In 1999, he announced that, at the age of seventeen, he had had visions of Parisians in flames throwing themselves into the Seine and that after studying other concordant prophecies, he came to the conclusion that the Mir space station was going to crash in France at the time of the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, its debris causing thousands of deaths in Paris and in the Gers region. On 10 May 1999, he publicly undertakes not to make any more predictions if Mir does not crash into Paris on 11 August 1999. However, he claims to have had an apparition of the Virgin telling him to continue the predictions.