Sebastien Clairmount said in his email, but was not specified in the article attached or even in the official police report, was that, unlike the other bones in their bodies, the backbones of all of the occupants of the car were pulverized in a bizarre way, as if they were fossils hundreds of years old. Tragedies outweigh scientific curiosity, and considering the dramatic loss of these young lives, not many in Bourg-Madame were in the mood to explore the biological anomalies of the accident.

  I would not be surprised if an autopsy followed by a DNA test would result in the discovery that the molecular composition of that fossilized osseous tissue differs from the genetic fabric of the rest of the bodies. I believe that whoever is conducting these “experiments” may be crossing a critical boundary from which there’s no turning back.

  I started this account by saying that most stories about alien encounters start or end with a UFO sighting. They unfold from the incident, rarely toward it. To my understanding and current conclusions regarding this case, we are far from both the beginning and the end of the journey here. Sometimes what escapes our senses cannot escape our instincts. When it comes to the Bourg-Madame mutilations, my instincts tell me that one day, before this town is gone, someone is going to look up at the sky and see what has always been there, and what will give this story the ending (or the beginning) that it's waiting for.