This article was published in the daily newspaper Var-Matin - République, France, on February 1, 1974.
"Concorde" has just added to the file of the unidentified flying objects a very important part whose existence was revealed only several months after its "birth."
Rene Mauries, editor of the "Depêche du Midi" was the only journalist allowed Wednesday to view it. It is actually a photograph, one of the numerous which were taken by Jean Begot, technician of the CNRS on board "Concorde 001". Then transformed into a scientific laboratory, the prototype of the Franch-English supersonic jet flew on last June 30, at 17.000 meters of altitude and 2300 km per hours.
At the development, one of the images shot by the objective revealed in the night of the Eclipse, a strange luminous point which, enlarged a thousand times, looked like a luminous disc.
Lengthily analyzed by the scientists of CNRS, this document was confronted scientifically and technically in all possible manners and the serious of the conclusion after seven months of study, cannot be disputed. It really an unidentified flying object – more commonly called "flying saucer" - that Concorde photographed, and if one takes into account the speed of the plane, the distance of the subject and its size, it would have, this UFO, a diameter of 200 meters approximately.
This exceptional document, which will be presented in exclusiveness to the television viewers of "Midi-Pyrénées", Saturday evening, at the time of the regional information, allowed Claude Poher, head of the division of the rocket probes of the CNES (National Center of the Space Studies) and true UFO expert to declare: "One needs to strip off the passion in the topic, to put up with its obviousness, and to prepare with an increasingly frequent confrontation."
And Claude Poher evoked, without referring to the science fiction of the abduction of Earthment on board flying saucers and their restitution after examination and probing.
Here is undoubtedly the essential testimony of a file that will perhaps be reopened very quickly and often.
Note: the "object" on the infamous photograph was later explained as being alomst certainly light from a meteor entry in the atmosphere.
