File PR-R08 · Prophecy · Fact recordFiled 2026-09-18

What is the Thiaoouba Prophecy?

The Thiaoouba Prophecy is a 1993 book in which Michel Desmarquet, a French-born Cairns resident, describes a roughly ten-day journey to a distant planet in June 1987, presented to readers as a true account rather than fiction. No independent evidence supports it: Desmarquet is the only witness, no outside library or archive holds his original French manuscript, and even the English text was revised years later by his own authorized representative rather than an independent editor. Reliable outside coverage of the book is thin, and what can be checked does not support the claim.

What the book claims

The Thiaoouba Prophecy is a book by the French-born Michel Desmarquet, first published in English in Australia in 1993, presented as a true, first-person account rather than a novel. Desmarquet said he was taken from his home near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland, in June 1987, and spent about ten days on a planet called Thiaoouba before returning with instructions to write down what he had learned. No independent evidence supports the story. Desmarquet is the only source for it, and none of the outside verification such a claim would need, from astronomers, other witnesses or independent investigators, appears anywhere in the public record.

Can you read the full book online?

Not legally for free. The Thiaoouba Prophecy is a book by Michel Desmarquet, first published in English in Australia in 1993, and it is still under copyright, so Real or Legend does not reproduce it. Library catalog records and the author's official site are in the sources below.

Who Michel Desmarquet was

Desmarquet was born in Normandy, France, in 1931 and, at 16, joined the French military in central Africa, where he later acquired a share of a coffee plantation. He then spent time in New Caledonia growing tomatoes before settling near Cairns, where he worked as a landscape architect and built his own cyclone-resistant house, according to the biography posted on the book's authorized website. He said his contact with Thiaoouba took place there in June 1987. He later moved to Vietnam around 2000 and died in 2018.

Where the story first appeared

According to the same authorized website, Desmarquet spent nearly three years writing the account by hand in French, which he said he did under telepathic instruction after returning from the journey. The first published edition appeared in Australia in 1993 under the title Abduction to the 9th Planet, a title the authorized site says the editor chose and that misrepresented the book's actual content. A 1995 print run of 10,000 copies in the United States went unsold, and Australian bookstores turned down further printings.

How the book found its audience

Desmarquet then authorized retitling the book Thiaoouba Prophecy. A WorldCat library record shows an Arafura Publishing edition under that title, printed in Melbourne and dated 1997. Dr. Tom Chalko, who says he organized more than fifty public lectures for Desmarquet and stayed in direct contact with him from 1995 to 2017, began promoting the retitled book that year and has run its authorized website since 1996. Later editions followed in multiple languages, including an English edition catalogued in 2022 and a Russian edition catalogued in 2020, both listed by the library aggregator Open Library.

What the book says happened

In the book, a being named Thao takes Desmarquet to a planet the text calls Thiaoouba, which the authorized website places roughly 100 to 200 light years away, possibly in the Hyades star cluster, reached by a method the book calls trans-substantiation rather than conventional travel through space. Desmarquet describes advanced, human-like inhabitants and returns with teachings that humanity's purpose is spiritual development, that material technology without spiritual growth leads to catastrophe, and that the Thiaoouba beings' level of consciousness compares to that of Jesus and Moses.

Why the translation is not the original

No French-language edition of Desmarquet's original handwritten manuscript has surfaced in any library catalog or archive checked for this record. Between 1996 and 1999, Chalko says he corrected inaccuracies in the English translation by comparing it against Desmarquet's French pages, and later foreign-language editions were translated from that corrected English text rather than from the French original. Every published version in circulation today is therefore at least one translation removed from what Desmarquet first wrote by hand, and the changes made along the way are not independently documented.

Why this can't be independently checked

This record found no independent, reliable coverage of Desmarquet's claims: no library catalog, scholarly publication or established news outlet examined for it corroborates the journey itself, and no astronomer has confirmed a planet matching the book's description. The only detailed accounts of Desmarquet's life and the book's history come from the book itself and from Chalko's authorized website, which is not an independent source. That does not prove the account false on its own, but it means the central claim, a physical journey to another planet, rests entirely on one person's testimony.

Verdict

Real or Legend files the Thiaoouba Prophecy as disputed, the stamp this archive uses when evidence is missing. A real book exists, with a documented publishing history: a French manuscript, a commercially unsuccessful 1993 English edition, a renamed 1997 edition that found a wider audience, and later translations built on a revised English text rather than the original. But the central claim, presented to readers as fact, is a solitary, unfalsifiable account with no independent witness, no physical evidence and no outside verification of any kind. Nothing in the published record supports treating it as a true story.