The 1954 French flap:

SAUCERS

(CONTINUATION)

4 characters tall "like 11-year-old children"

walk on the R.N. 631 (Tarn) before reentering their machine

TOULOUSE, October 12 ("France-Soir" newsbrief).

Mr. JEAN-PIERRE MITTO, technician, affirmed yesterday to have seen, Saturday evening, around 8:30 p.m., at the location called La Caiffe, on the road RN 631, a flying saucer and its passengers.

Mr. Mitto made the following statement:

- Coming from Toulouse, I returned at my parents', in Briatexte (Tarn), in company of my two cousins. I drove quite fast. After the contour of La Caiffe, we distinguished two small characters - the size of a child from 11 to 12 years old - crossing the road, at four or five meters before the car, and which jumped in the meadow.

"I slowed down and stopped twenty meters further. The time to go down and we saw flying away at the vertical a large convex disc, of a diameter of six meters approximately. The machine, of red orange color, seemed to be sucked up and disappeared in the sky like a fireworks."

False Martians at the Porte des Lilas...

A strange apparatus, equipped with a powerful headlight, has just landed Porte des Lilas," several readers of "France-Soir" phoned us simultaneously yesterday, at 08:30 p.m.

Information taken on the spot, it was actually a police car equipped with a projector which swept the vacant sites of the "Collines Rouges", where vagabonds had been reported.

THE FLYING SAUCERS: A COMPLEX

You have ... or you don't have the saucer complex!

Much more than a question of belief, it's a matter of logic.

But we have to believe that common sense is no longer the fundamental quality of the average Frenchman, since several tens of thousands of apparently healthy individuals buy "France-Poire" [=joke about the France-Soir newspaper] only to document themselves on flying saucers!

This is a good sign of ... let's say ... gullibility!

Because, apart from the fact that "France-Poire" is certainly not the paper to choose to get valid information on anything, it takes a commendable application in stupidity to think for a single moment that the inhabitants of any planet could consider Earth as a possible vacation spot. We have what it takes - as moral monsters - to deter the rest of the Universe...

As implausible as it sounds, there are people out there who believe it! As in the Bible. As in the Christ of Montfavet! The flying saucers have a merit however...: thanks to them, to the legend with which they are haloed, the nuts go out of their shells! The saucers allow us to unmask, to identify all that our sweet France has of crazy, hallucinated, repressed and mentally challenged people. They are given the opportunity to manifest themselves, they use it, profit from it, abuse it. They believe it, they see it, their poor disturbed heads are filled with saucers of all formats, bearded and unbearded Martians, green or red rays of light. It's Jules Verne for weak brains. All these people are ready for the asylum, for a drug shot... and the subscription to "France-Poire"! One even cites cases of collective dementia.

The rotten press is there, well there, creating the psychosis of fear, of the occult! Too bad if the degenerates get excited! What does it matter to defeat the primary scums of the poor buggers! You have to create the myth of the saucers, it rises the sales! Let us flatter the public's lower instincts, organize the ignoble publicity hype, on this enormous joke!

So they all buy it together, the poor sods from the provinces and elsewhere! Panic, cowardice, anxiety, all cowardly reflexes are unleashed. Without shame.

Very recently a character shot at his neighbor who was cleaning his car and who had been caught in the beam of headlights for a moment!

He mistook him for a Martian! In the suburbs of Paris (at Les Lilas) a group of idiots called "France-Poire" (naturally). They had just seen a large object land in the area! Quick check: it was only a police car which searched the wasteland with its headlights, to unmask tramps, prowlers...

By the way! What did the police want with them, with these tramps, these prowlers? Provide them with accommodation, work? Give them the means to become men again? We are not told...

Never mind, to equate our cops with Martians is to do them a lot of honor! And it is lack of courtesy for the "others"!

From every corner of the province, testimonies are pouring in. A peaceful army of bearded and hairy Martians occupies our smallest villages. The French hamlet which, at present, would not have had its saucer, would be dishonored!

There is no particular social category to classify saucer voyeurs in. It concerns the roadmender, the garage owner, the grocer and the local idiot... as well as the notary. Sometimes it is the mayor himself who poses as a visionary. And he is left in office... But the privileged, the lucky guys, they are still the cops! It's as we tell you: the Martians, not disgusted for two cents, easily sympathize with the gendarmes and the country guards!

There it is... the prestige of the uniform!

Bah.,. "THEY" will change their minds! Ultimately, there are only people whose job is to scan the sky (astronomers, observers) who, although equipped with powerful detection devices, have never seen a saucer! No chance! It doesn't do them any good in their profession! Soon, we will point the finger at "the man-who-has-never-seen-a-saucer". And he will be locked up in the mental house as long as he protests! So goes our planet...

Let us not forget the pranksters who have cheap fun; by inflating brightly painted balloons and sending them to wander in the atmosphere... and terrorizing all the crackpots of towns and villages.

The day we realize that the saucers - if there are any - are of purely terrestrial (and human) design they will no longer interest anyone. Or almost. It will only be science! What a disappointment for all the occult, for all the lunatics of the Mars complex!

In the meantime, the topic is gold for "France-Poire"! It will be pressed to the end. This stimulates sales and allows the ... "largest French newspaper" to put in the background - behind the saucers and the escort girls - the problem of world rearmament and social demands. For the government press, it is obvious that the favors of "Martine or Lolo" and the idyll of the Martian and the gendarme are much more important than unemployment and non-reconstruction!

We tell you, the saucers are useful for something...

René TERRIER.