The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Montagne, France, on February 24, 1978.
Toulouse. -- If we are to believe the statements made by several people in the Haute-Garonne, the Tarn-et-Garonne, the Ariège and the Aude, UFOs have flown over the area in recent nights.
According to these statements, it would be either a large ball sometimes blue, sometimes green, or an object in the shape of a triangle or a luminous funnel.
The most astonishing thing is certainly what several witnesses say: the mysterious explosion of a strange orange-green object at the beginning of the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, around 9:15 p.m., in the Aude sector of the Montagne Noire, between the communes of Cuxac, Laprade and Les Martyrs.
One of them, Mr. Gasc, hostel manager, heard "like a sound of thunder" and two airmen who were flying over the Carcassonne region at that time, MM. Maurice Messager, of the control tower of the Salvaza aerodrome, and Marc Giraud, armaments engineer, are formal, they have seen a blue-green craft with an orange tail.
The gendarmes who have begun their investigation rule out the hypothesis of a plane crash. The search was to intensify during the day, with the support of a helicopter, in order to detect any traces of the mysterious explosion.
