The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Est Républicain, Nancy, France, pages 1 and 11, on October 1, 1954.
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GRENOBLE (special correspondence):
Savoyards and Dauphinois are skeptical and distrustful people. They had always received with a rather mocking smile the more or less fanciful statements of those claiming to have seen flying saucers, cigars, or other mysterious craft wandering over their mountains.
However, for the past few days, the assertions of some of their fellow countrymen have begun to disturb them, and there is certainly the beginning, not of anxiety, but of interest, born of the latest "sightings."
The most picturesque, no doubt, and also the most questionable, would be that of a young woman from the lower Isère valley, bedridden - and with a fever of 39° - since she came face to face with a mysterious being. Here are the facts:
Last Sunday, then, Mrs. Lecœur, who lives in Valence and was on her way to her in-laws' home in the village of Chabeuil, wished to make a stop at the cemetery, at the family grave.
She was accompanied by her dog. As she passed along a hedge bordering a cornfield, the animal began to bark, then to tremble and crawl on the ground. Mrs. Lecœur saw the cause of her little companion's terror. It was a scarecrow placed in the middle of the cornfield. The woman from Valence began to pet the animal, but when she turned around, she was horrified to see that the scarecrow was walking, with a sound like crumpling paper. Literally panic-stricken, she found herself in the presence of a being with a human face, no taller than 1.10 meters, resembling a child wrapped in a thick shell of cellophane.
Frozen with fear, Mrs. Lecœur fled screaming, then flattened herself behind a hedge. From there, a few moments later, she saw rise into the sky, first very gently, a flying saucer of the most classic and most ordinary shape... Let's say "the old-model saucer."
The craft, according to the witness, first rose slowly, hovering for a few seconds, then shot straight up with a whistling sound, and disappeared behind the clouds at lightning speed.
Since then, as we said, badly shaken by this strange apparition, Mrs. Lecœur has been bedridden with a high fever.
Of course, her statements have brought a crowd of people to her home. Gendarmes, onlookers, professionals or not, went to check the spot where the saucer and its mysterious passenger had landed. They did indeed see all the corn knocked down, corn ears cut off, and tracks in the field left by the being who had so badly frightened Mrs. Lecœur.
Roger LACHAT
Continued on p. 11 (2nd and 3rd col.)
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(Continued from the front page)
Dr. Martinet, a dermatologist in Chambéry, regarded as a methodical, observant, and level-headed man, did not believe in the existence of flying saucers until last week. He used to shrug his shoulders every time someone spoke to him about these mysterious craft.
A former artillery observer with the rank of captain, the doctor has just been struck by an observation, the details of which he has entrusted to us in writing. He has also sent a copy of the following report, with even more detail, to the Prefecture of Savoie.
Here are the facts:
It was about 5:12 p.m. last Sunday (September 26). My family and I were returning by car from the Col du Chat, above Aix-les-Bains, when suddenly I noticed, directly above the Croix du Nivollet, at about two thousand meters altitude, at the edge of the misty zone, a dark aluminum-gray mass.
"I stopped my vehicle. Three other cars following me did the same, and we watched the maneuvers of the saucer. It was then 5:14 p.m. and 30 seconds.
"At first I thought it was a waterspout, but the wind was blowing from the northwest and the phenomenon came from the south.
"Thirty seconds later, while about fifteen of us were observing the saucer, it descended in a ‘falling leaf' motion and then appeared in the form of a concave plate with its raised side facing upward.
"Finally, at 5:16 p.m., as it presented itself head-on - that is, in the form of a perfect disc - we observed that the lighter part occupied the center of the whole, with darker patches all around.
"After that, the saucer moved directly above the Revard cable-car station, descended a little, then suddenly vanished like lightning.
"Depending on the angle from which we observed it, it changed color, shifting from very dark aluminum gray to a lighter gray.
"It was exactly 5:18 p.m. and 40 seconds when it disappeared.
"The phenomenon lasted a little over four minutes; which allowed me to record the different stages of its evolution in my notebook, along with the times.
The doctor made a diagram of the tortuous path followed by the saucer, which he shared with us along with his descriptions.
A distinguished electrical engineer from Grenoble, Mr. Baccard, correspondent for the "Uranos" Society - a private organization whose role is to collect testimony about flying saucers - had noticed that strange lights rose from a particular point several times a week in the sky, at the horizon visible from his windows.
The engineer carefully monitored these points, which intrigued him, during his moments of rest from work, and last Sunday, at roughly the same time that the people of Chambéry saw a flying saucer, here is what Mr. Baccard observed:
He saw on the horizon an aerial craft he first took for an airplane. Indeed, the object appeared like the tail assembly of a plane seen from the front, at the center of which one could distinguish a circular protuberance that could have been the fuselage. Alerted by the unusual speed of the craft, Mr. Baccard realized that he was most likely in the presence of a saucer.
At the moment this mysterious object passed overhead, it slowed down and then banked, emitting a glow; in this turn, the saucer (for that is what it was!) revealed its circular shape.
Mr. Baccard had at hand a precision camera; he took a photograph which, despite the distance (about 2,000 meters), shows in the sky a disc followed by a luminous trail.
A few seconds after the photograph was taken, the saucer rose vertically and disappeared at tremendous speed.
Mr. Baccard intends to go to Paris to show his photograph, which is very blurry, but which gives pause even to the most skeptical.
R.L.
R.L.
