As I mentioned at the end of my last post, during our meal with Monsieur R’s family something emerged during our conversations that surprised them immensely and answered a mystery Mick and I had been wondering about for more than two years.

But, before I get to that, another snippet from our dinner that I was remiss for not including in my last post – something that did make me giggle and also as it turns out, fortunately fits in with the heading I’ve selected for this post.

Now Mick won’t want me writing this, but it is funny. Even he has to admit that, after all he did draw about it in our diary.

As we were cleaning up after our meal with Monsieur R’s family, I recalled several animated conversations Mick had with Monsieur R’s wife, sadly I can’t recall the exact topic. Mick thought he was saying in his best French that he loved ‘it’ – “je l’aime“, unsure what ‘it’ was, but he actually was saying “je t’aime” – which means I love you – (the difference between the letter L and the letter T is extremely significant). He did not say this once, he said it at least four times. Perhaps that was why he was able to win Monsieur R’s wife over so easily – she couldn’t believe her ears!!

Now to the surprise of our evening with Monsieur R’s family.

Some of you who have followed my blog for awhile might recall a story where I mentioned we had an encounter with two hitchhikers we picked up near Bugarach in December 2016 when we were house sitting in the same location as now. I wrote a post about that entitled You Won’t Believe This!

We don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but these two looked pretty safe. In my post back then I mentioned that the gentleman was a bit upset with us for not recognising him, and I also thought his name was Claude, but I was not sure. My attempts at Googling him came up blank back then.

Anyway, during our dinner conversation we were asked if we had been to Bugarach and did we know about its interesting history linked to the prophecy that the village would be spared from the 2012 Apocalypse.

Answer – “Of course we have and of course we did. We actually have an interesting story about Bugarach.”

We then went on to tell them of our encounter with the “New Messiah” back in 2016. That comment brought the dinner conversation to a new level. They knew who we were talking about. The gentleman, not called Claude as I thought, was quite a famous character and we were told his name was Sylvain Durif.

In December 2016, the hitchhiker had spoken to us in English (obviously) and told us he was the New Messiah, but in French his title was either “Le Grand Monarche” or “Christ Cosmique” – as per this newspaper article which Google can translate for you.

Mick and I were both relieved we had not dreamt the encounter we had with him. He did look a little different when we met him as he was wearing a beanie and we did not know about his receding hair. It was winter after all and it was freezing the day we picked him up.

But, it was definitely Sylvain Durif.

The newspaper article you can read if you like clearly states he was indeed running for the Presidential elections in 2017, and some of his promises were very noble, while most of the others were absolutely whacky – like building extraterrestrial base stations.

He also was promising that people could practice their own religions, but that he would be called the new messiah (le nouveau messie).

I’ve sourced these images for Sylvain Durif from the internet of course – there are hundreds of them and loads of videos as well.

The information I have found is a bit confusing, and the language difference obviously contributes to that. In some articles it is claimed that his presidential election campaign was a total hoax – something to trick journalists and the public. And perhaps it was. But he did get loads of publicity. I liked this one in particular.

Which had the following caption….

Donald Trump prêt à travailler avec Sylvain Durif sur la question de l’immigration spatiale – Donald Trump ready to work with Sylvain Durif on the issue of space migration.

Monsieur R informed us during our conversation that Sylvain Durif was now deceased, having died in a car accident.

But is he?

Once again there are conflicting snippets of information about his death.

In one newspaper article the following information was provided about his death – which Google has translated as follows.

According to his relatives, the cosmic Christ has returned to his planet.
According to the police, he died in a flying saucer accident made by his cousin.
According to the railwaymen, he just took the train of the apocalypse of 2012 4 years late.

But wherever the truth lies, one thing we know for certain is that Mick and I met him!

Our mystery is now solved.