The 1954 French flap:

Transforner craft in Marcoing,
under the eyes of about forty
people, including the entire gendarmerie

Sunday between 8:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m., Miss Anne-Marie Pérut, 20 years old, daughter of a gendarme of the Marcoing brigade, saw through the window of her bedroom a very bright glow. She approached and noticed that less than a kilometer from the gendarmerie, above the Couillet wood, a very large ball of fire to which was suspended a second ball in the shape of a nacelle, which swayed, remained motionless in the sky.

She immediately alerted her father who refused to believe her. Mr. Pérut finally resolved to come and see the "thing", and to make sure he was not the victim of a hallucination, he warned all his colleagues and their families.

More than twenty people were soon to contemplate the phenomenon. The gendarmerie allowed itself to stop the cyclists coming from Masnières and going to Marcoing. More than thirty spectators attended the show. For more than a quarter of an hour the two fireballs remained almost immobile at around 500 to 600 meters above sea level, moving vertically at times.

Suddenly, they turned into an elongated shape that we readily call a cigar. The latter then moved horizontally almost as far as the eye could see and returned to the same place in the form of a spinning top. When the latter disappeared definitively in the direction of Viller-Plouich, that is to say Southwest, a rather bright gleam persisted for quite a long time in the sky.

The 30 or 40 spectators, including all the gendarmes of the Marcoing brigade, tried in vain to consider themselves hallucinated. They were all the more disturbed because the place where the saucer was seen is considered to be a strategic spot. Their emotion was at its height when a few minutes later a plane circled this area.

Note that the phenomenon was seen by several people of Marcoing, of Noyelles-sur-Escaut and by cyclists traveling between Iwuy and Escaudières.

October 3 [, 1954]

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08:00 p.m.: Marcoing (8 km SSW Cambrai)/Iwuy/Escaudeuvres/Noyelles-sur-Escaut/Masnières [sic]: 2 lum. spheres on top of each other

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The weekend of October 2-3 appears on all graphs as the maximum-maximorum of the 1954 wave. Although the work of counting the press of the time is not yet finished, the 118 various issues of newspapers and magazines I have been able to analyze for this period gives us an almost complete overview, in any case very broadly representative of the regional observations which were reported in the press for Sunday, October 3. I included the observations of the Somme which seemed to me inseparable from those of Nord - Pas-de-Calais and which also appear in the chapter entitled "Zigzag on the mining country" of the book by A. Michel: "Mystérieux Objets Célestes."

I count, as one case, each observation made by an independent group of witnesses. The astonishing quantity of observations reported below, shows once again the interest of thoroughly searching the newspaper archives.

OCTOBER 3, 1954:

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18) 08:30 p.m., NOYELLES S/ ESCAUT _59_ : Witnesse saw the same phenomenon than in Marcoing. (5/10: VdN, p.3)

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The Fabulous day of October 3, 1954

[...]

Chronology of the observations of October 3.

We give here only a summary of what was published in the press of the time, for the Nord region, regardless of what the ufologists could later say. We have numbered all these observations, the first of which have nothing to do with the setting of the moon, in order to be able to study them globally in a table. Some are already the subject of a special file.

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18) 08:30 p.m., NOYELLES-SUR-ESCAUT (59)

- Witnesses saw the same phenomenon than in Marcoing.

(La Voix du Nord 5/10 page 3)

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All this is only a compilation of the information given by all newspapers of the time, including local editions, and of which ufologists only used a part.

We will see that the analysis of this information makes it possible to eliminate the hypothesis of a flying saucer, in favor of those of multiple observations of the moon, whose image was reddened and deformed by clouds, which also gave it a illusory apparent movement.

Analysis of the observations of October 3, 1954

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18) 20 h 30, NOYELLES-SUR-ESCAUT (59)

proximity with the identifiable case of Marcoing

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