The 1954 French flap:

Are we late?

The flying saucers
and other cigars
hardly infest the sky of Calais

We talk a lot, currently of flying saucers, flying cigars, and other craft that are supposed to come from another planet... In all corners of France, the sky is infested with these luminous apparatuses that raise so much controversy.

In recent times, the Nord Department has starred thanks to this Quarouble worker who saw in the night, very close to his home him an "authentic saucer with two no less authentic inhabitants of another world."

The Calaisians are more down to earth. Similarly in the immediate vicinity of our City where the flying saucers made only very weak appearances, apart from that of Bois-en-Ardres.

We reported in recent days in our regional page the evolution of this machine seen one evening by a brave couple of the place.

Following this article, one of our fellow citizens, a member of secondary education in our city, living in the Petit-Courgain, told us that one of these last evenings, while he was in his garden, he saw, heading towards the sea, a very luminous machine, of green color, leaving a clear trail behind itself.

According to him, it was not a shooting star because this machine could easily be followed:

- I'm not saying it's a flying saucer or a flying cigar, he explained, but I can only report what I saw.

In another domain, we came very close to an eminent scholar from the Coquelles region, Mr. Auguste Lefebvre, farm cultivator of the "Petite Rouge Cambre", notorious prehistorian and member for 17 years of the Astronomical Society of France.

We know that this scientist, who has not given up field work, has a collection that can, some time, change what we know about the prehistory of our region.

In addition, he installed a real observatory which allows him to examine the sky with great precision:

- Despite all my good will, because this case interests me, told us Mr. Auguste Lefebvre, I never saw in the sky, the slightest suspicious luminous craft. There are many shooting stars, of course, but the comparison cannot be sustained. This does not mean that I reject, a priori, the hypothesis of interplanetary craft, because man would be very bold to claim that only the earth is populated.