The article below was published in the daily newspaper Le Méridional, France, page 14, on January 21, 1979.
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NICE. -- Has the sky of the Côte d'Azur become since the beginning of the year, the privileged setting of a real UFO festival? One is tempted to ask the question, given the proliferation of testimonies collected from Cannes to Nice, about events that are, to say the least, peculiar.
As early as December 31, a resident of the Colline Cimiez had seen at a fairly high altitude an object which left no trail of condensation behind it and which moved in a regular zigzag at an incredible speed, while roughly following around the Baie des Anges. This witness specifies: "This object was shiny like white-hot metal. I first thought it was a weather balloon, but that does not explain its irregular movement. I think it was enormous in size."
Other testimony, this time dated January 7, that of Mr. André Duron, who was walking in the Estérel and who also saw a U.F.O. "Flying, he says, above the shrubs before climbing very high to turn into a dot of light and suddenly disappear."
In the afternoon of January 13, a resident of Nice, Mrs. Michèle Scappazzoni, living on avenue de la Lanterne, on one of the hills of Nice, discovered, from one of her windows in her apartment, a large object, faceted, silver-colored, that crossed the Nice sky in less than a minute.
The next day, around 7 p.m., a dental surgeon in Antibes discovered another luminous phenomenon. "I saw, he said, three discs which seemed oval and were moving at about two, three hundred meters in altitude, forming an equilateral triangle. The light which was emitted seemed quite faded, it was distinctly orange in color, variable in intensity".
48 hours ago, Ms. Scappazzoni again witnessed another luminous phenomenon in the sky of Nice: "A kind of beacon, she said, like a huge cinema spot moving at a dizzying pace against the mountainous background of the suburbs of Nice."
This is what, in a few days, for the Riviera region alone, considerably thickens the still mysterious files on UFOs. A dossier which, it is true, is being welcomed with more and more curiosity and less and less skepticism by more and more people.
