The article below was published in the daily newspaper Le Courrier de Saône-et-Loire, France, page 8, on October 12, 1954.
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PARIS – Reports of mysterious craft in the sky continue to come in.
In Tourriers, 17 km from Angoulême, about thirty people saw during the night of the 8th to the 9th "a kind of cigar" which remained motionless about forty meters above National Road No. 10 for around twenty minutes. The craft, which had two small fins, then decided to take off at a speed of around 250 to 300 km/h.
Mrs. Lebert, caretaker of the Pont-Chapelle castle, in La Ferté-Macé (Orne), observed a mysterious craft in broad daylight. This craft, which looked like a rocket, was rising silently vertically, leaving behind a faint white trail. It was visible for several seconds before quickly disappearing. A woman and children living in the outskirts of the town also witnessed the phenomenon.
Elsewhere, Mr. Christian Couette, the son of a plumber from Tessé-la-Madeleine, was riding his bicycle towards Rânes when, near the Lande-Forêt pond in the commune of Beauvain, he was overtaken by a strange luminous craft that flew at high speed just above the treetops. The craft, about 4 meters in diameter, had the shape of a fireball with a domed top. It was visible for about ten seconds.
METZ. -- In Pournoy-la-Chétive, near Verny (Moselle), three children claim to have seen a flying saucer and its occupant.
They stated this to their parents, the mayor, and their schoolteacher, Mr. Martignon. One of them swore he had a conversation with a Martian, and since Saturday, Pournoy-la-Chétive has been divided into two camps: those who believe it and those who laugh about it.
As for the three children – Gilbert Calba, 12 years old, Daniel Hirsch, 7, and his brother Jean-Pierre, 5 and a half – here's what they said:
"It was 6:30 p.m. on Friday. All three of us were roller skating when suddenly, near the cemetery, we saw something luminous. It was a round craft, about 2.5 meters in diameter. It landed very close to us. The device had yellow and white stripes and landed on three legs.
"Soon, a man came out of it. He held a lit flashlight in one hand. This light blinded us, but we clearly saw that the man had large eyes, a hairy face, and was very small – about 1.2 meters tall. He wore a kind of black robe. The man looked at us. He said something we didn’t understand. He turned off his flashlight and, frightened, we ran away.
"As we looked back, we saw something in the sky flying away – very high, very fast, and very bright."
Another resident of Pournoy-la-Chétive, Robert Maguin, 16 years old, also claimed to have seen the mysterious craft, though he was not close enough to make out details.
Coincidence: a Martian matching the same description (bright eyes, heavy mustache, and flashlight), though without the robe, was seen in Lavoux (Vienne) by Mr. Roger Barrault, a laborer.
ALEXANDRIA. -- Egypt has now joined the flying saucer race. At the beginning of Saturday night, several hundred residents of Alexandria reported seeing a luminous object in the sky that appeared to change colors from red to orange, then green and bluish-gray. Officials from the meteorological service at Alexandria Airport phoned the Helwan Observatory near Cairo, asking for the phenomenon to be photographed. However, it disappeared before the observatory's special telescope could be readied.
The assistant director of the observatory, Mr. Azouz Imail, told the press that it might have been an aurora borealis. A magnetic storm had, in fact, been observed for forty-eight hours, making this explanation plausible.
BONN. -- A "flying saucer" was observed for about two minutes by 13 members of a gliding school over the Ockstadt airfield, near Frankfurt.
The 13 pilots and student pilots were watching a flight instructor maneuvering when they saw, at about 3,000 meters altitude above the glider, a "slightly domed silver disc" moving without the slightest sound. The witnesses, among whom were several former Luftwaffe aviators, firmly stated that they could not have been the victims of an optical illusion.
