The 1954 French flap:

SAUCERS AND CIGARS

IN THE CORREZIAN SKY

Disturbing observations, certainly, but nothing that could help to unravel the mystery

In the incredible sarabande that every day (or every night) saucers and cigars and apparatuses of all kinds lead in the sky of our planet, the Corrèze has not, so far, gotten the lion's share.

But I am tempted to write that if we did not get the quantity however we got the quality.

By this I mean that the few observations made in our region were made by serious people whose good faith and judgment cannot be doubted.

Mr. Mazaud of Bugeat gained a solid reputation not because he was the first to see the "flying cigar" even before the findings made in the sky of Rome, but also because his encounter with a curious person, Which one assumes to be the pilot or passenger of the mysterious machine, a character of the most "terrestrial" type that is contrary to what some write with a little too much fantasy.

Several weeks after other witnesses just as serious as M. Mazaud saw in the sky between Forgès and Saint-Chamont another flying cigar which moved a bit in the manner of an aircraft and which suddenly dove vertically.

But to these two serious observations must be added a third observed by a government employee who wishes to remain anonymous. I understand this a little.

"Saturday," he said, "I drove on the road from Egletons to Lapleau in the company of my wife, enjoying a nice morning we went to the neighboring woods to pick up mushrooms. Suddenly I saw in the sky an elongated machine, very bulging in the center, throwing metallic reflections towards the ground, the apparatus descended gradually, then disappeared suddenly behind the wooded hill in a south-easterly direction. When I reached a ridge I scanned the sky but I realized that the mysterious machine had disappeared.

My informant is formal, he did observe this extraordinary aerial ship; it was not a plane, at least not a plane of any known type. There was no [?]. It therefore belongs to the category of the flying cigars.

In the "flying saucer" category, the most serious observation seems to be that of Mr. Besse, which we did report in detail. He was able to observe the machine using binoculars. Other troubling facts were noted. But they do not have the precision of Mr. Besse's observations.

Thus in Puy-de-Noix, commune of Sainte-Fortunade on the road from Tulle to Beaulieu, several people observed a phenomenon inexplicable in their eyes.

It was Mr. Sol who gave the "alarm". At the moment when he was entering his house, from which he oversees a vast [hamlet?], he perceived at the height of a distant ridge in the direction of Falazinges a luminous ball which was moving, while changin in intensity. Mr. Sol called his son. Mr. Lherbe, a neighbor was also invited to come and observe the luminous ball, it moved irregularly, at one time it seemed that it wanted to go towards the village of Puy-de-Noix, but it returned to Falazinges. The night was dark, so we consider several explanations, an automobile headlight, the headlight of a tractor performing its nocturnal plowing. But we were obliged to consent that it could not be a headlight, since we could not see the luminous beam on the ground.

In the village of Puy-de-Noix, one still wonders about it.

Such are, among the various observations made in Correze, and have come to our knowledge, those that seem the most serious to us. They are troubling but they do not, alas, bring the final word of the enigma. -- V.A.