The article below was published in the daily newspaper Le Méridional, France, page 14, on March 20, 1989.
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Are the Martians attacking? Two readers reported to us the presence of a strange object in the sky of Marseilles, on of these that are called unidentified objects, for they quite simply nonidentifiable by simple mortals... By error of judgement or imposibility to recognize anything.
"I was quietly smoking a cigarette by my window, explains Ahmed, a 23 year old young person, living on boulevard des Dames in Marseilles. It was approximately two o'clock in the morning, when I saw this weird thing: I initially thought that it was a plane... But without wings. It rather had the shape of a cigar, longer than a plane, and shining of a white-yellow light... Super impressive! What was it?"
A testimony consolidated by a resident of the Saint-Georges building, in the downtown area, who refuses to give her name: "I will be called insane, however I ensure you: I am someone totally balanced."
The object in question moved much more quickly than a plane, according to the latter witness, towards the North.
Could this be a UFO? The very serious association "S.O.S OVNI" - yes, yes! - keeps their heads on the shoulders, their feet on ground, and the UFOs in the files of "the-exceptional-that-you-don't-meet-everyday."
"In 99% of the cases, it proves that the people who contacted us - when they are not pranksters - made a simple mistake in interpretation: the lights of the planes in a fog which one takes for a flying saucer are legion, but also the astronomical phenomena - stars that one had never noticed - or weather. For example, particularly violent thunderstorms, or more exceptional, ball lightnings, explain Pery [sic, Perry] Petrakis, the person in charge of association "studies on the flying saucers", based in Aix, which has set up for five years a special-UFO number. We intervene when we judge that there is a certain number of rather concordant elements so that there is an investigation, realized in a completely scientific manner. But the majority of the cases do not resist the examination a long time... And it could in adddition happen that one discovers within twenty years the scientific explanations to phenomena which we still to date did not understand..."
