UFOs in the daily Press:

A trucker recounts his trip with the "thing": "It modeled its speed on mine"

(From our special correspondent Charles GARREAU.)

CHALONS SUR MARNE. Friday [2/22/74]

He didn't believe it. He believes it. Since the adventure he experienced the other night, Daniel Vagnon, a sturdy 27-year-old truck driver, no longer thinks to smile when we talk to him about UFOs. If he is the main witness to a series of very disturbing observations, other people also witnessed part of it and their accounts agree and complete each other.

For Daniel Vagnon, it all started Monday morning at 3:40 a.m.:

- Driving my "Simca 1100", I was going to my work. I had just left the national 44 and was heading towards Marson. Suddenly, on my right and at low altitude, a phosphorescent orange half-sphere appeared, with very clear outlines against the black starless sky.

It was larger than the Moon and at a very regular pace it gradually obscured itself and reappeared in the same manner. Surprised, I slowed down. The thing imitated me. I accelerated. It literally followed my movement without the slightest jerk. Then I started to panic. From 90 an hour, I accelerated to 140.

The thing followed me to Francheville, four to five kilometers further. When I pulled into the truck garage, it stopped. Then it suddenly disappeared, just enough time to turn around.

Headlights flash

Daniel Vagnon gets behind the wheel of his truck to go to the quarry where he has to load. And there, second episode:

"Getting out of the truck, I see in the sky a sort of luminous gaseous cloud, very large, cylindrical in shape, with rounded ends. I called other drivers. They were able to see it as sell. It gradually disappeared half an hour later."

Daniel Vagnon carried out a first transport, returning to the quarry. "This time, there was a disc as white as a grapefruit. And again this disc began to follow all the movements of my truck. Drivers and the loader witnessed this whole scene. So I thought about flash the headlights.

I made some flagship code calls. Immediately the craft began to move sideways, then to descend and rise again. It repeated the maneuver several times. Then it rose vertically and gradually disappeared into the sky."

The various twists and turns of this observation have had numerous precedents over the past twenty years. In particular, the pursuit of cars or trains by luminous craft was repeated often in 1954. Likewise, on several occasions, witnesses who flashed their headlights received a response, either in the form of immediate extinction or complete with the luminous craft, blacked out on the contrary by the emission of a violent beam of light which often frightened them.