The Disembodied Hands of the Loire w/ Zelia Edgar

Summary

On May 20, 1950, a young Frenchwoman named Micheline G. was walking along the Loire River when a blinding light appeared and two cold, coppery, disembodied hands seized her, choked her, and dragged her through a bramble thicket while an unseen being laughed in a muffled, underwater voice. Police found finger marks on her face and throat, and burned, broken brush and fencing at the scene, and initially treated it as an attempted kidnapping. Host Zelia Edgar explores why this case, featured in Jacques Vallee's work, is one of the most frightening and physical abduction accounts on record, and how it echoes Scotland's Dechmont Law incident and centuries of folklore about phantom hands.

Key takeaways

• 1The encounter took place around 4 p.m. on May 20, 1950, near the commune of Givry in central France. It was first reported in the French journal Lumières dans la Nuit (Jan/Feb 1967) and later in the MUFON UFO Journal.
• 2The witness described the hands as dark and copper-like with yellowish reflections, roughly carved, cold and metallic, and 'quivering.' She heard a voice say in French 'There she is, we've got her' and was left with a bitter metallic taste in her mouth.
• 3A lock keeper and his wife saw huge finger marks on her face and throat. Police found charred, broken brambles and a crushed, burned fence, and a police dog would not go beyond the thicket and meadow.
• 4The witness reported earlier sightings: a 'shooting star' that stopped and rose upward the night before, and a shape-shifting crystalline object with reddish dots in May 1941.
• 5Jacques Vallee discussed the case in 'Passport to Magonia' and compared it to a case in 'UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union,' in which disembodied arms tried to drag a girl out through a window.
• 6Edgar compares the case to Robert Taylor's 1979 Dechmont Law incident in Scotland and to folklore about phantom hands, including the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor's B3212 road, a 1762 case of a girl strangled by an unseen hand, and an 1850 Normandy case recorded in an 1854 demonological book.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

is the season the season of green buy a kit from RYOBI get one tool free buy a leaf blower with power to spare get a free string trimmer as a gift to share buy RYOBI 2-2 combo kit get a free sander jigsaw or a sip if a battery kit is just what you need get a free verse clamp speaker to place under the tree and when boot prints and cookies create quite a mess a stick back and handbag cleans it all with less stress now with more gifts than ever before buy a kit from RYOBI and get all this and more only at the Home Depot Micheline walked briskly along the 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...

Excerpt from Somewhere in the Skies, Jul 24, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.