Somewhere in the Skies - The Disembodied Hands of the Loire w/ Zelia Edgar

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Micheline walked briskly along the flowery path, humming a popular tune, when suddenly the peaceful walk was eclipsed by a blinding light. Two large, disembodied hands hung in the air in front of her and when they touched her, they felt cold like metal. This retro French humanoid encounter is by far one of the scariest alien abduction stories ever recounted. Subscribe to Just Another Tin Foil Hat: https://www.youtube.com/@JustAnotherTinFoilHat Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All socials and books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Email: [e-mail] Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #French #France #Disembodied #Scariest #AlienAbduction #Retro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, gentle listener, the Nocturnal Transmissions Podcast, your friendly provider of delightfully dark short horror fiction, has a new episode available. And it goes a little bit like... This. Stella would be in bed by the time he arrived, but he would lean over and kiss her sleeping cheek. Then he would undress. and climb into bed beside her. In the morning when she woke, Stella would have no idea that it was a stranger who lay beside her in bed,

that it was in fact something from off the moors. The Nocturnal Transmissions Podcast, Get Some. Misholene walked briskly along with flowery path, humming to herself. It was a pleasant day when all of a sudden her walk was interrupted by a blinding light. Suddenly, she noticed two disembodied hands hanging in the air in front of her. And when they touched her, they felt cold like they were made out of metal.

This is the case of the disembodied hands of the Loire, a retro-French humanoid encounter that has been locked in with the UFO field. Tune in for a case of terrifying high strangeness, and in my opinion, one of the most frightening anomalous abductions ever recounted. Welcome to just another tinfoil hat with your host, Zilia Edgar. Join Zilia as she walks us through some of the most bizarre UFO cases and incidents of high strangeness.

So today, we will be discussing a truly weird case, and that is the fascinating case of the disembodied hands of the Loire. Now, this is indeed a fascinating and pretty terrifying case of high strangeness, but as far as the realm of, you know, when you think about alien abductions go, It is somewhat of a departure. So everyone, keep your hands and feet inside the saucer and please enjoy the ride. Now, before we get too far in this case, it's the sort of case to misquote Gordon Cole from Twin Peaks that makes you wish he spoke little French. So I'm doing my very best of the pronunciations, my sincerest apologies if they're not perfect or close to perfect or if they are indeed butchered.

Feel free to correct me in the comments, please. So this case involves a woman by the name of Michelin G who lived in central France in a village along the banks of the Loire River. The time of this encounter was May 20, 1950, and she said that it was around 4 o'clock in the afternoon of May 20th. She was rushing around in a great mood. She had to go run some errands, get some groceries, and then get home to get dinner ready for the family. She lived with her mother, father, and brother. So Michelin was leaving her village, which in the original Lumiere-Dans-Lenui report, from January, February of 1967. It was denoted simply as G. But in a later account from the

Mufon UFO Journal, we find out that it was the commune of Jivray. So she was walking along the steep embankment of the Loire River to the village of Horsham Bowl to do her grocery shopping. Michelin said that the path was very pleasant. It was far from the houses. It was lined with trees, dotted with flowers, and the day was still. Suddenly, Michelin claimed that she was surrounded by a bright dazzling light. And once she entered this patch of light, she said that she felt stupefied when right in front of her face appeared two large hands.

Now, as weird as this is, weirder still is the fact that she claimed that the hands were completely disembodied. They had no body to go with them. The witness said that it was like they had been, quote, suspended above her head as though waiting for her to walk past this area so that they could pick her up,

which is, as we see, pretty much what happened. Now, Michelin described these hands as being totally dark with yellowish reflections. Almost, she said, kind of like they were made out of copper. And she said that they also felt as though they were made out of metal. They were cold when they touched her, and they would eventually make contact with her. But we'll get to that in a second. She also said that they looked as though they had been roughly carved. So, you know, we're not talking like made out of, like, flesh and blood.

but that they looked like they'd been roughly carved and had a quivering appearance. So again, once Michelin entered this patch of light, she said that she felt stupefied and continued walking and that these disembodied hands waited about two or three steps before they touched her. As soon as the hands made contact with Michelin, she said that it felt like she had been struck by lightning. This shock left her pretty much paralyzed without energy or reflexes. Then they grabbed her head and wrenched it back,

against what felt like a chest. However, Michelin said that like the hands, the surface that she was pressed against, this apparent chest felt like it was made out of metal and it was very, very cold. She said that she could feel the cold actually eking through her hair, while the hands squeezed gradually tighter and tighter. Eventually the fingers moved over her eyes, nose, and mouth, again, blocking her sight and even her breathing. Then she said that the hands actually began squeezing either side of her throat and sort of throttled her back and forth before she said that she felt invisible arms on her shoulders and this strange being laughed. Now, as if that's not already terrifying enough after what is already a terrifying ordeal, Michelin said that the laugh sounded as

though it was underwater but close and right above her head. And when it stopped, she said that it was like it cut short, almost like a tape had been cut. Then she said she felt a metallic knee strike her back, and she fell backward. Now, this largely invisible force, not counting the coppery hands, then threw her to the ground and dragged her by her head along the path into a thorny bramble thicket at a really high rate of speed. When they were in the thicket, she heard this voice, which she described as, like the laughter, this kind of muffled underwater-sounding voice, say in French, there she is, we've got her, as though speaking to someone else inside the thicket. there on the banks of the Loire River, you know, this pleasant, you know, beautiful day with the flowers and the trees.

Michelin was still choking and she said that she felt like she was not going to make it. She said she thought over her life and she thought back to her family because, again, as this attack was going on, she really didn't think she'd be making it home. So this thing continued pulling her through the brush until they reached a pasture and then suddenly the force just stopped. She said that she felt the hands kind of slipped down her face and suddenly she was able to sit up in the pasture. She found that she still had her money in her bag. She wasn't robbed. And she tried to call for help.

But her voice was so hurt and it was in such pain that she really, she had even a difficult time breathing. However, just in case you thought the ordeal was over, she then heard a noise to her left inside the thicket. And she thought now she was going to see the faces of her attackers, see who this was that had you know, put her through this ordeal, but instead what she saw was extremely perplexing. Michelin claimed to see some invisible force trampling and moving the underbrush. She said that the branches were moving. The brush looked like it was literally being tramped down, but no one was there. Nothing was there to actually do this effect. So she continued on with great difficulty along the River Loire, but she was just in such a great deal of pain that

the going was very rough. Not only was she all scratch. She was literally bloody. She still felt as though she'd been electrocuted. She said that it felt like some strong current had passed through her end. She was just completely exhausted. She also had a bitter metallic taste in her mouth. Now to top it all off, she also said that she still felt as though something was touching her. This was where the thing had rested on her shoulders.

She said that her shoulders in back felt like they had been burned. Now finally, when she rounded a bend and saw the houses after five or six minutes the pain began to lessen a little bit. Quite suddenly, as she thought she was, you know, just within reach of safety, she heard a loud blast and felt a violent whirlwind kick up around her. She said that the trees bent she was thrown to the ground and a blinding light, much like what had begun her encounter, shone on her. And just as quickly as it had all started up, as it all kicked up, it stopped. A quarter of an hour had passed from the very beginning of her ordeal to the end. Now, when Michelin finally made it to this row of houses, you know, finally thinking that safety was in sight,

she was actually met by the people who lived there, a lockkeeper and his wife, who had heard the loud booming noise and wanted to come out and see what was going on. However, when they saw Michelin, that was immediately their concern because she looked like she had been attacked. They said that they could see the marks of huge fingers on her face and on her throat, as well as the scratches on her legs, which from the brambles, which they helped her bandage. Now, Michelin, you know, to her credit, she did finish her errands, she did her grocery shopping, and then continued back home, where her family listened to her story and then filed a report with the local authorities. Now, the authorities, much like we've seen in another very famous and very similar encounter, the Dechmont Woods incident, did investigate Michelin's claims and immediately went to speak with her. They found her in still pretty sorry shape, still very hurt, her face was swollen.

she had the imprints of fingers on her face and neck, and they took her to the scene of what they considered was quite literally the crime and found that it was also in quite a state. The brambles and some of the trees looked like they had been burned or charred. They were broken. A fence to the meadow was even broken, crushed, and burned. So they returned with her the next day, even though she was still feeling poorly, as though she was recovering from a bad illness.

This time, the second return to the scene of the event, they brought a police dog, which stayed only in the thicket in the meadow, never leading them past that area. So the police actually informed her that they really believed that this was some sort of attempted kidnapping. However, May 20th of 1950 was not the first strange occurrence that would befall our witness here. The night before, Michelin had been in the garden, doing some stargazing, when she saw a shooting star move across the sky, stop, and then move slowly upward among the other stars. She said that it stayed there motionless for a few moments, then it grew larger and brighter than the other stars, flickering slightly out and then back on again,

then suddenly it just moved off over the horizon at a high rate of speed. I don't know about you, but I don't really think that falling stars do that. Now, also in May, but nine years before in 1941, Michelin claimed that she had another sighting. This time in daylight, she saw what she described as a bright white star moving over the rooftops. Upon, closer examination, Miss G saw that it was a crystal-looking object that kind of oscillated, she said, sort of moving shapes from oval to round. She said that also a series of reddish dots appeared in the sky, kind of off to the side, each showing up to the left of the crystalline object, then moving away and vanishing. Misheline left to get binoculars when she got back,

all that remained was this sort of luminous, sinuous scarf, which quickly vanished. Now, this is a humdinger of a case and one that I've really been meaning to make an episode on since I first came across it in Jacques Valet's passport to McGonion. Valet would return to this case multiple times, including in drawing similarities to another case, which he included in the UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, in which a young girl was sitting with her back to a window on the sill inside of her home, when suddenly two disembodied hands, this time attached to arms, but nothing else apparently. These arms, I guess, became diffuse as they continued up to, you know, where the shoulders would be, grabbed her and tried to drag her outside. Her dog began barking at them,

and when her father arrived with his gun, because he thought, again, that there was some intruder, he found his daughter nearly unconscious and the dog barking at nothing. Now, a while back, I did an episode on disembodied hands or hands in general in paranormal phenomena. And what I found is that they are far more often at hand than you might think. From folkloric instances like Japan's Manakuta Noyore, the beckoning ghost hands are central in South America's. La Manopuluta, the hairy hand, or the hairy hands of Dartmoor's B-3212,

claim to be responsible for several crashes on that stretch of road. You also have, you know, in UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, Velley mentioned the previous case that I just mentioned, as well as a story from a rare demonological book from 1854, which relates manifestations which occurred in 1850, Normandy, where dark hands manifested and struck a child. There is another specifically hairy hand, which was believed to belong to the devil,

from a case from Elias Owen's Welsh folklore, and from Galen Cornell's poltergeists. There are numerous encounters of unseen hands, harassing witnesses, as well as a poignant encounter from 1762, where a young girl was seen to be strangled by an unseen force, which her siblings claimed looked to them like a hand, a disembodied hand on her throat. Now, to everyone else it was unseen,

but they could see the imprints of what looked like invisible fingers pressing into the girl's skin. Speaking of the hands themselves, we have this weird descriptor attached to them, and that is, you know, of course, first the copery, shimmery look to them, the rough texture, but the oscillating effect that they seem to have. I recently remarked in another video on another mid-century French case, lots of weird retro cases from that era,

the Ark Suisse-Sisson Sing-Along sighting, in which the entities were described as furry. I'm wondering if this means, instead of actually being furry, it's almost more like visually fuzzy. This oscillating fact, especially in this case, is of note. You know, it really makes me wonder if these anomalies are, you know, kind of translated into our reality as opposed to being part of it, or if they're translated, you know, even in our own minds, instead of being an objective occurrence, if that's

why so many of these encounters, people describe them as looking fuzzy or looking like oscillating or kind of weird. I mean, even the description of the voice is coming through water. It seems like there is some sort of separation there. However, the hands are really only one clown in this circus of bizariness. We have a true classic of high strangeness. We have a true classic of high strangeness, and that is the anomalous light. This case, the siting on May 20th, 1950, on the banks of the Loire River, was begun with a blinding light, and it ended with a blinding light. Now, so often it seems like encounters go through almost two parts, one part with the hard and fast entity or craft, and another with the more nebulous light anomaly. Researchers such as John

Keel often theorized that although the more concrete part of the sighting, you know, the craft, the entity, the humanoid, the whatever it is, is often the more dramatic part of the encounter. and the focus of the witness's memory or the investigation, the light accompanying the focus may be the only genuine part of the phenomenon. Now, another classic facet of high strangeness that we have in this case is the whirlwind. Now, of course, I've mentioned this many times before because it pops up in relation, especially to UFO encounters to a lesser extent, poltergeist, ghost, cryptic phenomena, but definitely there are still patterns there with that.

but folklorically it's tied to just about every type of other that you can possibly have. Notably, the gin and fairies are two belief systems that include the whirlwind as part of their traveling or abducting. Now, in this case, however, it's really intriguing to note, too, that there was trace evidence. And we see this so often where someone goes through a case which, you know, an experience, which seems to be impossible. And then suddenly, you know, if we're tempted to put it into that category, if maybe it was just flusenomeness, maybe it was just purely subjective occurrence that only the witness had. It occurred in some dream state. Suddenly there is objective confirmation that something did happen. And that's exactly what we have in this case. When the authorities got to the area, they genuinely believed that vandals had ransacked the place and done like a really thorough ransacking.

I mean, you know, not just, you know, crushing the fence and like tramping the brush. They said that stuff had been burned. You know, all of this too, of course, calls to mind. the various ground disturbances, crop circles or whatever, with UFOs. Before that, they were called flying saucer nests. There's, of course, the connection from that to Bigfoot nests. Now, the fact, too, the simple fact that this was investigated so thoroughly by the local authorities, I mean, this is also really of note because it wasn't just the trace evidence where this occurred. It was the trace evidence on Michelin's person.

She was really hurt by what it, like physically hurt by what had gone on. and also frankly terrified. Now, the authorities believed that this was an attempted abduction, though perhaps not of the alien kind, which is how this case was really spun after it was investigated, that, you know, it falls in line with a UFO abduction. Now, the fact that this case was investigated by the few authorities that they found so much trace evidence,

it really calls to mind the Declan law incident, otherwise known as Scotland's most infamous UFO citing. Now, I did a video on this case a little while ago I'll link in the description here if you would like to watch it. But the gist of it is that in 1979, a forestry worker and World War II hero by the name of Bob Taylor claimed that he came upon some large metallic object in the woods when he was doing his job,

which emitted two smaller metallic objects, which grabbed him and attempted to drag him back to the larger object. Now, both the Dathmont Law encounter and this encounter on the banks of the Loire, they're very distinct in that, you know, typically when you hear the term, you know, alien abduction, You think of, you know, the communion-style abduction, missing time, regression, hypnosis, being taken away from your bed or your home or your life, and returned with memories that are not always intact. But there is a distinct different vibe to these two cases, Declan Law and the Loire River abduction. These two cases feature a much more physical kind of of the moment sense of abduction.

Now, it is very intriguing because in so many ways, the Dechmont Law case perfectly parallels this case here. You have this anomaly cited. Bob Taylor and Dechmont Law spotted a landed craft for Michelin here in the Loire abduction, a bright light. Then you have two sets of entities, kind of. In Declan law, two little seamine-like robots. Here, a set of hands of two hands, which Michelin believed had an accomplice. So again, you have this kind of like two different parties. Anyway, two sets of entities make physical contact with the witness and began dragging them through the brush away from the path and deeper into the wilderness.

In each case as well, the witness had a noticeable pain in the throat. The experience stops but strong trace evidence remains. Now, in each case, too, the witness kind of staggers back home where their loved ones are the ones who decide, hey, we have to call the authorities because something happened. You know, even if their loved ones didn't believe that it was tiny robots or disembodied hands that did the grabbing, they really did think that this was a crime that needed to be investigated that both of these witnesses were very brutally and physically attacked by someone. Now, the amazing thing is, is that as with so many patterns across different apparent types of encounters, the song remains the same. It's just that the players differ. robots, aliens, ghosts, bigfoot fairies, even disembodied hands. Now finally, here with Michelin's case, she also has these other two sightings of things in the sky.

Now, not always, but oftentimes, when someone has one really weird thing happened, has one paranormal experience, it seems like they tend to have a bunch more as well. And I really wonder sometimes if you could catch up with these witnesses, you know, years down the road after their big event, if you'd find that other things have happened to them in the time that has transpired since then, or if they had kids, if their kids had experience or so on and so forth. You know, however, one of the biggest things to take away from this case, too, is the fact that, you know, and it reminds me so much of the Declan Law incident as well, because, you know, the paranormal is so often, it's kind of, I mean, I think it's getting better, but it is still

looked at as kind of like a fringe thing. A lot of people tend to make light of it. You know, there's always the, with UFOs especially, there's the sort of end of the newsreel scenario that it seems to be put in. But in this case, as with many other cases, I mean, Dechmont Law is another great example. The Elmwood UFO is another great example from here in Wisconsin. Witnesses go through something that really frightens them. And that is enough to change their life.

And that's enough to change their outlook on things. And, you know, it's just, it is really unfortunate that, like, you know, some people really don't take this seriously. Because even if you don't believe that in aliens or, UFOs or ghosts or whatever. These people had something happened to them which was unexplained. And it caused a real physical effect. And that out of respect for the witnesses, in my opinion, that's why it's so important to keep trying to understand what these anomalies are. Because truthfully, you know, at the end of the day, people really don't have answers about the phenomena.

I certainly don't have any answers. I've got a lot of questions about it. But I think that there is just so much worth in kind of extending that empathy, too, towards like trying to understand what people go through, especially when it is unknown and when it is frightening. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed this episode on the case of the disembodied hands of Luar. And if you're new to this field of crop circles, go ahead and subscribe to see what weirdness the future may have in store. Every other Friday, you can keep up with me on the fantastic podcast somewhere in the skies.

And you can also keep up with me on my free blog at patreon.com slash just another tinfoil hat. So for today, I'm Zelia Edgar, signing on. has been Just Another Tinfoil hat with Zelia Edgar. Be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. For full video versions of these episodes, be sure to subscribe to Just Another Tinfoil Hat on YouTube. Thank you for listening.