At 10:30 AM on August 29, 1967, 13-year-old Francine Delpech and her 9-year-old brother Anne-Marie were tending the family herd of cattle in a pasture above the hamlet of Cussac in the Cantal department of central France when they saw four small figures in the adjacent field — initially mistaking them for neighbouring children. Approaching closer, they realized the figures were approximately 1 metre tall, dressed in close-fitting black one-piece garments, and had features that were distinctly non-human. The children watched as the four beings climbed into a bright silver spherical craft approximately 2 metres in diameter, which then rose silently into the air and departed vertically at extraordinary speed.
The children ran immediately home to their parents and reported the encounter to their father. Within hours, the Cussac gendarmerie had inspected the landing site and found a distinctive circular burned area approximately 4 metres in diameter in the pasture. French Air Force investigators subsequently arrived from the GEPAN/GEIPAN program and conducted interviews with the two children in separate rooms; both children provided independent and highly consistent descriptions of the entities, their garments, the craft, and the sequence of events. Francine and Anne-Marie were subsequently re-interviewed at six-month intervals over ten years; their accounts remained consistent throughout.
The Cussac case is particularly notable because of the young ages of the witnesses, the broad daylight conditions, the distance at which the entities were observed (approximately 15 metres), and the duration of the observation (approximately 90 seconds). The GEPAN final report on the case, published in 1982, noted no evidence of hoaxing and classified the case as 'unexplained' with the note that the physical evidence (the burned landing circle) was inconsistent with any identifiable cause. Francine Delpech, who became an adult in the 1970s and entered careers in teaching and social work, has consistently refused to commercialize or repeatedly discuss the incident but has confirmed its reality whenever asked. The Cussac case stands as one of the most carefully-documented child-witness close encounters in the French and European UFO literature.