Somewhere out there are billions of galaxies, billions of stars, and probably as many planets as there are grains of sand on a beach. Faced with such staggering numbers, historian Philippe Baudouin does not hesitate: “what would be unreasonable is to think we are alone in the universe.” What form that life might take, microbial or intelligent, is another matter entirely. On that point, he admits, “I’m simply incapable of telling you.” Perhaps that is why he chose to curate UFOs rather than extraterrestrials themselves, leaving photography to tell the story that science cannot yet prove. Winner of the Rencontres d’Arles’ 2025 curatorial research grant, he presents “Nous ne sommes pas seuls. Images extraterrestres” (“We Are Not Alone. Extraterrestrial Images”) at Espace Croisière, on view through October 4, 2026.

And then, there is this image in the exhibited ones that needs no galaxy to fascinate: a man, his flying saucer, sitting there as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Taken by photographer Yves Bosson, Jean-Claude Ladrat, constructeur de soucoupes volantes (Jean-Claude Ladrat, Builder of Flying Saucers) dates from 1993, the year an entire generation discovered this man from the Charente region in a cult episode of the French television show Strip-Tease, La Soucoupe et le perroquet (The Saucer and the Parrot). Many still remember it: Ladrat, building in his mother’s garden in Germignac a craft bound for the Bermuda Triangle, his mother Suzanne keeping watch over a stuffed parrot she intended “to be buried with,” and that now-famous line, a kind of poetics of amateur ufology: “It will be much easier to come back from the fourth dimension than to get there.” Baudouin savors the coincidence: this photograph had “never been published or shown.” It had been sitting in Bosson’s archives, a photographer who, as is often the case in this story, was himself a ufologist, the author of a documentary that never saw the light of day, “for reasons unknown.” Blind, it must be said, could not resist putting it on the cover of an article about the festival program. Some images have that power, somewhere between memory, tenderness, and fascination for a passion not everyone can always take seriously.

Yves Bosson, Jean-Claude Ladrat, Builder of Flying Saucers, 1993 © Yves Bosson / Agence Martienne

1963, Paul VILLA, 255-GS-65-110 © US National Archives

Inside the exhibition, everything begins with a poster. The world-famous one, from The X-Files, that I Want to Believe pinned to the walls of teenage bedrooms in the 1990s, Philippe Baudouin’s included. “What I’m telling is that when this poster was created for the very first season, Chris Carter’s team used a photo from 1975, taken by an obscure Swiss farmer,” he says. The man’s name is Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier, born in 1937, still alive today, credited with photographing more than 1,400 UFOs over the Swiss countryside between 1975 and 1980. One of his images was used, “without authorization, by the way,” to create the television icon. Right from the entrance, the exhibition lays out its whole program: beneath the most popular fiction lies a document. And beneath that document, a mystery that will never quite be resolved.

Baudouin is not a ufologist, he insists, “not at all.” Trained as a philosopher and art historian, he spent about a decade writing on occultism and spiritism, where the question of the invisible is central, before he turned to this other literature of the invisible that UFOs represent. He has a name for his own method: “the only tenable position is that of the open skeptic.” In other words: staying “conscientious, careful,” without ever “radicalizing” one’s doubt. “It’s the school of why not,” he sums up, meaning one remains open to the physical possibility of these phenomena while maintaining “that epistemological caution.”

He carried that same balance into the exhibition design. Half the show is devoted to archives, the other half to purely creative works, placed “opposite each other, face to face.” Because the UFO phenomenon, he says, “exists at once on the margins of science” and is “essentially perceptual,” a fact one sees in the sky before it becomes a fact one proves. It keeps the visitor within “a border zone” where nothing can be fully affirmed, and nothing fully dismissed either.

Ten years ago, Baudouin was already tracking 19th-century ghosts on the photographic plates of spiritists, in a striking exhibition at the École de Médecine in Paris. Today he finds the exact same symptoms among UFO hunters: “the same problems, the same difficulties,” the blurriness, the grain, the authenticity that gets questioned, the fraud that gets suspected. “UFOs are, in a way, the photographic heirs of 19th-century ghosts.” The one real thing spiritism and ufology have in common: “the photographic instrument,” and the investigation that must always follow it. In the wall texts, Baudouin does not cheat: there are “photographs that are clearly scams” as well as photographs “whose story we still don’t have the final word on.”

George Stock, 29/07/1952, 16h30, Passiac, New Jersey © Collection Philippe Baudouin

What today’s moment rarely does, amid declassifications and hearings in Washington, is look at a UFO the way one looks at a photograph, for its form. “It’s very rare to approach the question of UFOs from an artistic and aesthetic point of view,” Philippe Baudouin notes, before revealing the curator’s true creed: “the first thing I put forward is the plastic beauty of these objects.” To consider UFOs as “plastic, photographic objects” before they are threats, evidence, or hoaxes.

The exhibition follows that thread: first pure form, isolated in the sky, almost “ideal figures”; then the encounter, always human, “with witnesses”; then, finally, the beliefs and cults these encounters give rise to. “Keeping the throughline that is the human experience,” he says. A progression that moves, in short, from the visible to the raw.

Two images, among the hundred on view, stop him in particular. The first, aerial, captured by chance over Costa Rica in the early 1970s by a plane fitted for cartography, with cameras “that weigh dozens of kilos” and are of “formidable precision.” Above a lake, a metallic disc several dozen meters across, invisible to the pilots’ eyes, discovered only “when the film was developed.” A hovering object, or one that surged from the depths? In that case it would no longer be a UFO but a “USO,” an unidentified submarine object, a term that does in fact exist, “I’m not joking.” The anecdote is not incidental: 80% of the oceans remain uncharted, 95% unexplored, even as people today are building ways to get to Mars. The mystery, in truth, does not need the sky.

The curator’s other favorite photograph dates from 1974, in the Alpilles region. Jean Bedet, an amateur ufologist, comes home empty-handed from yet another night of observation. His wife, who had stayed home alone, greets him with a different story: she saw a UFO, “not by herself,” she went and “woke the neighbors up so no one would think I was crazy.” A few days later, on his car’s windshield, an anonymous envelope, a slide inside: a green and orange UFO, beams shooting out from under the saucer, a “magnificent” photograph, signed by a local doctor who “wishes to remain anonymous.” Back home, Baudet shows the picture to his wife. She recognizes, instantly, the object from that night. End of story, almost too perfect to be fiction.

Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier, Third Photograph in a Series of Eight Images Depicting a “Pleiadian spacecraft”, Ober-Sädelegg, Switzerland, March 8, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and FIGU.

Tracking down these images required, Baudouin says, “a whole network, an address book,” French associations, and collectors too, “because these are photographs that sell for a fortune”: a parallel market, in auction houses, where certain prints go for “tens of thousands of dollars.” His own collection, meanwhile, fits on a single shelf: a few old magazines, a handful of prints given to him by an elderly ufologist who, upon retiring, “wanted to turn the page.”

Out of this material will come, in October, O.V.N.I., une histoire photographique (UFO, A Photographic History, Hoëbeke), continuing an earlier atlas in which Baudouin traced, this time on Earth, how our projections into the sky had inspired museums, steles, and monuments. The imprint of the sky, brought back down. One last question, an obligatory one, returns at last, the one left hanging since the beginning: what form might this life take, the one Baudouin considers, statistically, too improbable to rule out? He has no answer, only a hypothesis “to be taken very seriously,” like everything else in the exhibition. The school of why not, to the very end.

“Nous ne sommes pas seuls. Images extraterrestres” (“We Are Not Alone. Extraterrestrial Images”) is on view at Espace Croisière, as part of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, through October 4, 2026. Catalogue: O.V.N.I., une histoire photographique (UFO, A Photographic History, Hoëbeke), forthcoming October 2026.

We Are Not Alone: A Fascinating Photographic History of UFOs