Belgian labourer whose left leg carried an ununited compound fracture for eight years, the bone ends described by named physicians as some three centimetres apart with the wound still open, and which closed at the Lourdes grotto replica at Oostacker in April 1875.
Why the case is unusually hard
It is one of the few items in the Marian record that was documented by physicians before the event as well as after it, and where the physical substrate outlived the patient: the bones were exhumed and photographed, and the case was published in a scientific review, the Revue des Questions Scientifiques, in October 1899 by Van Hoestenberghe, Deschamps and Royer. The Invisible College uses it, with the Lourdes Apparitions 1858 candle test, as the strongest medical material in its comparison of the Marian record with landing cases.
What it does not settle
Nothing about mechanism, and nothing about the UFO record. Its function in Jacques Vallee’s argument is narrower than it looks: it is there to show that the tradition contains items which were examined rather than only told, which is what makes the comparison admissible at all.
Connections
The Invisible College · Lourdes Apparitions 1858 · Jacques Vallee · Fatima 1917 · Control System Hypothesis