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The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Nouvelle République du Centre-Ouest, France, in October 4, 1954.
The seven concordant testimonies of the workers of a quarry in Marcilly-sur-Vienne who, on Thursday, around 4:30 p.m., saw near them a mysterious craft and its passenger, intrigued the people of the region.
We were able to interview Mr. Georges Gatey, chief of the building site and main witness of the event, as well as his six comrades.
We report the impression that these men are sincere and trustworthy. Their statements, they confirmed them Friday and Saturday to professional investigators who did not fail, in their turn, to be impressed by the emphasis of sincerity of the witnesses.
Mr. Gatey and his five workers were busy pulling sand and gravel from a quarry near the road near Marcilly. Everyone was at his workplace, some with a mechanical shovel, others with a hoist. Mr. Gatey was on the sidelines, closer to the end of the quarry. He was the first to see the machine, a device of circular shape surmounted by a dome, apparently equipped with blades similar to those of a helicopter.
The machine was standing motionless one meter from the ground, the blades turning very rapidly. It did not land on the ground.
Wearing a helmet of opaque material on the head, resembling scrambled glass, dressed in a combination of neutral tone, booted with booties, it stood next to it. He had in his hand a kind of big revolver or a pipe, and on the chest a very brilliant disc, emitting a jet of intense light.
No one in the quarry, which lies below several meters from the road and the surrounding grounds, had seen the apparatus arrive and no one heard it. Everyone was busy at work and the machines that worked at the same time were very noisy.
Mr. Gatey is formal: the machine remained there for a half minute, enough time to be able to examine it. The site supervisor is an excellent draftsman. His first reflex, after his astonishment, was to run to the tent of the site to get a paper, a pencil and draw the sketch of
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the extraordinary machine and its occupant.
"But my legs were cut," he said, "and I could not take a step, nailed to the ground certainly by the effects of the luminous ray emitted by the man.
Mr. Gatey was at that moment about fifteen meters from the craft and two meters below. He saw it from below. The machine, it should be pointed out, was at the entrance of the quarry, on the edge of the excavation, 3 meters from the road. On this road came a truck which came to get a load at the quarry, driven by M. Amirault, who saw the quarry men look towards the entrance of the shipyard, and he also looked. He saw "something gray" that was not there usually. This thing rose in the air.
Mr. Gatey also told us: "The man climbed back into his craft without I being able to tell by where, and then the craft rose vertically in jerks and a noise like the jet engines Of fighter planes. At 200 meters of altitude, roughly, it emitted a fog that completely concealed it and disappeared before our eyes."
"That's it," said the other witnesses of the scene.
Moved to the vicinity of fear, then men tacitly shut up about their adventure of the afternoon when in the evening they found themselves in the small restaurant of Parçay-aux-Vienne where they take their meal.
It was not until much later, around 7:30 p.m. or 20 p.m., that they decided to speak.
"If I had been been alone, I would never have said anything about it," said Mr. Gatey, for fear of being the laughing stock of the country.
The site supervisor had gone to the edge of the quarry to see whether the craft had left any traces. He hoped to find some burned grass but there was nothing like it, only the grass soiled and trampled by trucks.
The 7 men, 6 of them at least being 30 years old, are sympathetically known in the area where they have been working for some time and there is no reason to suppose that they have attempted to set up a huge joke. Mr. Gatey drew from memory the silhouette of the craft and its passenger.
His comrades, MM. René Rougier, André Beurrois, André Sèche, Georges Lubanowich and Maurice Dubrocs, in the presence of the sketch, affirmed: "It is this shape that the apparatus in question had." The craft could measure 4 m. 50 in diameter and 2 meters in thickness. It was gray.
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[en]terprise Goursault of Melle, came back to start their air compressor.
Châteauroux, 3. - Mrs. widow Janiki, residing in the village of Le Cerisier, commune of Levroux (Indre), told the Gendarmerie that she had seen in the sky a luminous machine with a diameter of about 3 meters and which Was at the height of the buildings.
Ms. widow Lacotte witnessed the same phenomenon.
Mrs. Baron of Vatan (the Indre), said she saw last night a luminous ball in the sky.
She alerted her husband, as well as about fifteen people from her neighborhood, all of whom saw the yellow-greenish craft rising and falling in the sky at a very high altitude.
Nevers, 3. -- A representative of an insurance company in Clamecy and several residents of Corbigny said they saw an orange luminous disc moving in the sky.
SAINT BRIEUC
Several people claimed to have seen, at 300 or 400 meters from them, last night, around 8:45 p.m., a "flying cigar", at an altitude of about 50 meters.
LILLE
Mr. Anicet Corneille, an agricultural worker, said he saw a cigar-shaped craft 8 to 10 meters long by 3 meters in thickness last night in Comines; which evolved at about forty meters in height and emitted a sharp violet glow.
MONTCEAU-LES-MINES
Two bricklayers, MM. Romain Sebastiani and Buratto, both cyclist racers, said they saw a craft take off with a shrill whistle along the road from Blanzy to Montceau.
In a written question, Mr. Jean Nocher, Deputy for the Loire, informed the Secretary of the Air about the emotion aroused in the public by the numerous and various testimonies concerning the "flying saucers".
He asked him "if his predecessors in the Secretary of State for the Air had been concerned, as in the US and U.S.S.R., to open an investigation about the presence in our atmosphere of unidentified flying objects?
"If so, he asks him to publish the results of these investigations, if not, he asks him to set up a committee widely extended to all the scientific branches concerned in order to study this phenomenon objectively."
