Soucoupe Volante (Flying Saucer)

In 1999, deputy mayor of Vitteaux François Sauvadet commissioned a piece of art to mark the passage into the new millennium. Ten years later, a round metal ship appeared to make a crash landing in a field on the outskirts of town.

This UFO was the work of Sylvie Fleury, the Swiss artist who Vitteaux’s mayor had asked her to make something surprising. Fleury made a series of flying saucers, the first of which was installed in Anyang, South Korea in 2007. It was not until July 2009 that one of the saucers arrived in Vitteaux. Since then, the work has been regularly been vandalized by graffiti, but it still resists human attacks.