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 11 August 1999, its debris causing thousands of deaths in Paris and in the Gers region. On 10 May 1999, he publicly undertook not to make any more predictions if Mir did not crash into Paris on 11 August 1999. However, he claimed to have had an apparition of the Virgin Mary telling him to continue the predictions.
Despite this episode, which tarnished his reputation among the public and the media, he continued to appear regularly in the specialized press, dealing more with the subject of his so-called paranormal experiences than that of high fashion.
