Irishwoman Jennifer Harpur lives in the region and loves to go walking on the mountain. She doesn’t believe the rumors of aliens, but she, too, has felt something there. “There is a strange kind of feeling,” she said. “As you turn around, the wind either makes lots and lots of noise in your ear, but you turn around slightly to the left or slightly to the right and it’s very, very silent. So it’s a kind of eerie feeling.” Patrice Etienne runs a small local cafe and does a brisk trade in T-shirts and postcards of the mountain with superimposed orbs. He has no doubt there are strange goings-on on the mountain. “We can see flying objects,” he said. “It’s moving so fast you cannot see it with your eyes, without a camera … During the night, there’s a lot of strange lights, like falling stars, going down and up again. It’s really strange.” It’s those reports that have attracted New Agers and healers and the simply curious for years. With the latest rumors that Bugarach will be saved, the mayor has called in the army and banned access to the mountain during the weekend, concerned the tiny village will be overrun by thousands of outsiders. “The police don’t know if there will be no one, or throngs of people, so we had to put some security in place,” Delord said. Some local residents, like Austin, believe the mayor should have kept quiet, and blame him for stirring up all this interest in Bugarach.