This article was published in the daily newspaper Var-Matin - République, France, on January 2, 1974.
A tradesman of Haisnes-lés-la-Bassée (the Pas-de-Calais), Mr. Jean Liefooghe, claims to have seen a flying saucer Monday.
"I drove", he explained, "in direction of Lens, when, in the crossing of Hulluch (the Pas-de-Calais) on my left, within 500 meters approximately, I perceived signals of intermittent headlights in the darkness."
Whereas I was at two hundred meters approximately, I saw a kind of rocket in the shape of a cigar, high of ten meter approximately, that disappeared at a high speed and without noise towards the west while leaving during ten seconds a wake of orange color behind it."
On his return in Lens, the tradesman stops on the same location of this puzzling apparition and notices on the ground of a field that was not plowed, prints of step and in particular, the traces of support of a tripod apparatus.
The gendarmes took note of traces of feet of small size, and especially, three rather deep marks in the ground delimiting a right-angled triangle of 8.80 meters of base and 4.70 meters side. But they did not find any trace of combustion.
