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SPACESHIP OBSERVATION REPORT
Statement by Mr. Chaloupek of Issy les Moulineaux (Seine)
"It was on Sunday June 8, 1952 towards 02:30 p.m. - 15:00 p.m.; a very beautiful day, and I would not have been at home if I were not retained there by the end of a Vincent angina of Vincent who had weakened me enough. I live opposite the Parc des Expositions exhibition site, I thus have a very beautiful sight very clear ahead. Sat in front of my opened French window, I gazed at all and nothing, and only by chance did I look upwards and it is there that my glance was struck by a small brilliant round spot. I believed to be misled, looked elsewhere and looked at it again; there was no mistake. I called my wife and asked her what she saw in the direction of my finger; "a brilliant pastille" she said to me and almost at once: "but there is another one." Indeed there was another one under the same angle (approximately 80°) at a distance of approximately 1 meter at arm's length. The discs were the thickness of a thumb's nail, silver, and scintillated with the sun. There was a gentle wind, the objects did not move, and that during the 20 minutes that we observed them. Then the dots became smaller, they rose and became quickly completely invisible. We were alone in the house that day, thus we had no other witnesses unfortunately.
To note I did the investigation.
Communicated by Mr. R. Veillith "Les Pins"
LE CHAMBON SUR LIGNON (Haute-Loire)
Born in 1923 in Paris, the young Henri Chaloupek was a science fiction buff. He became craftsman-furrier, discovered Kenneth Arnold's sighting by chance in a newspaper and developed a deep interest for the flying saucers issue, joining Alfred Nahon's group of enthusiasts "A.M.I.", the "World Interplanetary Association" whose objective was "to tell the truth on the interplanetary ships and to prepare the arrival of our space friends".
It was during the first flap of sightings in France in 1952 that he made the observation noted by Raymond Veillith, the future founder of the magazine "Lumières Dans la Nuit". The text appeared in issue 12 of "Le Courrier Interplanétaire" (the Interplanetary Mail), the bulletin of the A.M.I.
The handwritten line by Veillith, "I did the investigation" should not be taken differently than the indication by Mr. Veillith that he did note the statement by Henri Chaloupek. In 1952 in France, the concept of ufological investigation was only to note the statements of witnesses, and eventually some remark that they are of "good faith", and headline the story "spaceship sighting".
In fact, one can ask whether the Exhibition site for example did not simply launch a pair of balloons that day. The angular size given by Mr. Chaloupek is actually probably to be understood literally as the thickness of a thumb's nail at arm's length and not its width. The nail's width would be three to four times the size of Full moon. It is practically impossible, if the objects had been so big, that he would not have seen the second one immediately. The surface winds and the winds at various altitudes are not the same, this is actually one of the reason balloons are used to probe wind speeds at various altitudes. There were thus probably indeed two "shining dots", rather small, so that it was not easy to notice them, "small brilliant round spots" in the sky which ended up being lost from sight in the higher sky; this constitutes a good description of ordinary balloons or weather balloons with nothing that would give any reasons to call them interplanetary spaceship as suggested by R. Veillith's headline.
Henri Chaloupek had his interest for the flying saucers expectedly reinforced by this sighting, he became a member of the ufology group GEPA in the Sixties, and regularly wrote for the ufology magazine "Lumières Dans la Nuit", collecting reports of "Men-in-Black", "parallel worlds" and of course flying saucers.
