The 1954 French flap:

The saucers' merry-go-round

A "boiler's lid" chooses
a carrot field to land

LUNEVILLE. -- Would there be a correlation between a noted fact a few days ago by a resident of Lunéville who has a garden on the territory of the small community bordering on Rehainviller and the appearance of a "flying saucer", Sunday, appreciably at the vertical of the place where the suspect traces were discovered?

Sunday morning, a dozen inhabitants of the district Ste-Anne in Lunéville saw around 0:30 a craft of ellipsoidal shape and gray color which hoered in the sky of Rehainviller. MM. Jean-Marie and Raymond Jandel, residing on 11, cité Ste-Anne, were on their doorstep when the first exclaimed: "a saucer". He pointed to several people an object in the shape of "a boiler's lid" seeming to oscillate in the power of the wind, above the road of Rehainviller, a few kilometres from there.

Mr. Haudry, butcher on street of Lorraine in Lunéville, Mrs. Klein and his family, other people still, reident in the cities Ste-Anne, were the witnesses of this phenomenon. The saucer, which evolved like this during three or [sic] emitted volutes of smoke four minutes then disappeared above the Rehainviller forest, not without covering its retreat of a thick cloud of smoke.

Another person claimed: "It is not a bolide built by Martians, but quite simply a terrestrial guided missile which has landed."

But where did it land? Perhaps the place will be it discovered these next days by a farmer of the locality. In any case, one can establish as of now, a correlation to a few days of interval, between this appearance seen by a dozen of people worthy of faith and the preceding discovery of a site marked on a carrot field which was photographed recently from every angle by investigators in charge of pulling the lid off the "saucers."

Let's go back to this discovery. Mr. Edmond Schluk, metal worker, living street Béatricet in Lunéville, owns a vegetable garden between the railway and the Meurthe near the road which goes from Lunéville to Rehainviller through Chaufontaine. A dirt track leads to this garden of small surface where carrots and onions are grown.

Wednesday Mr. Schluk noted with amazement that part of his plantation had been destroyed. In the plain middle of the field, on about fifteen square meters, the carrot seedlings were literally crushed, the ransacked part having the shape of an ellipse. At the center, in two places of a few square centimeters, equally distant of the edges of the ellipse and clearly separated, the carrot haulms were intact as if the bottom of the mass which had been posed heavily in the garden, had two major holes.

This was enough to cause an investigation. These observations posed a number of questions, as nobody noticed during the day and the previous night any "saucer" or flying "cigar" evolving in trimmings.

No footsteps traces around the indicated place. At the outside of the ellipse and on only one side, the haulms of the vegetables had been puffed down violently. Lying or torn off, they seemed to have been flattened by the free exhaust of an engine. However, no projection of gas flaring nor of mineral matter could be found at this place nor elsewhere. Here thus in few lines, the first noted fact before the appearance, Sunday morning, of the famous "boiler's lid."