The index page for the 1954 French flap section of this website is here.
Reference for this case: 10-sep-54-Quarouble.
Please cite this reference in any correspondence with me regarding this case.
[Ref. cdn1:] NEWSPAPER "LA CROIX DU NORD":
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Will the epidemic of flying saucers which usually rages in July and August reach its climax in September this year? A few days ago, it was near Amiens that walkers claimed to have seen a mysterious craft. As they approached, the machine rose into the air and when the gendarmes went to the landing site, they did not, of course, detect any suspicious traces.
In the night from Friday to Saturday, a saucer reportedly landed this time on the territory of the commune of Quarouble, located in the Valenciennes area, near the Belgian border.
Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, who occupies a house at P.N. 79, on the railway line, claims to have seen the craft within five meters.
"At around 10:30 p.m., said Mr. Dewilde, when I was busy reading and my wife had gone to the next room, I heard my
Continued on the last page,
in the fifth column, under the title
"SAUCER"
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dog howling to death. Thinking that a prowler was trying to enter my backyard, I went out, armed with a flashlight. Then I saw, about six meters away, a dark shape, which I took for a cart of farmers abandoned in the fields. As my beast continued to bark, I saw small beings emerging from a nearby path. They were running towards the railway crossing. The beam of my lamp lit the head of one of them. I was dazzled by a reflection similar to that which a glass object can emit. Almost immediately the door of the craft opened, closed, then it rose ten meters after oscillating for a moment. A very bright light gushes out, like a lightning of magnesium, and the saucer, like a ball of fire, took the direction of the West."
Mr. Marius Dewilde, after alerting his wife and neighbors, hastened to the police station of Onnaing, where he told his astonishing adventure. From the description he gave of the craft, one could estimate that the height of the flying machine was of the order of three meters, its diameter of six meters, its shape round or conical.
The size of the extraordinary travelers did not exceed 1 m., and the two of them seemed to be wearing some kind of metallic spacesuits.
The air police, informed of the facts, went on Saturday afternoon to the place, but they did not find any clue likely to give more substance to the assertions of Mr. Dewilde, who is believed to a serious man little inclined to hallucinations. However, a part of ballast, freshly shattered, caught the attention of the investigators.
Let us add that the saucer would have landed in a particularly calm place, more than 2 kms from the village, among the pastures and groves, well made to rest the unknown visitors of their interplanetary journey... and wait - in calm - the saucers to come...
[Ref. nmn1:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-MATIN":
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A new flying saucer has descended from the sky. It reportedly occurred in the night from Friday to Saturday on the territory of Quarouble at P. N. 79 on the railway track operated by the National Coal Mines.
Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, claims to have seen the object within six meters. Better still, two of the occupants of the saucer, surprised when they had descended to the ground, grazed him, he said, in their race to join the apparatus, which, as usual, left no trace.
"It was 10:30 p.m.", Mr. Dewilde told, "my wife was in bed, I was reading by the fireside, when my attention was drawn to my dog's barking. The beast hooted to death. Believing in the presence of prowlers in my backyard, I went out with a flashlight. From my enclosure, in the night, less than six meters from the door of my house, I saw a dark mass. I thought it was a harvest cart. My dog ??then crawled towards me. At that time I turned my gaze to a small path leading into a pasture, I saw two men, small, who ran towards the P. N. Immediately I thought of smugglers bending under their load. They sometimes take this path but the two beings in a hurry almost brushed against me. I pointed the beam at my flashlight. The beam was reflected on the head of one of them as on glass. The head seemed to me rather large, but I did not have the time to detail it. At the same time the door of the craft opened. A
Read more on the last page
under the title
SAUCER
[Photo caption:] Mrs. Dewilde, in the absence of her husband, shows Commissioner Fouchet the place where the craft landed. (Nord-Matin photo.)
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bright light dazzled me like a flash of magnesium. Blinded, paralyzed by fear, I saw the door close, the craft oscillate slightly, rise to ten meters, then flash like a lightning in the direction of Anzin, that is to say west."
Mr. Dewilde, invited to describe the saucer, also indicated that it was round, possibly conical.
According to his indications, one could estimate that it could measure about 3 meters high and 6 meters in diameter. As it climbed, it let out a little smoke and reddened until it looked like a ball of fire.
When he had recovered, Mr. Dewilde went to wake up his wife, the neighbor, ran to the gendarmerie of Onnaing, where he arrived around midnight. Commissioner Gouchet found before him a man trembling with all his limbs, suffering from intestinal contractions which ruled out the hypothesis of comedy.
Mr. Dewilde had been afraid, he said, of the stocky, helmeted little beings, also afraid of the lightning that occurred when they opened the door of the saucer.
His demeanor indicated that one is not dealing with a simulator.
The Quarouble resident is also known for a skeptic, a tough guy, his friends say. And he's smart.
Before concluding, it may be useful to locate the place where the saucer came to land.
P. N. 79 is in the fields, at least two kilometers from the village. The house of Mr. and Mrs. Dewilde is isolated in the middle of fields and groves. In front of the door passes the railway track on which the craft landed, which, if the witness is to be believed, almost brushed against the barrier of the small courtyard.
Let's add that yesterday the air police came to inspect the place. No trace was found. It was only observed that a piece of ballast had been freshly removed. On the path taken by the little men, no footprint has remained.
It is true that the hard ground in this place is daily searched by the cattle.
[Ref. ner1:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-ECLAIR":
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WILL THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, a film projected on many screens of the region, generate an epidemic of flying saucers likely to disturb the sleep of the inhabitants of our peaceful countryside? We may fear it.
A few days ago, it was near Amiens, that two peaceful strollers perceived, while walking, a mysterious machine which flew away with the backfires and the usual illuminations, without leaving any valid traces for the attentive eyes of the gendarmes.
On the night of Friday to Saturday, the affair happened, this time, in Quarouble, a small locality in the Valenciennes area, close to the Belgian border.
The Onnaing police station and the nearby gendarmerie brigade were alerted in the middle of the night by Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, living in a small house hidden in the countryside, near the railway crossing 79. Mr. Dewilde, still under the influence of emotion, began to tell the most extraordinary adventure that he lived.
"It was around 10:30 p.m., he said. I was reading by my fire while my wife had gone to the bedroom. Suddenly I hear my dog ??howling to death. I was thinking of some prowler trying to enter my backyard. I opened the door and went out, a flashlight in my hand.
I immediately saw a dark mass five or six meters from the house. I thought a farmer had uncoupled his cart on the edge of the neighboring field.
It was then that from a path appeared two low and stocky shapes grazed me. The beam of my lamp lit one of them: I was able to discern an enormous head protected by a kind of glass or plastic helmet. The size of the strange being did not exceed one meter. But hardly had I recovered from my surprise when an opening was made in the craft, the mysterious travelers rushed inside and the "Saucer" rose vertically, gaining an altitude of ten meters, then swung west, it disappeared at a prodigious speed, like a ball of fire.
From the claims of Mr. Dewilde, who passes for a serious man, little inclined to hallucinations, it appears that the flying machine could measure six meters in diameter by three meters in height approximately. It was round or conical in shape.
The scene which lasted only a few moments did not allow the author of the story to report other details.
Anyway, the Air Police went to Quarouble on Saturday afternoon. Despite the careful research that was carried out in the area around the landing, there was no evidence to support Mr. Dewilde's claims.
Let us add that the mysterious travelers had chosen for their place of visit, a particularly quiet site, very suitable for resting them from their extraterrestrial journeys.
And we calmly wait for the next ball, the next spindle, where the next cigar, even if we don't keep a level crossing...
[Ref. vdn1:] NEWSPAPER "LA VOIX DU NORD":
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A few days after the appearance in the region of Amiens of a flying saucer which was reportedly seen by two workers going to their work, a phenomenon of the same kind reportedly occurred, according to the words of a reident of Quarouble, Friday evening, on the territory of this locality. The saucers seem to literally pile up in our crowded sky.
Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, worker at the A.N.F. at Blanc-Misseron, domiciled at level crossing 79 in Quarouble, who narrates the facts which he claims to have witnessed, is formal. Living in the gatekeeper's house located in a particularly deserted place along a disused railway, Mr. Dewilde was at home Friday evening and ended the evening by reading a weekly newspaper.
It was around 10 p.m.; he was about to go to bed when his attention was attracted to the repeated barking of his dog. The animal being free in the enclosure which surrounds the small house, Mr. Dewilde, after taking an electric flashlight, went out to find out what was causing the agitation of his dog.
We will now leave it to him to personally describe the scene he claims to have had before his eyes.
"When I open the door, I don't see anything at first, but my dog ??turns alternately towards me and towards the railway line which runs along the house, I observed a little more attentively. I distinguished then, posed on the track a few meters from me, an oval, domed mass that might have been about six meters long and three in height. I thought it was a harvest cart abandoned by some farmer. I did not get more time to look at it any longer, because the dog was barking at another direction, I pointed my flashlight in the direction that it indicated to me.
"In the beam, I perfectly saw two strange beings moving quickly towards the dark mass, four to five meters apart. They were small, no more than a meter I thought, and stocky. They had big heads on which the beam of my flaslight was reflected as if it were a glass globe. Dumbfounded, I also saw a square of bright light opening on the side of the craft. Frightened now, I closed my eyes for a moment.
"When I opened them again, the light was gone, and the slightly swaying machine went up vertically, emitting smoke. Having [reached] a height of about ten meters, the underside reddened and the craft disappeared quickly. I didn't hear any noise except a breath at the start. It had hardly lasted more than fifteen seconds. As soon as I had enough strength to run, because my legs were numb, I woke up my wife."
Some time later, Mr. Dewilde reported to the Onnaing police station, where the officers on duty saw him arriving with strong emotion. He told them the extraordinary story that we have just given.
Saturday morning, Commissioner Grouchet went to the scene to carry out an investigation. After careful research, he found that he could not find the slightest trace, either on the ballast or on the rails or in the immediate vicinity of the witness's home.
In the afternoon, the Air Police inspectors also visited Quarouble.
Traveling by car with his wife and mother-in-law, Mr. Robert Chovel, of Origny-en-Thiérache, was surprised to see moving at a relatively low altitude a luminous disc which went towards Lechaudron.
He was able to follow the moves of this strange machine for quite a while. According to his statements and those of the witnesses, the craft is provided at the rear with a tube through which luminous smoke escapes. Note also that it was the same evening when a similar craft was reportedly seen around Amiens.
[Ref. nll1:] JOURNAL "NORD LITTORAL":
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Valenciennes, September 11. -- A resident of Carouble, near Valenciennes, Mr. Marius Dewilde, 24, a worker at the Ateliers du Nord de la France, in Blanc-Misseront, residing at the level crossing No 79, said that Friday evening, around 10 p.m., his attention was aroused by his dog's barking.
He went out immediately, armed with his electric lamp, and saw on the railroad running alongside his house, in a particularly deserted place, a dark mass, of oval shape, which could be 6 meters long and 3 meters high.
Turning his lamp to another direction, Mr. Dewilde saw two strange and stocky men, whose height did not exceed one meter, quickly moving towards the craft. These men had a short head on which the rays of his lamp were reportedly reflected as if they were glass globes.
A few moments later a square of intense light appeared on the sides of the craft. The witness then reportedly closed his eyes and, when he opened them again, the light and the strange beings had disappeared.
The craft swayed slightly, climbed vertically, giving off smoke. Arrived about ten meters from the ground, the lower part of the craft reddened and it disappeared quickly.
Mr. Dewilde reported this strange appearance to the police at Onnaing.
No trace was found.
[Ref. bre1:] NEWSPAPER "LA BOURGOGNE REPUBLICAINE":
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Lille, 12 (A.C.P.). - A new flying saucer allegedly descended from the sky and landed, during the night from Friday to Saturday, on the territory of Quarouble, near Valenciennes, near the level crossing 29, on the railway line operated by les Houillères.
Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, claims to have seen the craft within six meters. Better, two of the occupants of the saucer, surprised while they had come down to earth, grazed him, he said, in their race to join the apparatus, which, as usual, left no trace.
It was 10:30 p.m., Mr. Dewilde said, my wife was in bed, I was reading by the fire, when my
Continued on page 10, under the title
SAUCER
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attention was drawn to my dog's barking. The beast "howled at death." Believing in the presence of prowlers in my farmyard, I went out, provided with a flashlight.
"Less than six meters from the door of my house, I saw a dark mass. At first I thought it was a harvest cart. My dog ??then came towards me, crawling, and, at that moment, I looked towards a small path leading to my pasture. I saw two men, small, running towards the level crossing. And immediately I thought of smugglers bending under their load. They sometimes take this path; but the two beings in a hurry almost brushed against me.
"I shone the beam of the lamp. The beam was reflected on the head of one of them like on glass. This head actually seemed quite large to me, but I didn't have time to detail. At the same moment, the door of the craft opened. A bright light dazzled me as would a flash of magnesium. Blind and paralyzed by fear, I saw the door close, the craft oscillate slightly, rise about ten meters, then fly like lightning in the direction of Anzin, that is to say west."
Mr. Dewilde, invited to describe the saucer, further indicated that it was round, perhaps conical.
According to his indications, it was estimated to be about three meters high and six meters in diameter. As it took off, it let out some smoke, and blushed until it looked like a ball of fire.
When he had regained his senses, Mr. Dewilde went to wake up his wife, a neighbor, and ran to the gendarmerie, then to the Onnaing police station, where he arrived around midnight. Commissioner Gouchet found before him a man trembling in all his limbs, suffering from intestinal contractions which clearly excluded the hypothesis of comedy.
Mr. Dewilde had been afraid, he says, afraid of the stocky, helmeted little beings, also afraid of the lightning which occurred when they opened the door of the saucer.
In his neighborhood, Mr. Dewilde has the reputation of a sober and full of common sense man.
Yesterday the air police came to inspect the scene, but no trace was found. It was only observed that a piece of ballast had been freshly loosened. In the path taken by the little men, no imprint remains. It is true that the earth, hard in this place, is continually trodden.
[Ref. vmr1:] NEWSPAPER "VAR-MATIN REPUBLIQUE":
Near Valenciennes
Valenciennes, September 12. -- An inhabitant of Quarouble, close to Valenciennes, Mr. Marius Dewilde, aged 34, workman in a workshop of the north of France in Blanc Misseron, domiciled at the railway crossing #79, stated that Friday evening, around 10 p.m., his attention was drawn by the barkings of his dog.
He came out immediately, equipped with a flashlight, and saw on the way skirting his dwelling, in a particularly deserted place, a dark mass, of oval form, which could be six meters in length and three in height.
Directing his lamp in another direction, Mr. Dewilde saw two strange and squat men, whose size did not exceed one meter, moving quickly towards the machine. These men had a short head on which the rays of the lamp is said to have been reflected as if they were spheres of glasses.
A few moments later, an intense square of light appeared on the sides of the machine. The witness is said to have then closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the light and the strange beings had disappeared.
The apparatus, slightly swinging, went up vertically while releasing smoke, arrived at ten meters of the ground, the lower part of the machine reddened and it disappeared quickly.
Mr. Dewilde announced this strange appearance to the police force of Onnaing. The Air police force went on the spot but no trace was noted.
[Ref. lie2:] NEWSPAPER "LIBERTE":
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A flying saucer crossed the sky of the Valenciennois. The better still, it landed, that's how we tell you. And it is Mr. Marius Dewilde, residing on the National Road, in Quarouble, who has just revealed it to the police station.
Friday, around 10:30 p.m., Mr. Dewilde heard his dog howl. Thinking he was dealing with thieves, he took an electric flashlight and went to the garden. It was then that he saw a "dark mass" six meters in diameter and three meters high.
While he was going around the "craft", little men, barely a meter tall and wearing a plexiglass helmet jumped into it. The mass then rose rapidly, accompanied by lightning and rockets, and disappeared towards Anzin.
We bet that the Police Commissioner took this "statement" most seriously. From there when all the cops and sub-cops will soon be armed with a spyglass, there is only one step...
Here is the sad result of a hysterical campaign sharpened by the radio, the cinema and a press which carefully maintains in the skull of its readers a cold war psychosis.
But should we laugh about it?...
[Ref. vdn2:] NEWSPAPER "LA VOIX DU NORD":
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Mrs. Dewilde repeating to Onnaing's police commissioner, Mr. Gouchet, the explanations given by her husband on the very place where the latter claims to have seen the mysterious craft land. We also give Mr. Dewilde's story.
(Photo "La Voix du Nord)
[Ref. lau1:] "L'AURORE" NEWSPAPER:
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Recently, in the Somme and the Pyrenees, flying saucers were seen in the sky. Mr. Marius Dewilde, aged 34, workman of the steel-works of Blanc-Misseron, resident of Tuarouge [sic, Quarouble], in the Nord, saw, him, the other night, at about 2:30 a.m.. within [... ] approximately of his garden, a dark, high shape of 3 meters height and a diameter of 5 meters. Then two strange small beings, measuring approximately one meter, came running out a nearby path. Then, the apparatus, whose door had opened and closed again, rose of ten meters, after having wavered one moment. A very sharp light spout out and, similar to a ball of fire, the machine disappeared towards the West.
[Ref. cpd1:] NEWSPAPER "LE COURRIER PICARD":
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VALENCIENNES, September 12. -- A resident of Carouble [sic], near Valenciennes, 31, Mr. Marius Dewlive [sic], 34, worker at the Ateliers du Nord de la France, in Blanc-Misseron, domiciled at the level crossing nr. 97, said that Friday evening around 10 p.m. his attention was aroused by his dog's barking.
He went out immediately, armed with his electric flashlight, and saw, on the railroad running alongside his house, in a particularly deserted place, a dark mass, of oval shape, which could be 6 meters long and 3 meters high.
Turning his lamp to another direction, Mr. Dewilve saw two strange and stocky men whose height did not exceed 1 meter, quickly moving towards the craft. These men had a short head on which the rays of his lamp reportedly reflected as if they were glass globes.
A few moments later, a square of intense light appeared on the sides of the craft. The witness then reportedly closed his eyes and when he opened them again the light and the strange beings had disappeared.
The craft, swaying slightly, went up vertically, emitting smoke. Arrived about ten meters from the ground, the lower part of the craft became red and it disappeared quickly.
Mr. Dewilve reported this strange appearance to the police at Onnaing.
The Air police went to the location but no trace was found.
[Ref. lcx1:] NEWSPAPER "LA CROIX":
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In the sky of the Somme and the Pyrénées, flying saucers have been seen recently. Mr. Marius Dewilve [sic], a workshop worker in northern France, saw not only a flying saucer, but its passengers.
He said that on Friday night, around 10 p.m., his attention was aroused by the barking of his dog.
He went out immediately, armed with his flashlight, and saw on the railway tracks along his house, in a particularly deserted place, a dark mass, oval in shape, which could have been six meters long and three meters high.
Shining his flashlight in another direction, Mr. Dewilve saw two odd, stocky men, no more than three feet tall, walking quickly towards the craft. These men had short heads on which the rays of his lamp would reflect as if they were glass globes.
Moments later, a square of intense light appeared on the sides of the craft. The witness would then have closed his eyes and when he opened them again, the light and the beings had disappeared.
The craft, swaying slightly, rose vertically, emitting smoke. Arrived at ten meters of the ground, the lower part of the craft reddened, and it disappeared quickly.
[Ref. las1:] NEWSPAPER "LIBRE ARTOIS":
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A new flying saucer descended from the sky. It reportedly occurred in the night from Friday to Saturday on the territory of Quarouble, at P. N. 79 on the railway track operated by the National Coal Mines.
Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, claims to have seen the object within six meters. Better still, two of the occupants of the saucer, surprised when they had descended to the ground, grazed it, he said, in their race to join the craft, which, as usual, left no trace.
"It was 10:30 p.m., said Mr. Dewilde, my wife was in bed, I was reading by the fireside, when my attention was drawn to my dog's barking. The beast was howling to death. Believing in the presence of a prowler in my backyard, I went out with a flashlight. From my enclosure, in the night less than six meters from the door of my house, I saw a dark mass. First I believed that it was a harvest cart. My dog ??crawled towards me. At that time I turned my gaze to a small path leading into a pasture. I saw two men, little ones, who were running towards the P.N. Immediately I thought of smugglers bending under their load. They sometimes take this path but the two beings in a hurry almost brushed against me. I pointed the beam of my flashlight. The ray was reflected on the head of one of them like on glass. The head seemed rather large to me, but I did not have the time to detail. At the same time the door of the apparatus opened. A bright glare dazzled me like a flash of magnesium. Blinded, paralyzed by fear, I saw the door close, the craft oscillate slightly, rise to ten meters, then go away like lightning in the direction of Anzin, that is to say to the West."
Mr. Dewilde invited to describe the saucer, also indicated that it was round, perhaps conical.
According to these indications, it was estimated that it could have measured approximately 3 meters in height and 6 meters in diameter. As it rose, it let out a little smoke and reddened until it looked like a ball of fire.
When he had recovered, Mr. Dewilde went to wake up his wife, the neighbor, ran to the gendarmerie then to the police station of Onnaing, where he arrived around midnight. Commissioner Grouchet found before him a man trembling with all his limbs, suffering from intestinal contractions which ruled out the hypothesis of comedy.
Mr. Dewilde had been afraid, he says, afraid of the stocky and helmeted little beings, also afraid of the lightning that occurred when they opened the door of the saucer.
His demeanor indicated that one was not dealing with a simulator.
The Quarouble resident is also known for a skeptic, a tough guy, his friends say. And he's smart.
Before concluding, it may be useful to locate the place where the saucer came to land.
P. N. 79 is in the fields, at least two kilometers from the village. The house of Mr. and Mrs. Dewilde is isolated in the middle of fields and groves. In front of the door passes the railway track on which the craft landed, which if we believe the witness, almost brushed against the barrier of the small courtyard.
Let's add that the day before yesterday the air police came to inspect the place. No trace was found. It was only observed that a piece of ballast had been freshly shod. On the path taken by the little men, no footprint remained.
[Ref. nnm1:] NEWSPAPER "LE NOUVEAU NORD MARITIME":
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Valenciennes, 12. -- A "flying saucer", as two workers from the Amiens region claim to have seen, reportedly landed in Quarouble, near Valenciennes, according to Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, a worker at the A.N.F. of Blanc-Misseron.
Mr. Dewilde, who occupies a gatekeeper's house, along a disused railway track, in Quarouble, was at home on Friday, around 10 p.m., when, intrigued by his dog's barking, he went outside.
Mr. Dewilde saw, on the track, "an oval mass in the shape of a dome which could be about six meters long and three meters high". Pointing an electric lamp in another direction, he saw "two strange beings, small - no more than a meter - and stocky. They had large heads on which the ray of my lamp was reflected, as if it were was a glass globe. Dumbfounded, I also saw a square of bright light opening on the side of the craft. Frightened this time I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, the light had disappeared and the machine, swaying slightly, climbed vertically, giving off smoke."
The police, alerted, did not find any trace of the craft.
[Ref. lin1:] "LIBERATION" NEWSPAPER:
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A metal-worker of 34 year old, Mr. Marius Dewilde, resident of Quarouble (the Nord), claims to have seen Friday, at about 10:30 p.m., on the railway located at a few meters of his garden, a dark mass which he initially took for a cart. But he heard steps on other side of the balustrade of the garden and directed his flashlight in this direction. He then saw two beings covered of diving-suits. They were of small size, not more than one meter, but very broad of shoulders. They had legs proportioned with their size, but Mr. Dewilde does not know if they had arms.
He then wanted to prevent the escape to the two strange characters, but a port-hole of square design opened in the dark mass posed on the way. A green ray spout out and Mr. Dewilde was, it seems, paralysed on the spot. When the projector died out, he finally recovered his freedom of movement, but the two "Martians" had gone up in their apparatus which had risen above the ground vertically. It was a machine having the shape of a cheese cover, 3 meters high, a diameter from 5 to 6 meters, which disappeared quickly towards the west. The Air Police force investigated, but fail to find any trace on the way crossed by the "Martians."
We quite expected that.
[Ref. ppe1:] NEWSPAPER "PARIS-PRESSE":
This newspaper as some other did, gave the account by the Witness Marius Dewilde:
"My wife and my son just went to bed, and I read by the fireplace the account of the accident of "L'Abeille". The clock hung above the cooker marked 10:30 P.M., when my attention was drawn by the barkings of my dog Kiki. The animal howled madly. Suspecting the presence of some prowler in the yard, I took my flashlight and went outside."
"While arriving in the garden, I saw on the railway, within less than six meters of my door, on the left, a sort of dark mass. It must have been a peasant who left his carriage there, I initially thought. I will have to inform the police officers at the police station tomorrow, so that they remove it, or there will be some accident at the first hour."
"At this time, my dog came towards me, crawling, and suddenly, on my right, I heard a noise of hurried steps. There is a path which one calls "the path of the smugglers" because smugglers use it sometimes, at night. My dog had turned again to this direction and had started again to bark. I lit my flashlight and projected its light towards the path."
"What I discovered had nothing in commun with smugglers: two "beings" as I had never seen before, at no more than three or four meters of me, just behind the palisade who only separated me from them, were marching one behind the other in the direction of the dark mass which I had noticed on the railway. One of them, the one that went in front, turned to me. The beam of my lamp came right at the place of its face, a reflection of glass or metal. I had the clear impression that its head was enclosed in some diving-suit helmet. The two beings were besides clothed in one piece suits, similar to those of the divers. They had a very small size, probably less than one meter, but extremely broad of shoulders, and the helmet protecting the "head" appeared enormous to me. I saw their legs, small, proportioned with their size, it seemed to me, but on the other hand I did not see an arm. I am unaware of whether they had arms. The first second of stupor went by, I rushed towards the door of the garden with the intention to circumvent the palisade and to cut their path to capture at least one of them."
"I was at no more than two meters of the two silhouettes when, spouting out suddenly through a sort of square of the dark mass that I had initially seen on the rails, an extremely powerful illumination, like a magnesium flash, plugged me. I closed my eyes and wanted to shout, but I could not. I was like paralysed. I tried to move, but my legs did not obey me any more. Thrown into a panic, I heard as in a dream, within one meter of me, a noise of stepping on the cement flagstone which is posed in front of the door of my garden. In fact the two beings moved towards the railway."
"Finally, the projector died out. I regained the control of my muscles and run towards the railway. But already, the dark mass which was landed there rose off the ground while slightly balancing as would an helicopter."
"However I had been able to see a kind of door closing itself. A thick dark vapor spouted out underneath it with a light whistle. The machine went up to the vertical to about thirty meters, then, without ceasing taking altitude, fled towards the west in direction of Anzin. From a certain distance, it took a reddish luminosity. One minute later, all had disappeared."
[Ref. lqh1:] NEWSPAPER "LE QUOTIDIEN DE LA HAUTE-LOIRE":
A new flying saucer is said to have come down from the sky and to have landed in the night from Friday to Saturday at 10:30 p.m. on the territory of Quarouble, close to Valenciennes, near the railway crossing 79, on the railway used by the national collieries.
"It was 10:30 p.m.," Mr. Marius Dewilde, aged 34, noted, "when my attention was drawn by the barkings of my dog. Believing in the presence of prowlers in my farmyard, I went outside equipped with a flashlight. At less than six meters of the door of my dwelling, I saw a dark mass. In a small path, emerging in my grazing ground, I saw two small men who ran towards the railway crossing. I directed the ray of the lamp. The ray was reflected on the head of the one of them as on glass. Besides, this head appeared rather large to me, but I did not have time to detail it, at the same time the door of the machine opened. A sharp light dazzled me as it would have happened with a magnesium flash. Dazzled, paralysed by the fear, I saw the door being closed again, the apparatus oscillate slightly, rise at some tens of meters, then to slip by like a flash in the direction of Anzin, i.e. towards the west."
Mr. Dewilde, invited to describe the saucer, further indicated that it was of round form, maybe conical. According to his indications it was estimated that it could be approximately three meters high and six meters in diameter. At the time of its rise, it let escape a little smoke and reddened until resembling a ball of fire. When he had recovered his spirit, Mr. Dewilde went to awake his wife, a neighbor, and ran to the gendarmerie, then to the police station of Onnaing. Police chief Gouchet found in front of him a man shalking of all his members, suffering of intestinal contractions which obviously excluded the assumption of an act. In his district, Mr. Dewilde has the reputation of being a balanced and intelligent man.
Yesterday, the Air Police force came to inspect the location, but no trace were found. It was only observed that a piece of the ballast had been recently exposed.
[Ref. fas1:] NEWSPAPER "FEUILLE D'AVIS":
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Recently, in the Somme or the Pyrenees, flying saucers were seen in the sky. Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34 years, worker steelworks Blanc-Liseron [sic], residing in Tuarouge [sic], in northern France, saw him the other night, around 22 pm. 30, 7 meters from his garden, a dark shape, high of 3 meters and a diameter of 6 meters. Then two small strange beings, measuring about a meter, came running from a nearby trail. Then the unit, the door opened and closed, rose a dozen meters, after hovering a moment. A very bright light burst and like a fireball, the spacecraft disappeared towards the west...
[Ref. tst2:] "THE STAR TRIBUNE" NEWSPAPER:
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QUAROUBLE, FRANCE -- (Reuters) -- A steelworker here claimed a baby flying saucer paid him a visit over the weekend here and two little armless men in space helmets came out for a look around.
But when he run up for a closer look, Marius DeWilde said, a bright green light seemed to paralyze him and the strange machine made a clean getaway.
DeWilde, 34, said he was reading a book in his kitchen Friday night when his dog began to bark.
He peered out the window and saw a "black mass" of some kind on the nearby railroad line. When he flicked on his flashlight he saw two little creatures about three feet tall, but with wide shoulders, he said.
He described the men as having legs, but no arms, and big space helmets on their heads.
He said the "saucer" was something like a "cake cover," about 18 feet in diameter. Last he saw of it, he said, was a cloud of black smoke hissing out as it rose into the air.
Police said they found burn marks where the "cake cover" is said to have landed, but could find nothing else.
[Ref. lon1:] NEWSPAPER "L'OISE-MATIN":
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SEA SERPENT", new genre, the problem of flying saucers returns to the foreground of the news. A strange information teaches us that an inhabitant of the department of the Nord, Mr. Marius Dewilde reportedly saw in Quarouble, near the level crossing 79 of the railway line Saint-Amand - Blanc-Misseron two strange individuals. According to this information, these two people, dressed, declares Mr. Dewilde of sorts of diving suits, would have, when he walked on them, sent a light beam with green reflections which paralyzed the witness for a time.
The two individuals would then have climbed into an elongated craft three meters high, six meters long, which rising vertically would have disappeared into the sky. Following this statement, three air police inspectors went to the scene to carry out an investigation. The ground on which this landing would have taken place was thoroughly searched. No footprints were found. On the other hand, one of the railway ties show strange traces. In five places, the timber of the crosspiece is threaded over an area of five square meters. Its markings all look the same and are arranged symmetrically.
The story told by Mr. Dewilde is also confirmed by the testimonies of several inhabitants of the region.
All these testimonies, these facts, give Mr. Dewilde's story a touch of authenticity. Yet many people remain skeptical. Mr. Dewilde is doubtless in good faith; but a year ago he suffered a serious accident at work (head trauma), as a result of which he developed some nervous disorders.
Information indicates that the gendarmes of the Bugeat brigade, informed by public rumor, that a farmer from the hamlet of Mouriéras, commune of Bugeat (Corrèze), Mr. Antoine Mazaud, had conversed with the passenger of a "flying saucer", went to the farmer's to confirm these rumors.
Mazaud tells them that on September 10, at 8:30 p.m., returning from these fields, he had met on a path, 1,500 meters from his house, an unknown individual of normal size, wearing a helmet without ear muffs, who squeezed his hand and kissed him, uttering intelligible words.
The man then climbed into a cigar-shaped, unlit machine, three to four meters long, which, taking off vertically, left in a westerly direction, making no more noise than a bee.
[Ref. lob1:] NEWSPAPER "L'OBSERVATEUR":
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There is hardly a week without mentioning here or there the appearance in the sky of one of these mysterious craft called "flying saucers." This time it was our region that would have been the scene of such an appearance, which, if the witness was to be believed, would be truly disturbing.
Here's what it is about:
A resident of Quarouble, near Valenciennes, Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, a worker at the Ateliers du Nord de la France in Blanc-Misseron, residing at level crossing No. 79, said that Friday evening, around 10 p.m., his attention was aroused by his dog's barking.
He went out immediately, fitted with his electric flashlight, and perceived on the railroad alongside his house, in a particularly deserted place, a dark mass, of oval shape, which could have been 6 m. long and 3 m. high.
Turning his flashlight to another direction, Mr. Dewilde saw two strange and stocky men whose size did not exceed one meter moving quickly towards the craft. These men had a short head on which the rays of his lamp were reportedly reflected as if they were glass globes.
A few moments later a square of intense light appeared on the sides of the craft. The witness, dazzled, then reportedly closed his eyes and when he opened them again the light and the strange beings had disappeared.
The craft, swaying slightly, went up vertically, emitting smoke. Arrived about ten meters above the ground, the lower part of the machine reddened and it disappeared quickly without leaving any trace on the ground, in these places daily trampled by the cattle.
The police superintendent who carried out the investigation declared that the witness was obviously still under intense fear and that his behavior was not that of a simulator.
In addition, the Quarouble resident is known as a "tough guy", a skeptic and also an intelligent man.
[Ref. nmn2:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-MATIN":
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While the population of the Valenciennes borough continues, for the most part to doubt the story of Mr. Dewilde, the Authorities take the landing of flying saucers on our territory very seriously.
Others have spoken of Martians. On the origin of the beings who would have explored the pastures on the edge of P.N. 79, it is perhaps better to assume nothing. The fear that Mr. Dewilde felt at their sight, if we admit that his adventure had really been lived, has certainly distorted his assessments, both on the size and on the appearance of the occupants of the saucer. Especially since the night from Friday to Saturday was particularly dark.
One thing is official, however: representatives of the air police have discovered, on the railway sleepers, deep claws and impact spots which may lead to believe in the landing in this location of a craft. They also found ballast stones with suspicious traces.
We add that young people from neighboring villages, namely Onnaing and Vicq, saw in the sky, at the time indicated by Mr. Dewilde, and heading west, a luminous disc.
In any case, the case seems disturbing.
The adventure of Marius Dewilde, this farmer from Quarouble, who saw two men embarking in their sidereal machine, is not unique.
There is better, if we have to believe a farmer in the hamlet of Mou-
Read more on the sixth page under the title:
SAUCERS
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rieras (Corrèze). The latter, Mr. Antoine Mazaud, reportedly made an extraordinary encounter on September 10.
It was 8:30 p.m. that day, night was beginning to fall and the farmer was following a hollow path when he found himself face to face with a medium-sized stranger wearing a motorcycle helmet without earmuffs.
The two men were both surprised and the farmer, somewhat worried, made a gesture of defense with his pitchfork.
It was then that the individual approached the cultivator, his hand extended, as if to show him his good intentions. Then, fearing that he would not be understood, he approached the farmer, uttering incomprehensible words and kissed him.
He then walked away to a bizarre craft shaped like a cigar. And, before Mr. Mazaud recovered from his surprise, the craft took off vertically and disappeared towards the West.
Subsequently, the farmer returning home told his wife about his adventure, but asked her not to say a word to anyone.
"They would make fun of me," he said.
Mrs. Mazaud could not resist the pleasure of telling - under the seal of secrecy, of course - this adventure to a neighbor and soon the whole country knew about it.
The Ussel gendarmerie questioned Mr. Mazaud who confirmed his story. But it was too late to find traces. Mr. Mazaud is not considered, in the country, as being subject to hallucinations.
It should also be noted that several people said they saw a "flying saucer" last night near Helsinki.
The strange object, circular in shape, moved at about 800 meters of altitude. It emitted an intense light by leaving in its wake a long reddish tail about three times longer than the diameter of the saucer.
The strange vision was visible for seven seconds.
[Ref. cdn2:] "LA CROIX DU NORD" NEWSPAPER:
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Suspicious traces were found on the disused railway track, where Mr. Marius Dewilde claims to have seen a flying saucer, posed during the night from Friday to Saturday. After carefully examining the sleepers near P.N. 79, air police inspectors noticed that one of them bore symmetrically arranged marks, a kind of "claw", we were told, at the Onnaing police station.
The wood received deep prints in five different locations and investigators believe they may have been caused when the craft landed.
In addition, some of the stones from the ballast were removed. Their appearance and abnormal arrangement caught the attention of the inspectors. However, no footprints were noticed around the house. But it may be that the paths hardened in this place by the passage of many cattle did not keep track of the strange little beings seen by Mr. Dewilde.
Let's add that several people, including a young man from Onnaing, said they saw Friday around 10:30 p.m., a luminous ball moving towards the West.
[Ref. ner2:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-ECLAIR":
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The mystery of flying saucers fascinates public opinion. It is no longer from America or Australia that the testimonies come, but from France. They multiply in a quite peculiar manner. We reported the declarations of Mr. Dewilde, of Quarouble. The latter, semsible man, claims that "he saw." A farmer from Corrèze just made such surprising revelations. On the other hand, a German scientist publishes a study disputing the existence of mysterious craft. Who is right?
Suspicious traces were found on the disused railway track, where Mr. Marius Dewilde claims to have seen a landed flying saucer during the night from Friday to Saturday.
After carefully examination of the sleepers near P. N. 79, the air police inspectors noticed that one of them bore symmetrically arranged marks, some sort of "claws", we were told at the Onnaing police station.
The wood has received deep prints in five different locations, and investigators believe they may have been caused when the craft landed.
In addition, they collected some of the stones from the ballast, whose appearance and layout had caught their attention. However, no footprints were noticed. But it may be that the paths hardened in this place by the passage of many cattle, did not keet trace of the "strange little beings" seen by Mr. Dewilde.
Let us add that several people - including a young man from Onnaing - stated that they saw Friday at around 10:30 p.m., a luminous ball moving towards the West.
Continued on page 9
under the title: SAUCERS
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Tulle. -- The gendarmes of the Bugeat brigade (Corrèze), learning yesterday morning, by public rumor that a farmer in the hamlet of Mouriéras, commune of Bugeat (Corrèze), Mr. Antoine Mazaud, had conversed with the passenger in a "flying saucer", went to the farmer, to have these rumors confirmed.
Mazaud tells them that on September 10, at 8:30 p.m., returning from his fields, he met an unknown individual of normal size, wearing a helmet without earmuffs, on a path, 1.500 meters from his home, who shook his hand and kissed him, saying unintelligible words.
The man then climbed into an unlit cigar-shaped craft, three to four meters long which, taking off vertically, set off towards the West, making no more noise than a bee.
Mr. Mazaud then declares that he did not want to speak about this story, because he feared that one would scoff at him.
The eminent German astronomer Hans Haffner claims that flying saucers, apart from hallucinations and aerial reflections, are balls of fire produced by lightning at high altitude. He claims his theory fits with all sightings of flying saucers reported so far.
"Let's get rid of the flying saucer psychosis," he writes. "Flying saucers are actually a natural phenomenon that occurs in the layer of air surrounding the earth."
Mr. Haffner, professor of astronomy at the University of Hamburg and head of section at the Hamburg-Bergedorf Observatory, says that all of the flying saucers that have been seen so far can be classified into four groups:
1) Hallucinations, more frequent than generally believed.
2) Optical illusion even deceiving the lens of the camera. The so-called flying saucer photographs are reflections often seen when taking photos against the light.
3) Weather balloons.
4) Unknown flying objects.
All the objects of the fourth category can be explained by what we know about balls of fire produced by lightning. This phenomenon rarely occurs and we only have two or three photographs. The size, shape, speed, color, brightness, duration, electrical composition and mode of dissolution of these balls of fire are "remarkably similar" to descriptions of flying saucers, Professor Haffner writes.
The balls of fire often emit very bright rays of light, which also matches the story of people who say they saw saucers.
[Ref. nnm2:] "LE NOUVEAU NORD MARITIME" NEWSPAPER:
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Hamburg, 15. -- The eminent German astronomer Hans Haffner writes in the weekly "Die Zeit" that flying saucers, apart from hallucinations and aerial reflections, are balls of fire produced by lightning at high altitude. He says his theory fits with all of the flying saucer sightings reported so far.
"Let's put an end to the flying saucer psychosis," he writes. "Flying saucers are actually a natural phenomenon that occurs in the layer of air surrounding the earth."
Mr. Haffner, professor of astronomy at the University of Hamburg and head of section at the Hamburg-Bergedorf observatory, says that all of the flying saucers that have been seen so far can be classified into four groups:
1. Hallucinations, more common than it is generally believed.
2. Optical illusions, fooling even the lens of the camera. The alleged photographs of flying saucers are reflections often seen when taking photos against the light.
3. Weather balloons.
4. Unknown flying objects.
All the objects of the fourth category can be explained by what we know about the fireballs produced by lightning. This phenomenon rarely occurs, and we only have two or three photographs. The size, shape, speed, color, luminosity, lightness, electrical composition, and mode of dissolution of these fireballs are "remarkably similar" to the descriptions of flying saucers, Professor Haffner writes.
Fireballs often emit very bright rays of light, which again corresponds to the accounts of people who say they saw saucers. Likewise, fireballs can change shape and direction in less than a second, just like saucers. The changes in direction of the fireballs produced by lightning are easily explained by the influence of magnetic fields and by the faster cooling of one side of the ball. Finally, the fireballs always disintegrate suddenly, sometimes silently, sometimes with a loud detonation.
The three "apparitions" of the Amiens region, of Quarouble and of Bugeat, reopened the flying saucers file. And the Air police resumed their investigation.
Officers went to Quarouble and looked closely at where Mr. Dewilde claims to have seen the suspicious craft on Friday evening. They noted on the ballast, contrary to what had been first said, traces may have been left by a craft; which of course remains to be identified.
Also, several witnesses stated that they saw, on the evening of the "landing", a luminous object moving in the sky.
This information should be compared to the testimonies collected both in the Amiens region and in Limousin. People also claim to have seen a luminous object at the time when the "flying saucers", seen respectively by two Picardy masons and by a Bugeat cultivator, took off.
The investigation continues.
[Ref. foe1:] NEWSPAPER "FORCE OUVRIERE":
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In Quarouble (Nord) a metallurgist saw two Martians... Because it is understood that the flying saucers can only come from March. But just as our man was about to start a conversation (a funny job!) he was paralyzed by a ray, green obviously. It looks nicer in technicolor.
In short, once again the saucer flew away without us knowing exactly what it is.
Clever, these Martians, all the same, we were never to capture oine of them!
In Bugeat (Corrèze) it is a farmer who, too, brings his testimony. Late testimony actually. Not wanting to pass for an imbecile, Mr. Mazaud had taken care not to announce his unexpected encounter, except to his wife as it should be.
But it was too much, of course, and the whole village now knows the story. The man was of normal height, wearing a helmet without ear blinders. Shaking hands with Mr. Mazaud, he kissed him and climbed back into his cigar, 3 to 4 meters long; which took off silently vertically.
If the Martians all behave like this, we can surely establish good neighborly relations.
[Ref. las2:] NEWSPAPER "LIBRE ARTOIS":
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While the population of the district of Valenciennes continues, for the most part to doubt the story of Mr. Dewilde, the Authority takes the landing of flying saucers on our territory very seriously.
Others have spoken of Martians. On the origin of the beings who would have explored the pastures bordering the P.N. 79, it may be better to assume nothing. The fear that Mr. Dewilde felt at their sight, by admitting that his adventure had been truly lived, has certainly distorted his assessments, both on the size and on the appearance of the occupants of the saucer. Especially since the night from Friday to Saturday was particularly dark.
One thing is official, however: representatives of the air police have discovered, on the railway sleepers, deep claws and impact points which may lead to believe that a craft had landed at this place. They also found ballast stones with suspicious traces.
We add that young people from neighboring villages, that is to say from Onnaing and from Vicq, saw in the sky, at the time indicated by Mr. Dewilde, and moving towards the West, a luminous disc.
In any case, the affair seems disturbing.
The adventure of Marius Dewilde, the Quarouble farmer, who saw two men getting into a sidereal machine, is not unique.
There is better, if one has to believe a farmer from the hamlet of Mouriéras (Corrèze). The latter, Mr. Antoine Mazoud [sic], reportedly made an extraordinary encounter on September 10.
It was 8:30 p.m. that day, night was beginning to fall and the farmer was following a hollow path when he found himself face to face with a medium-sized stranger wearing a motorcycle helmet without earmuffs.
The two men were also surprised and the somewhat worried farmer made a defense gesture with his fork.
This while the stranger approached the farmer, his hand extended, as if to show him his good intentions. Then, fearing that he would not be understood, he approached the farmer, uttering incomprehensible words and kissed him.
He then walked away to a bizarre craft shaped like a cigar. And, before Mr. Mazeud recovered from his surprise, the craft took off vertically and disappeared towards the West.
Subsequently, the farmer returning home told his wife about his adventure, but asked her not to say a word to anyone:
"They would make fun of me," he said.
Mme Mazaud could not resist the pleasure of telling - under the seal of secrecy, of course - this adventure to a neighbor and soon the whole country knew about it.
The Ussel gendarmerie questioned Mr. Mazaud who confirmed his story. But it was too late to find traces. Mr. Mazaud is not considered in the country as being subjected to hallucinations.
[Ref. ner3:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-ECLAIR":
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From our special envoy
MICHEL DUFOREST
For the first time since the appearance of mysterious machines called "flying saucers", in Quarouble, close to Valenciennes, the traces left by one of these apparatuses were assessed. Six claws, laid out in half-circle on cross-pieces of a little used railway line, seem to prove that in this place a contact or a friction occurred between wood and a harder material.
That is all that can be stated for the time being. But the services of the police force of the Air Force which photographed each print and took some of the scattered stones on the ballast perhaps already drew some other conclusions which they will jealously keep under the cover of military secrecy.
For if the public remains skeptic with respect to all that refers to the "Flying saucers", it is not the same with the police force of the Air with which has a one section especially in charge of investigations in that matter. Hitherto, no material fact had come to corroborate the statements of the witnesses and perhaps this is why the traces in Quarouble will make it possible to see a part of the truth.
Undoubtedly, the story starts well for the disbelievers since it is told by... Marius Dewilde. But the burst of laughter which accommodates this firstname [*] ceases when the story is told.
To obtain more guarantees, it is not to Mr. Dewilde that I asked to tell the facts he witnessed on Friday September 10. Because at this day, he could have been influenced by the questions of the investigators and tens of journalists who raveled at his place. The interrogations which he underwent to check if it did not lie or if he was not the victim of hallucination, could work his imagination, and, involuntarily, he would be likely today, to add details to the primitive account. This normal phenomenon happening to the most balanced men would be all too explainable since for almost a week now, Mr. Dewilde has read in the "trash press" about stories which do not have anything anymore resembling his statements.
Continued in the last page
[*] The first name Marius is supposed to make everyone laugh because it is the generic firstname used in any invented exaggerated stories. "Marius" is the archetype of the simple guy from Marseille who would made any wild claims. Of course Mr. Dewilde's credibility has nothing to do with the archetypes attached to his firstname.
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Mr. Dewilde's home - a railway crossing guard house - is isolated at the edge of a small wood, at approximately a kilometer and half from the national road of Valenciennes to the Belgian customs of Quiévrain. A dirt track, hardly suitable for motor vehicles, leads from the road to the house: it is actually used only by farmers who go to their fields.
The house is located in a triangular space separating two railways. One, employed only by the mines, leads to the mine of Quiévrechain; a train a day passes by there. The other goes from Blanc-Misseron to Odomez; a merchandise train descends in the morning in the direction of the border and goes up the evening in opposite direction; it is on this railway that the traces are.
Let us imagine that we are last Friday, Mr. Dewilde reads, in his kitchen, his illustrated weekly magazine. It is approximately 10:30 p.m. His wife and two sons aged 14 and 2 years 1/2 slept on the first floor - in the mansard-roofed room. For a few minutes already, Mr. Dewilde has heard the dog barking outside, but he does not pay attention to it. However, irritated by these barkings, he finally stands up, takes his flashlight and opens the door of the kitchen that gives on a small enclosure contiguous to the railway line, he shouts "Kiki, will you stop it already?"
When he said these words, he saw a dark mass posed through the railway, which he mistakes for a carriage loaded with hay. A farmer - knowing that no train goes by at night - can, indeed, have abandoned its loading until the next day morning.
At this point in time Mr. Dewilde hears noise in the small way connecting the two railways.
Instinctively, he directs the flashlight in the direction of the place from which the noise comes. And in the ray of light a man appears - a small man who runs while moving towards the "dark mass."
It is a child, he thinks, but while looking better, he sees a second man, behind the other, and so he supposes they are defrauders, for he thinks he makes out a heavy pack on their back.
At this point in time light of the lamp has lights the head of one of the individuals and Mr. Dewilde realizes that it is covered with a kind of diving-suit or helmet out of glass. He also sees that the man carries a very full combination...
And then brutally he is blinded by a light; which surprises him. When his eyes can see through the darkness again, the machine - which he mistook for a carriage loaded with hay - rises vertically while rocking, and moves away quickly above the railway releasing a small flame at the back, without making more noise than a gentle humming.
Only then did Mr. Dewilde realize that he has just been the witness of an extraordinary event. He rushes into his home and shouts to his wife: "Come quickly, there is a "thing" which flies away on the railway. It is a weird machine, and there are men!"
Awaken up too fast, Mrs. Dewilde does not react immediately, and when her husband returns outside, the mysterious apparatus had disappeared.
Mr. Dewilde decides, at once, to go to warn the gendarmerie of Quiévrechain, in spite of the his wife who asked him to wait until the next day morning. "It is my duty to go there, he answered, according to Mrs. Dewilde. That will perhaps be useful to them." And, jumping on his motorcycle, he leaves for Quiévrechain - distant of more than 3 kilometers - skirting the railway which leads to Blanc-Misseron.
But there is no permanence at the office of the gendarmerie, and the door remains hopelessly closed, in spite of the insistence of Mr. Dewilde, to ring the bell and hit the door. He then goes into a nearby coffee shop, where he explains what he has just seen. The skepticism of the customers is shaken all the same by his account and his state of excitement. Somebody then suggests to him going to the police station of Onnaing.
Mr. Dewilde thus resumes his road travel and crosses the six kilometers which separate Quiévrechain from Onnaing, where he arrives shortly before midnight.
The officers in duty are also struck at his attitude: "he was pale, they told me, and was shaking like a man who had just had a great fright." However, the police officers refuse to wake up the chief detective, but they promise that he will visit Mr. Dewilde early in the morning.
The latter thus regains his residence, at approximately four kilometers, and he buckles his night excursion.
After his departure, the officers change their minds and alert the chief detective all the same, Mr. Gouchet, who will collect in the morning of the next day, the statement of Mr. Dewilde on premises of the adventure. In front of the sincerity of the witness, he will alert the Air Police force, and they will record the traces that we mentioned.
Such is the veracious story of the "flying saucer" of Quarouble. The police chief of Onnaing, like the investigators of the services of the Air Security, refuse to say anything more for the excellent reason that they know nothing more. All that they would add would distract away from the truth and would lead in the field of deductions and assumptions.
One can admit initially that Mr. Dewilde, wanting to have people talk about him, invented this uncanny history completely.
"If this were the case, answered Mr. Gouchet to me, Mr. Dewilde would be, at the present time, in jail for insult to the authorities. I have experience of interrogations, and I can vouch that Mr. Dewilde does not invent anything. This is also the opinion gathered by the Air Police force. you can't make up such a story without betraying yourself, at one time or another."
There are also elements which prove the good faith of the witness. He crossed, in the middle of the night, some fifteen kilometers to inform the authorities. H showed signs of his fear.
But if Mr. Dewilde did not want to mislead, he could have been mislead. Wasn't he victim of hallucination?
Mr. Gouchet answers this question too. "I thought of that, too. Thus, I examined the last readings of Mr. Dewilde. In the evening of the event, he read a weekly magazine in which there was nothing about flying saucers." He is not stuffed with science fiction novels, and reads only few illustrated magazines in addition to his daily newspaper."
Moreover, Mr. Dewilde is a balanced and sensible man, and he was in no way predisposed "to see a flying saucer."
And furthermore, it is only when the apparatus flew away that he thought of the "saucers." Hitherto, he mistook the dark mass for a carriage loaded with hay, and the two men for defrauders.
In addition, more than ten people stated to have seen, that evening, around 08:30 p.m., either a "fireball," or a "disc letting escape a trail of fire" in the sky. All testimonies agree to state that the disc moved towards Anzin. And actually, it is indeed towards this direction that Mr. Dewilde saw this mysterious thing which rested on the railway move away.
Do we have then to suppose that there was a collective hallucination of people who did not know each other and were not together at this time? Some chattered on the step of their door, others were closing the window of their bedroom, some, finally, were going home.
Last point to be cleared up: who were these "small men". In his statement, Mr. Dewilde says that they were no more than one meter tall. He initially thought that were children, then "defrauders carrying a heavy burden." finally, he saw that a "sort of diving-suit" covered them.
Is all that incredible? Before, it is wise to specify that 1°) the scene did not last thirty seconds; 2°) the night of Friday to Saturday was extremely dark; 3°) the wind blew with strength.
Mr. Dewilde thus did not have time to "examine" the individuals. He saw shades and his flashlight allowed him to note that they were covered with special clothes.
But aren't aviators provided, them also, of a full combination and a special helmet allowing them to confront high altitudes? Can't men, of average size, curved so that they are not seen, appear as "small men" in particular when the width of their combination still makes them appear smaller?
These plausible assumptions that the police force emits authorize to believe in the sincerity of the witness.
MICHEL DUFOREST
[Ref. fas2:] "FEUILLE D'AVIS" NEWSPAPER:
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Still the flying saucer problem
Following the information that we recently published about the two passengers of a flying saucer, we learned today the following details:
Three inspectors of the air police returned to Quarouble (North) to hear Mr. Marius Dewilde, the man who "saw" two Martians to the garden gate.
They left the village believe that on the night of Friday to Saturday, a mysterious flying object has landed, as stated by Mr. Dewilde, on the railway Saint-Amand - White-Misseron near the crossing 79 .
The findings seem they could do, indeed, confirm the testimony of the metalworker. The latter said that on Friday to 22 pm. 30 he saw an oblong craft, 3 meters tall, long 6, placed on the track, a few meters from his house. Two beings of human appearance, very small and, apparently, wearing suits, were nearby. Mr. Dewilde walked toward them, but at that time, the craft leveled on him a beam of light green reflection, which had the effect of paralyzing it. When he regained the use of his limbs, the machine began to rise in the sky and two people were missing.
Investigators have found no trace of the existence of these two characters. The surrounding ground, examined meter by meter, has not delivered a pitch mark.
On the other hand, one of the sleepers showed signs that have been made by a machine at the time of landing. In five places the wood of the cross is tapped over approximately four square centimeters surface. These brands all have the same appearance and are arranged in a symmetrical manner, on the same line: three of them - those in the middle - are separated by a gap of 43 centimeters. The last two are distant previous 67 centimeters.
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(CONTINUED FROM FIRST PAGE)
A machine which would land on crutches and not on wheels like our planes would not leave different traces, satted one of the police of the air inspectors.
The report Mr. Dewilde made also finds confirmation by testimonies of several residents of the area. In Onnaing, a young man, Mr. Edmond Auverlot, and a pensioner, Mr. Hublard, saw, at approximately 10:30 p.m., the hour indicated by Mr. Dewilde, a red gleam moving in the sky. The same gleam was seen from Vicq by three young people who left a ball.
All these testimonys, these facts, give to the account of Mr. Dewilde a color of authenticity. However, many people remain skeptical. Mr. Dewilde is undoubtedly of good faith; but one year ago he was victim of a serious industrial accident (cranial traumatism), in the continuation of which he showed some nervous disorders. So one thinks he might have been the victim of " waked up hallucinations", well-known phenomenon in medicine.
[Ref. cia1:] CIA:
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INFORMATION FROM
FOREIGN DOCUMENTS OR RADIO BROACASTS
| COUNTRY: | Non-Orbit | DATE OF INFORMATION: | 1954 | |
| SUBJET: | Military - Unidentified flying objects | |||
| HOW PUBLISHED: | Dail[y] newspaper | DATE DIST.: | 29 oct 1954 | |
| WHERE PUBLISHED: | As indicated | NO. OF PAGES: | 5 | |
| DATE PUBLISHED: | 31 Jul - 20 Sep 1954 | |||
| LANGUAGES: | Various | SUPPLEMENT TO REPORT NO.: | ||
| [Blackened out] | [Blackened out] | THIS IS UNEVALUATED INFORMATION | ||
| SOURCE: | As indicated |
SIGHTINGS OF UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS,
31 JULY - 20 SEPTEMBER 1954
WESTERN EUROPE
[... (Reports from other countries) ...]
France
[... (Previous reports)]
BELIEVE "FLYING SAUCER" PILOTS WERE SMUGGLERS -- Paris, Franc-Tireur, 16 Sep 54
(The following is additional information on reports of two cases cited in the FBIS [CIA reports such as this one] roundup of 14 September 1954)
Two of the alleged landings (on 10 September) in France of "flying saucers" are considered by the local air police to have been nothing more than the landing of planes used in smuggling. Furthermore, in one case, the farmer in Correze Department stated that the pilot uttered unintelligible words; but the farmer was certainly no polyglot and could easily have been fooled. In the other case, in Valenciennes Departement, the witness may have been sincere, but it should be noted that he had a cranial traumatism one year ago and several nervous disturbances since. It is true, however, that in the latter case, the air police found four unusual marks on the railroad ties near the spot indicated by the witness, marks that could have been made by the tools of railroad workers.
[... (Next reports)]
Note: the first case is the Antoine Mazaud case, refer to the corresponding file for September 10 in Mourieras, Correze.
[Ref. rdr1:] "RADAR" MAGAZINE:
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Thanks to its draftsmen and reporter-photographers, RADAR has endeavored to reconstruct with extreme meticulousness the mind-blowing appearance witnessed by Mr. Dewilde (below), barrier guard in the Nord. Hardly believable events: he would have seen a flying saucer land near his house!
HALLUCINATION? Truth?
Marius Dewilde, a metalworker in Quarouble (Nord) claims to have seen a flying saucer, placed on the railway line that serves the Houllières Nationale, 6 meters from his house. Small creatures, dressed in a sort of diving suit, wearing helmets made of translucent material, had reintegrated the mysterious craft at a run. Having wanted to approach it, Marius Dewilde has been paralyzed by a ray which had suddenly sprung from the craft.
Three days earlier, two farmers from Acheux-en-Amiénois (Somme), Emile Renard and Yves de Gillaboz, had witnessed, they claimed, the landing of another flying saucer in a field, 200 meters from the road from Harponville to Contay. The craft oscillated a few centimeters from the ground.
Finally, last news (while waiting for others!), Antoine Mazaud, farmer in Mouriéras (Corrèze), reportedly found himself face to face with a passenger of a "space ship" who would have shown him... peaceful feelings.
Such news - sensational, it must be admitted - is not without arousing the disbelief of many. But for those who for seven years have been looking into the disturbing problem of flying saucers, they are only retelling certain testimonies collected by the Ouranos, a research organization which now sets the number of "space ships" having landed on French territory at seven.
But France does not have the privilege of these surprising visits.
On June 24, 1947, an American aviator, Arnold Kenneth [sic], saw above Mount Rainier (State of Washington) "9 scintillating objects moving at the height of the snowy peaks". They looked like saucers surmounted by a protuberance which assumed the shape of an inverted cup. Each of them had about the wingspan of a four-engined "C54".
From this date, not a week goes by without these mysterious craft being reported somewhere in the world.
The "US Air-Force, without first taking a position, collected all the testimonies and instructed the A.T.I.C. (Air Technical Intelligence Center) to open an investigation. This one, called "Soucoupe Project", showed that of 270 cases examined, 60% could be explained: they were weather balloons, cosmic-ray research devices, meteors, even birds. But for the other 40% of the cases, the mystery remained.
Despite this restriction, when in December 1949 the "Soucoupe Project" investigation was closed, the conclusions were that the flying saucers were a joke: that they were, in fact, either known objects, or hoaxes, or mass hysteria.
However, as the phenomenon continued to manifest itself with increasing magnitude, the "US Air-Force" recreated "Soucoupe Project" discreetly under the neutral name of "Project Bluebook" or "Commission Grudge", or "Project Sign."
CONTINUED ON PAGES 2-3
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VALENCIENNES. -- That evening, in his small house in Quarouble, 9 kilometers from Valenciennes, Marius Dewilde reads in his diary the story of the drama of "l'Abeille" because he is a former sailor. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, his dog starts howling to death. Dewilde comes out of his kitchen to calm the beast. Marius lives in the house of a former gatekeeper. He took his electric torch which revealed to him, on the rails, a sort of hut, the color of rust, the dimensions of which he estimated at 3 m. by 7 m. Footsteps on the way. He shines his flashlight on the walkers. One could have taken them for smugglers bent under a heavy load. But a closer look shows that they are at most 80 cm. tall and have no arms. An inflated diving suit envelops them. A porthole helmet covers them. Marius sets off on their trail. They flee towards the craft. A hatch opens and a greenish light stops the curious. Stunned, he does not see how the craft takes off. But a huge black smoke escapes from it as it rises vertically.
[Photo caption:] On one of the sleepers of the track, one circled with chalk the traces of the landing. These are notches of about two centimeters by five. They attack the wood at an angle of 45° as could an anchoring by metal crutch. Note that since that night Marius' dog has been terrified.
[Ref. las3:] "LIBRE ARTOIS" NEWSPAPER:
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The revelations of Mr. Marius Dewilde of Quarouble, who, a few days ago, claimed to have been grazed by the two passengers of a flying saucer, made of the modest village of the Valencienne region the meeting place for all the journalists from France and Navarre. For the past two weeks, Mr. Dewilde, or rather Mrs. Dewilde, received more visitors in his humble little house at the railway crossing 79 than the President of the Council himself.
The "Martians of Quarouble", as one of our sensationalist colleagues put it, brought representatives of the written and film press to Mr. Dewilde's. Reporters, photographers, filmmakers, etc ... questioned their host in every possible manner, looking for the flaw in his story that would betray him. In vain: Mr. Dewilde has a version of the facts which, for the past two weeks, has not varied by an inch.
Those who, in the village itself and around, had peddled the rumor that Mr. Dewilde would be only a visionary, a big mouth, or even a hallucinated, should only be careful. Mr. Dewilde went to the Onnaing police station with the intention of filing a formal defamation complaint against them. Mr. Dewilde, taken for an impostor by a part of his fellow citizens, had another mishap. Tenant of a house belonging to the S.N.C.F., he was told, a few days ago, to have to leave the premises as soon as possible. Reason: does not belong to S.N.C.F.
To live happily, let's live hidden, said La Fontaine. The formula is good.
Those who might have thought Mr. Dewilde interested will have to abandon this unfavorable prejudice: the Quarouble saucer costs him dearly. He hasn't finished paying the bill. This is an argument in favor of his testimony.
[Ref. cdt1:] NEWSPAPER "THE CARROL DAILY TIMES":
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FLYING TALE -- Marius Dewilde makes a rough drawing of what he claims he saw in his Quarouble, France, back yard recently. He says it was a flying saucer, and strange looking creatures came out of the craft, looked around and departed. Marius had local police investigate the incident.
[Ref. lob2:] NEWSPAPER "L'OBSERVATEUR":
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Mr. Dewilde, the man who, in Quarouble, allegedly saw not only this mysterious machines which one baptized "Flying saucer", but also its two occupants, must not be far from cursing the day when this strange adventure happened to him!
These revelations made of the modest village of the Valenciennes area where he lives, the meeting place for all the sensation press in France and Navarre.
Reporters, photographers, filmmakers follow one another in the humble abode of railway crossing 79.
In addition to the inconvenience caused by these untimely visits and these more or less sneaky interrogations in the hope that Mr. Dewilde will vary in his version of the facts, the latter now sees himself exposed to the malevolence of certain fellow citizens. Isn't he accused of being a visionary, a big mouth, a hallucinated, even an impostor? The applicant, exasperated by these rumors, threatened to file a defamation complaint against his detractors and went for that to the Police Commissioner of Onnaing.
But this is not the most serious in the story of the "Martians of Quarouble". Tenant of a house belonging to the S.N.C.F., Mr. Dewilde was served a few days ago, to have to leave the premises as soon as possible. Reason: does not belong to the S.N.C.F.
There you go! "To live happily, let's live hidden," says popular wisdom. Mr. Dewilde experiences it.
If the man is a hoaxer, let's face it, his joke is expensive and he must start to regret it.
If, on the contrary, he really lived the adventure he told, let's bet that if, one day, he sees his "Martians" again, he will be tempted to send his boot back... to their moon.
And if he relies on the promises of the government to find new housing, let him remember that, for some time, it is the habit of governments to promise the moon.
[Ref. cns1:] NEWSPAPER "THE COURRIER NEWS":
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FLYING TALE -- Marius Dewilde makes a rough drawing of what he claims he saw in his Quarouble, France, back yard recently. He says it was a flying saucer, and strange looking creatures came out of the craft, looked around and departed. Marius had local police investigate the incident.
[Ref. tst1:] NEWSPAPER "THE STAR TRIBUNE":
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LYON, FRANCE, -- (Reuters) -- France's flying saucer circus continued to rouse interest around the country Wednesday as more eyewitnesses accounts of "saucers", "plates" and other whizzing celestial objects kept pouring in.
Now a farner says a creature came up to him on a lonely road, carressed his arm and burbled unintelligible noises at him. Then it went off towards its "saucer", which the farmer could not describe because a green ray temporarily paralyzed him.
[Ref. ner4:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-ECLAIR":
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If you meet Martians or any other passenger of mysterious craft, go your way whistling, looking totally cool, and, above all, do not say a word to anyone about your adventure.
So for Mr. Marius Dewilde, the impromptu visit he received, on Saturday evening, at Quarouble, was the beginning of the troubles.
There were the gendarmes, the various police forces, the journalists, the photographers, the work buddies, the neighbors, the radio reporters, the cinematographic news reporters, the grocer, Mr. the mayor, the close relatives and distant cousins, etc...
That's not all. Mr. Dewilde occupies a gatekeeper's house. And he is not a gatekeeper. The S.N.C.F. had the attention drawn to his case, he was asked to leave the premises.
Don't talk to Mr. Dewilde any more of saucer stories: he's disgusted with them.
[Ref. cdv2:] "LE COURRIER DE VALENCIENNES" NEWSPAPER:
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Mr. Dewilde, a man who, in Quarouble, allegedly saw not only this mysterious craft which we baptized "Flying saucer" but also its two occupants, must not be far from cursing the day when this strange adventure occurred!
These revelations made of the modest village of the Valenciennes region where he lives, the meeting place for all the sensation press in France and Navarre.
Reporters, photographers, filmmakers follow one another in the humble abode of railway crossing 79.
In addition to the inconvenience that these untimely visits give him and these more or less sneaky interrogations in the hope that Mr. Dewilde contradicts himself in his version of the facts the latter is now exposed to malicious attacks from some fellow citizens. One is accusing him of being a visionary, a crackpot, a hallucinated, or even an impostor?
The concerned one, exasperated by these rumors, threatened to file a defamation complaint against his detractors and went for that to the Police Commissioner of Onnaing.
But this is not the most serious in the history of the "Quarouble Martians." Tenant of a house belonging to the S.N.C.F., Mr. Dewilde was told, a few days ago, to have to leave the premises as soon as possible. Reason: does not belong to the S.N.C.F.
There you go! "To live happily, let's live hidden," says popular wisdom. Mr. Dewilde experiences it.
If the man is a liar, let's face it, his joke is expensive and he must start to regret it.
If on the contrary he really lived the adventure he told, let us bet that if one day he sees his "Martians" again, he will be tempted to kick them... in the moon.
If he relies on the promises of the government to find a new accommodation, he will remember that, for some time, the characteristic of Governments has been to promise the moon.
From our colleague "L'Observateur."
[Ref. rdr2:] "RADAR" MAGAZINE:
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VALENCIENNES. -- The mail of a star falls every day on the table of Marius Dewilde. From the four corners of the world he is written to in almost identical terms. "We would like to read from your own pen the story of the phantasmagoric apparition so well reconstructed by "Radar". The English, especially, demand a detailed account of the adventure. Bravely, Dewilde answers, by hand. But the letters becoming too many (from 66 to 100 a day), he thinks of affording himself a typewriter, perhaps even a stylish secretary.
[Ref. ler1:] NEWSPAPER "L'EST REPUBLICAIN":
A plague of "flying saucers" and other mysterious craft is sweeping Europe, and the number of recorded testimony shows that France appears to be particularly targeted. There is no day, since weeks, where many of these events are reported from the Vendée, the Moselle and the Quiévrain to the Bidassoa.
In the Limousin, in particular, where a farmer was embraced on September 10, by a stranger; although he was peaceful, terror took hold, especially in the area of Roches (Creuse), where children no longer dare to go to school alone and where shepherdesses no longer want to keep their flocks since a dark shadow was reported hiding in the brushes. There is concern that the friendly Martian re-embarked leaving on the earth one of his companions.
In Diges (Yonne), two women saw each in her turn, a cigar land in a meadow and its pilot was leaning, perhaps on its engine. The "being" was of normal size, dressed in khaki and wearing a cap, but they were so scared that by the same reflex, they fled and locked themselves in.
A pseudo-writer, on the contrary, delighted that these fantastic creatures come to join his philosophical ramblings, assimilates the "anti-saucerists" to troublemakers and warmongers. He writes without smiling: "These cigars and saucers could well make all of us agree. Perhaps this is why some people do not want to hear about it. Think about it! Eisenhower and Malenkov shaking hands around a saucer! What an idea!"
What to think of this new fever? Should we follow in their disdainful disapproval those who believe without verification, it is all hallucinations - sometimes collective - or should we believe with the others these are real craft originating from the human genius or more romantically coming from another world?
No doubt it is better to examine things more closely. The case now takes a too serious turn for trafficking in nonsense or admit all the news. It is time to grasp the problem and reason healthily on the sum of elements accumulated since more than seven years.
For it is on June 24, 1947, that the first "saucers" were reported in the manner described thousands of times since.
It was an American businessman, Kenneth Arnold, who saw that day "nine luminous discs flying in formation at high altitude" when he had taken off from Chehalis (Washington) on a personal plane. He could see that these "craft" were "flat like frying pans or saucers" before their disappearance and, if the case made little noise, the term "flying saucers" (soucoupe volante) was already launched.
It took six months before a new apparition was reported again in America, but this one was to end in tragedy, beginning to worry the public opinion. On January 7, 1948, the police in Fort Knox (Kentucky) warns the military at the Godman Airfield that "a huge fiery object, surrounded by a reddish glow" was flying in their direction. Three reservists fighter pilots were in flight, precisely at that time, on "Mustangs" propeller planes, and the tower alerted the control. Captain Mantell, leader of the squadron, immediately saw the "object" and putting gas on dove after it although his two comrades and himself had left for a flight at low altitude and were deprived of oxygen masks. The two crew members did not exceed 4,000 meters. Only Mantell went up to almost 7,000 meters before telling on the radio, breathless:
- It's frightening...
These words were the last and no one ever knew what they meant. The plane broke up in flight and the body of the unfortunate pilot was found horribly disjointed. The first reaction of Mantell's friends was naturally to think that he had been "downed" by the mysterious craft. His exclamation seemed to indicate that what he saw was awful and that monsters had fired at him.
This is the first victim - the first "martyr" - who tragically marked the true arrival of the "saucers" on earth.
An investigation commission was appointed, but its work was long and hard at a time when the high-speed compressibility phenomena were still unclear. When it put out its report on the accident, it finally explained that the pilot had climbed too high, probably in the pursuit of an atmospheric phenomenon. Deprived of oxygen, he had probably exclaimed that he was losing consciousness. The aircraft, abandoned to itself, had probably dislocated by diving at nearly the speed of the "wall of sound".
But psychosis was already on his way. What can the fairly conservative assumptions of technicians do against the taste of wonderful and the supernatural?
It is in any case strange to see that the appearances of "flying saucers" multiplied at once in America where 1,192 cases were reported, in waves, from 1947 to 1952. And it is no less surprising to see that, little by little parallel waves manifested themselves in France three to five weeks behind those recorded in the U.S.A.
Of course, the "pro-saucerists" interpret this pattern to their advantage: - We are part of the same humanity that the Americans and the "saucers" have no reason to despise us when visiting Earth. Their pilots wherever they come from can be as much interested in France and in the United States and if we see less it is because our territory is seventeen times smaller than that of the U.S.A.
It is certainly flattering to our national pride. But more Cartesian than sentimental "anti-saucerists", are concerned with this regular shift:
Just long enough to newspapers to inform you of the virus, they reply. After the Mantell crash anyway America was so gripped by the fear of the saucers deadly saucers that it accepted all the fables.
The most sensational story was published by one Franck Scully of Denver, who told in a weekkly magazine, then in a book, how a circular machine, that came from another planet, crashed in the United States, described the autopsy by a famous practitioner of sixteen little creatures found on board and stated that metal debris from the machine, heated to 10,000 degrees, had not melted. The finally palpable "saucer" and these little men in blue linen clothes made such a noise that an investigation commission - again - joined in. Frank Scully, interrogated, had to admit the "hoax". His piece of metal melted at 637 degrees and the case ended with two convictions for fraud.
But once again, the explanation came too late. The book beautifully sold and the author won a lot of dollars.
1953 has not been a hot year for "saucers".
In France, the first known "saucer" was reported in Antibes, in August 1949, but the following came in waves, parallel, we repeat, to those in the US. There is a fever in 1950, two in 1951 and one particularly important in 1952. That year, there were eleven appearances in May, six in June, six in July, two in August and two in September, eight finally in October.
This is precisely the time when America also see many "flying objects" and made us know its anxiety. We will see how calm then returned across the Atlantic. Here, 1953 was also quiet. The saucers disappeared from our skies until last August where a new wave started discreetly in Norway with the meeting of a helicopter by two young people who were picking blueberries.
This time Europe had exclusivity. The wave grows slowly, recalling the Loch Ness [Monster] who in the past returned in the heart of summer to fill the gaps in the news. But the Scottish snake was a prisoner of the lake while the "saucers" do not recognize borders nor countries nor the dreams and the real facts are now mingled with the disorder.
We must reject from the first five recent stories - the most sensational alas! - just too unreliable.
In Vernon, the young witness has a strong imagination well known in the region.
In Quarouble, near Valenciennes, the gatekeeper who saw "little people" was a victim, one year ago, of a head injury and is subject, since then, to nervous disorders. Prints appear on the wood of the railway track, but may give rise to infinite interpretations.
Near Amiens, four pranksters had to admit they had wanted to make fun of their friends. In Bugeat (Corrèze), Mr. Mazaud has probably been embraced by someone but the air police firstly believes in a light aircraft that came in this deserted place at dusk, for a rendez-vous with a smuggler.
In Craintilleux finally, near St-Etienne, the giant, Hitler lookalike, double-faced (one grimacing at the front and the other, jovial, at the back) climbed in his saucer without opening the door, in the manner of wall-crossing ghosts, really seems too childishly wonderful. Witnesses, actors and writers have probably the romantic spirit that suits this kind of occurrence. And the Martian they thought they saw will at least have the advantage of providing them something for a play or a novel.
Medicine knows about these awaken hallucinations which can be experienced by completely normal people. Who did not see in the dark shadows move where there was nothing? It should be noted in this connection that virtually all reported landings of "saucers" took place at night and no one has yet seen Martians having a shape significantly different from ours in daylight.
Should we conclude that all recorded reports are the work of unbridled imaginations?
Certainly not.
Kenneth Arnold and Mantell were not dreamers. Most French witnesses aren' either.
[Ref. fso1:] NEWSPAPER "FRANCE-SOIR":
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The most recent testimonies of the strange passengers of saucers, cigars, and various apparatuses that landed in different regions of France agree on one point: the supposed Martians are small and different from those who appeared in Portugal and measured 2 m. 50.
We summarize the witnesses report that can give an idea of what might be the "average Martian":
Mr. Marius DEWILDE, 34, metallurgist in Quarouble (Nord), saw two beings measuring one meter, with wide shoulders, but apparently without arms. They were dressed in diving suits and fitted with helmets. They pointed at the witness a ray that paralyzed him for a few seconds.
Mr. Pierre LUCAS, a baker in Loctudy (Finistère), saw an "individual" measuring 1 m 30 come out of a saucer and patting him on the shoulder uttering unintelligible sounds. His face was oval and hairy and his eyes were "the size of a raven egg".
Mr. André NARCY, 48 years old, a roadmender in Mertrud (Haute-Marne), saw a 1.20-meter-tall being disembarking from a saucer "dressed in a coat covered with hairs".
Mr. Antoine MAZAUD, from Bugeat (Corrèze), saw a "medium-sized" being wearing a motorcycle helmet.
M. Lucien BORDET, storekeeper, 9 rue Lapérouse, Paris, saw at the Bois de Boulogne three "beings" of 1 meter in height, dressed in luminous outfits and wearing helmets whose portholes concealed their eyes. One of them, who appeared to be the chief, had "six rotundities on the abdomen".
[Ref. ssr1:] NEWSPAPER "SAMEDI-SOIR":
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[...]
Quarouble (Pas-de-Calais), Friday September 10, 1954, 22 h.15:
MARIUS DEWILDE, aged 34, workman with the steelworks Blanc Misseron, reads a magazine in his kitchen (it would be interesting to know what this magazine was about) [the shipwreck of l'Abeille], On the first floor, Mrs. Dewilde and her son have rested already for a moment. All is quiet. Only the tick-tock of the clock and the crumpling of the turned pages break the silence.
Suddenly, Marius Dewilde raises the head, attentive. Outside, Kiki, his dog, barks furiously as when a foreigner penetrates in the small garden. Somebody at this hour? Certainly not a visitor. Then? A tramp, perhaps, or a smuggler? Marius Dewilde takes a flashlight and goes outside on his doorstep. The fresh air of the night hits him in the face. During a few seconds, his eyes badly accustomed to the darkness cannot distinguish anything. Then, beyond the barrier which separates the way from the railway, he sees a dark mass, like a cart abandoned on the rails.
"Hold on..., thinks Marius, a peasant uncoupled on the railway. I will have to warn the station so that it gets removed, that could cause an accident."
Meanwhile Kiki, towards the right, continues to bark furiously. Marius Dewilde presses the button of his flashlight and directs the luminous ray towards the place where Kiki is. And then, he sees...
Within three or four meters of him, on the way which passes in front of the house, two beings go one behind the other towards the dark mass seen on the railway. They are small (no more than one meter). The one from the pair who walks in front turns the head towards Marius Dewilde who has the impression to find himself in the presence of two extremely broad shouldered divers whose helmets throw metallic reflections.
First amazed, Marius runs towards the garden's door, to cut the road to the unknowns. Then, in the dark mass posed on the way, a window of square design opens, from where spouts out a green ray which is directed at Dewilde. At once, the man is paralysed, nailed on the spot. His legs refuse to serve him.
During several seconds, he is thus unable to make even one movement, then suddenly, the projector extincts, and Marius finds the use of his muscles. He runs towards the apparatus, but he is too late. With a whistle and a thick black smoke, the dark mass rises in space while slightly rocking. One would say a cheese cover three meters high and from five to six meters in diameter. The thing goes up... goes up... It takes a red-orange color, and disappears towards the west. Marius Dewilde and his Martians enter the legend.
As in the Mazaud case, the police forces investigate. This time, it is the Air police forces. Why the Air police force? Well, because this is about a flying apparatus, of course. One "seeks" landing traces on the railway and one of "finds" it. Five scratches on the cross-pieces. One of the inspectors states:
- AN APPARATUS WHICH WOULD HAVE LANDED ON QUILTS WOULD NOT LEAVE DIFFERENT TRACES!
Marius Dewilde was victim, formerly, of a cranial traumatism in the continuation of which he had, one says, expressed some nervous disorders. Perhaps a psychiatrist would have questions to ask, but this assumption is excluded. Nobody will subject the witness to what Americans calls a "cross-examination", i.e. a true interrogation intended to find contradictions or the improbabilities in his account. In what authority, anyway, would this be done?
Marius Dewilde is not a criminal or a madman. He does not threaten the safety of anybody. He did not call the police. He is perfectly free, like any French citizen, to tell what he saw or what he believed to have sees and to give of the events of which he claims to have been the witness any version which suits him or in which he believes.
Under these circumstances, however, it is allowed to raise the question: where is the scientific truth?
[Photograph with caption:] A few hours after Mazaud, Marius Dewilde, of Quarouble (Pas-de-Calais), saw, too, two "Martians". Moreover, he had the privilege of the diving-suits and the "paralysing ray". He also wanted, afterwards, to get a gendarme as witness.
[Ref. smh1:] "SYDNEY MORNING HERALD" NEWSPAPER:
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From June GODDARD In Paris
FRANCE, the land of logic, is in the full grip of the fever of flying saucers and of little men in space helmets, who make friendly, if unintelligible, advances to startled peasants, or nail them to the spot with a hypnotic "green ray."
For the past 10 days there have been unnumerable flying saucer reports from peasants, doctors, milkmen, butchers, farmers, housewives, gendarmes, teachers, from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean, from the Pyrenees to the Ardennes, from Britany to Alsace.
According to all these witnesses, the sky over France is alight with sparkling yellow "saucers," bluish globes, "flying cigars," (Once as dramatically reported from Mulhouse in Alsace, surrounded by "12 little cheroots"), plain aluminum "saucers," luminous "cigars," 10 "saucers" which seemed to perform a sort of ballet in the sky, and sometimes just plain "mysterious machines."
Unlike earlier flying saucers, those reported hovering over France fly low, sometimes at about 600 ft, and do not flash across the sky, but remain in view for as long as 15 minutes, or remain apparently immobile.
They variously spit flames, form luminous curtains of light, change color, land and take off vertically without a sound.
MANY French scientists, hitherto skeptical on the flying saucer question, are reported to be somewhat shaken by the multiplicity of reports, and by the fact that some are group observations, or individual reports which tally with others received from adjacent regions.
On the subject of little men or Martians, they reiterate that astronomers have never made any observations which could indicate a high form of life on Mars.
They point out that Mars is a thousand million years older than the earth, and that, if life did once exist there, it probably disappeared in the pink icy deserts which appear now to abound on the planet.
The protagonists of the flying saucers and the little men from Mars have been greatly encouraged by an article in the serious journal, "Forces Aériennes Françaises" (French Air Forces) written by a young aeronautical engineer, Lieut. J. Plantier, and approved by an engineer-in-chief of the Air Ministry.
Lieut. Plantier does not take sides, but merely demonstrates theoretically and by mathematical study that all the phenomenal behavior attributed to flying saucers is perfectly explicable if such machines were using cosmic ray energy,
Lieut. Plantier shows that the reports that flying saucers remain motionless in the sky, accelerate from immobility to 10,000 m.p.h. in a few seconds without any noise, and that living beings can fly in them without being harmed by the acceleration, are completely logical if it is admitted that energy of cosmic rays has been harnessed and that machines can fly at the speed of light.
IRRESPECTIVE of the views of scientists, however, French men and women continue to report daily appearances of saucers and cigars and their encounters with the space men.
First reaction of the honest French citizen in the face of any unusual happening or danger - including, it seems, phenomena from outer space - is to inform the gendarmes.
Accordingly, in villages and towns, bold gendarmes have been "alerted" as the French Press has it, and have been kept busy checking reports and examining alleged flying saucer landing areas for "traces."
Two gendarmes at Chateauroux in Central France themselves saw three luminous green flying objects.
Their police training immediately asserted itself, and they stopped a motor car driver and a cyclist so that they too could look and bear witness. Then the gendarmes made out a full report.
The only tangible evidence to date of a landing is that produced by Mr. Marius Dewilde, a 28-year-old metal worker in the North near Valenciennes.
M. Dewilde, a young man with a hairline moustache, a long - and it must be admitted, humorous - face, said he first saw the "Martians" from his garden near the railway line.
"Two little beings, not more than three feet high," he reported, "each wearing a sort of diving suit with metal helmet, were standing near a 'flying cigar,' which had landed on the railway sleepers."
M. Dewilde had no chance to shake hands or welcome the visitors in the name of the Fourth Republic for, as soon as they saw him, they hypnotized him with a "green ray" while they leapt into their machine which, of course, took off vertically in a thick cloud of smoke without making a sound.
Next day the gendarmes "alerted" at once by M. Dewilde and two inspectors of the Air Force police, found a series of strange regular marks on the railway sleepers, which could have been caused by the "saucer" in landing.
MOST intimate contact with the space men was reported by M. Antoine Mazaud, a farmer, aged 58, with a bushy grey moustache, who lives near Limoges in the Massif central plateau of France.
M. Mazaud alleges that a "Martian" about three feet high emerged from a "flying cigar" and began to talk in an unintelligible tongue. When he realized that M. Mazaud could not understand him, he kissed the farmer on the cheek.
M. Mazaud's argumentative fellow-countrymen, questioning this strange story, immediately wanted to know why a creature from another world should adopt the habit - not even universal on earth, they pointed - of kissing.
"It is surprising that he did not pin a medal on your chest and kiss you on both cheeks," they scoffed.
In view of this unsympathetic response to M. Mazaud's story, it is not surprising, therefore, that M. Yves David, a farmer of Chatellerault, concealed for some days the fact that he had been touched on the arm by a "space man" before being momentarily hypnotized by the "green ray" like M. Dewilde.
M. David was afraid of being laughed at, he said, but eventually asked a friend if anyone else had seen the space man. The friend spread the news and, of course, told the gendarmes.
Two women in the Yonne department gave independent reports of having seen a strange machine in a clearing with a pilot standing next to it. Neither stayed to investigate, however.
DAILY the stories continue. No Parisians have yet reported an encounter with a "Martian," altough, as the wits point out, you would expect them to land on the "Champs de Mars" ("Field of Mars"), the esplanade in the front of the military school.
Cartoonists are fully exploiting the "Martian" and flying saucer season. One, in true Gallic vein, has drawn the classic wronged husband who returns home unexpectedly. He has thrown open the cupboard door to reveal a strange little figure in a spaceman's suit and helmet, and is saying to his guilty wife, cowering in bed: "And that, I suppose, you'll tell me, is a Martian."
Most celebrated flying saucer "spotter" to date in Paris is film star Michele Morgan, who reported seeing one near the Eiffel tower at about 10 p.m.
When Mademoiselle Morgan later complained of the flood of telephone calls from fans and friends who wanted to hear further details, her mother made the dry and essentially French comment:
"You lost a good opportunity that night to hold your tongue."
[Ref. lie1:] NEWSPAPER "LA LIBERTE":
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Last week the Club of Dowsers went to Quarouble, under the leadership of its president, to investigate this famous flying saucer that landed on the railway track. The eminent president and his collaborators wanted to be able to detect the nationality of the two two-legged monsters, which the Quarouble resident, baptized in the city under the nickname of "Cacoule and Parisian", had seen with his own eyes, seen.
As soon as these gentlemen arrived on the scene, the news spread like wildfire, and a few hundred curious people surrounded the Valencian scholars.
"Come quickly, shouted a brave farmer, to one of his comrades, to check the delegation from the French Academy, you've seen at the movies 'bout that thing?"
The guard of Quarouble pushed aside the increasingly dense crowd and the president of the club, who had "fetched" the "seer", kindly begged him to tell, in front of his colleagues, what he had seen in the night!
The seer. - Well, here's that's what I saw. First I slept. All of a sudden there was a noise like a hit of tha thunder. I put on slacks and there's me gonna outsude. What do I see? An big round deal of six meters long by 4 wide. Two little men like 2 infants, I showed at the cinema how they were.
The President. - You were wide awake my friend?
The seer. - Ya listen... Na if you thing i'm a crackpot, you have to say it, or else...
The President. - do not be angry, my friend. We are here to shed light on our fellow citizens, let's continue.
The seer. - The 2 dwarfs light a big chigar "Gimme one of those!" it cried. No answer. "What's that country of ya?" Nope answer. "Ah well ...!" what I told them...
"Eat there" which answers one of the two.
"I was paralyzed. All of a sudden, they jump in the the flying plate and woof! they're gone.
The President. - Did they go East or West?
The seer. - That way (he points east).
The President. - Gentlemen, armed with this valuable information, let's get to work.
* * *
All dowsers swing their pendulums. A quarter of an hour passes.
* * *
The President. - Gentlemen, my conclusions are as follows: it is a machine which comes from the East and which left again in the East.
Other dowsers. - Our conclusions are identical to yours.
The president at the "seer". - Could you tell us the approximate height of the two airmen?
The seer. - I showed it at the movies. You see, it couldn't be that big. One meter to one and a half meters.
The President. - Gentlemen! Let's get our pendulums to know the nationality.
* * *
A quarter of an hour passes.
* * *
The President. - For me it was two Mongols or two Tartars.
The others. - For us too, no doubt.
An assistant. - lsiten, Gentlemen, I'n not fooling! I alway said althat the [?] have nothing to say. But do you think that two Mongols or two Tartars would get in Quarouble to do what?
The President. - We don't care, they're Russians!
Another assistant. - Listen ya... Cacoule and Parisien said there that he said "ra" and that the 2 airmen answered: "Eat there". You'd think that Mongols or Tartars do not know any French!
A third assistant. - As for me, Mr. Bauduin, I didn't get anything. Cacoule, and Parisien, he saw nothin' and he dremead all this at the movies. And stupid in everything, and all those chaps that came from Paris and elsewhere to do an investigation! Get back to your homes and let us laugh full our caps...
A. L.
[Ref. rdr3:] "RADAR" MAGAZINE:
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VALENCIENNES. -- "Exactly," Dewilde proclaims, "I'm taking the crosspiece with the notches. Ah! I'll remember... the earthlings. The Martians had the good taste to leave immediately. The earthlings, on the other hand, keep poisoning my existence. Not content with sending me 300 letters a day, they organize tourist caravans in order to verify for themselves that the mysterious visitors, whose landing "Radar" (September 25) has reconstructed, indeed left prints on the railway track. Well, I don't want to deal with this story any longer. Just think that the S.N.C.F., discovering that I was occupying my house without any title, is going to evict me!...".
THE END
[Photo caption:] Dewidle removes the crosspiece that got him into so much trouble. The Martians had left traces there.
[Ref. tes1:] "EVENING STAR" NEWSPAPER:
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PARIS. -- Readers of the classical ad columns of the Brest Telegramme blinked recently at the following notice:
REWARD
Offer of 10 million francs (1000000) to any one who brings me a live inhabitant of planet Mars. Contact PRE in LOCRONAN (Finistère).
It may that that Mr. Pre has his tongue in his cheek and a good more than 10 million francs in his pockets. But considering what is going on in Europe these says you never know...
Cedric Allingham, if his interest has been more mercenary than scientific, might have warmed up. Mr Allingham is a [unreadable]. He is also a professional ornithologist and an amateur astronomer. His big chance came last February 18, about 3:30 p.m. on his course of a stroll between [... unreadable]
[(Allingham claimed to have met Venusians...] chances of earning Mr. Pre's reward, he has no corner on the Martian market. Within recent weeks, European newspapers have been flooded with scores of hardly less intriguing reports:
On the night of September 10, near Quarouble in Northern France, an oblong machine about 10 feet long landed on a railroad track a few yards from the house of farmer Marius Dewilde. Two small man-like creatures emerged, dressed in costumes that looked like divers' suits. As Mr. Dewilde walked towards the machine, he was paralyzed by a green light. By the time he recovered, the machine was high in the sky. Further investigations showed symmetrical scrapes on the wooden railroad ties, suggesting that the object had rested on a tripod undercarriage.
The same evening a farmer named Antoine Mazaud of the Plateau of Millevache in Southern France turned in a similar report to the local authorities. Walking home, Mr. Mazaud had found himself suddenly face to face with a small, mysterious stranger, wearing something that looked like a crash helmet. Farmer Mazaud prudently extended his pitchfork. The stranger, on the contrary, held out his hands in a gesture of friendship, walked up, uttered a few sounds, and kissed Mr. Mazaud on the cheek. Before the farmer could recover his poise, the amiable intruder has climbed the roadside hedge and entered a cigar-shaped contraption which took off with a faint buzzing sound.
On September 24 at 10 a.m. in the Gardunha Mountains near the Spanish border, three Portuguese peasants were stratled by a fast flying sphere which landed in a field 200 yards from them. This time, two tall creatures emerged in shiny metallic outfits and started collecting grass and stones in a brightly polished box. Spotting the peasants, they strolled over and invited the men by gestures to climb into their machines, where moving shadows could be seen behind the semitransparent center section. when the offer was declined, the strangers disappeared through a hatch. A few seconds later, the sphere took off vertically and rapidly disappeared. [In Portugal, a hoax. Case file here.]
"Flying Mushroom"
On September 30 at 5:10 p.m. Bernard Goujon and Armand Pichet were working on the road between Maisoncelles and Meaux when a "flying mushroom" eight feet wide settled gracefully nearby. Mr. Pichet, from a vantage point in the roadside ditch, urged Mr. Goujon to "run over and have a look." According to Mr. Goujon's report to the gendarmes, the mushroom seemed to be made out of aluminum and rested on three crutches. It took off as he approached "spiraling like an autumn leaf" and was lost in the clouds. Next morning the
[Ref. jdf1:] NEWSPAPER "LE JOURNAL DES FLANDRES":
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It is sometimes better not to talk too much about flying saucers and their peculiar conductors.
The proof is that Mr. Dewilde, the man in the Nord who saw "interplanetary men", has attracted the attention of the whole world, in general, and S.N.C.F. in particular.
Which S.N.C.F. found that Mr Dewilde was not allowed to occupy a gatekeeper's house and therefore urged him to look for another accommodation.
[Ref. tie1:] "TIME" MAGAZINE:
The article below was published in Time magazine, USA, for October 25, 1954.
One morning last October, Jean Narcy, a road mender of Haute-Marne, France, was riding to work on his bicycle. In a wheat field he saw a little whiskered man just under 4 ft tall, who wore a fur coat, an orange corset and a plush cap.
"Bonjour, [Hello]" said Mr. Narcy.
The little man muttered something like "I'll be seeing you." Then he jumped into a small (10 ft. in diameter) flying saucer, took off with a buzzing sound and disappeared into the clouds.
With Narcy's "Hairy Martian" as a starting point, the French press run wild, and a deluge of Martians have been raining down ever since. They have come in flying cigars, crowns, comets, winged mushrooms, even a flying chamber pot. Unlike Americans who have seen flying saucers, the French "sighters" paid little attention to the vehicles. They were interested in the people from space.
The Martians were anything but standardized. One who stopped Mr. Roger Barrault near the town of Lavoux had brilliant eyes, an enormous moustache, wore rubbers and spoke Latin. Another asked Mr. Pierre Lucas, a Breton baker, for a light. He was bearded and had a single eye in the middle of the forehead. Mr. Lucas could not remember what language he spoke.
Paralysing Pygmies. As the Martian invasion of France proceeded, the invaders became more bizarre. A troup of pygmies in plastic helmet gamboled down a railroad track near Quarouble and transfixed Mr. Dewilde with "a paralyzing beam of light." Some Martians were blue, others were yellow or pink. A traveling salesman of the Côte du Nord saw a wonderful sight: a deep rose flying cigar from which stepped a zebra-stripped Martian. As he alighted, he changed color, chameleon-like, from yellow to green.
The Martians marched en masse into French affairs. Cartoonists welcomed them delightedly (see cuts). As they multiplied, they even gained respectability. Le Figaro reported: "Counsellor General of Alpes Maritimes greets flying saucers' first appearance on the Côte d'Azur." France Soir announced that "a daily flying-saucer service seems to have been established between Marais-Poitevin and La Rochelle." A man from space even made the social columns of Paris-France: "Mustached Martian spends weekend at Vienna." Angry deputies asked questions in Parliament. Air Force Authorities (even as in the US) were badgered for explanations.
Before the many-colored Martians rained down on France, fames Swiss Psychiatrist C. G. Jung was asked what he thought about the saucer epidemic.
"Something is being seen," said Jung. "What is seen may be, in the case of a single observer, a subjective vision (hallucination). In the case of many observers, it may be a collective vision. such a psychic phenomenon... could be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to the present conscious situation; the fear of an apparently insoluble political situation in the world... At such times eyes turn heavenwards ... and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high."
No More Dreams. Dr. Jung blames the U.S. air Force for mishandling the saucer epidemic and for permitting irresponsible journalists to pump it for bits of sensational-sounding information. He does not believe that the saucers are space ships. Those that are not hallucinations, he thinks, are probably misinterpretations of physical objects or effects. But he was willing to speculate about the effect on the human race of an invasion by beings from another world.
"Should the origin of the phenomenon turn out to be an extraterrestrial one," said Dr. Jung, "it would prove an intelligent interplanetary link. The impact of such a fact on humanity is unforeseable. But, without doubt, we would be placed in the very questionable position of today's primitive societies that clash with the superior culture of the white race. All initiative would be wrested from us. As an old witch doctor once said to me, with tears in his eyes: We would 'have no more dreams.'
Our sciences and technology would go to the junk pile. What such a catastrophe would mean morally we can gauge by the pitiful decline of the primitive cultures that takes place before our eyes. The capacity to manufacture (interplanetary space ships) points to a technology towering sky sky high over ours."
"Just as the Pax Britannica made an end to the tribal warfare in Africa, so our world could roll up its Iron Curtain and use it for scrap ... This might not be so bad. But we would have been 'discovered' and colonized."
[Ref. tms1:] "THE MARION STAR" NEWSPAPER:
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By CROSBY S. Noyes
PARIS (NANA) -- Readers of the classified-ad columns of the Brest Telegram blinked recently at the following notice:
Reward - Offer of 10 milions francs ($28.000) to anyone who brings me a live inhabitant of the planet Mars. Contact Pre at Locronan (Finistere).
It may be that M. Pre has his tongue in his cheek and a good deal less than 10,00,000 francs in his pocket. But considering what is going on in Europe these days, you never know...
Cedric Allingham, in his interest had been more mercenary cleaned up. Allingham is a Scots. He is also a professional ornithologist and an amateur astronomer. His big chance came last Feb. 18, about 3:30 p.m., in the course of a stroll between Lossiemouth and Buckle in Scotland. The flying saucer landed on the heath only a few yards away.
"A magnificent machine," Allingham reported later. "About 50 feet wide and 20 feet high. Made of metal, shinier than aluminum. As I walked over, a trap in the lower part opened and a man jumped out gracefully. I waved at him and he waved back. Then we just sort of stared at each other for a while.
"We both looked pretty much alike - about 5 feet 8 inches, around the same age (32), short, dark hair. Clothes, of course, were quite different. He had on a sort of tunic covering him completely to the neck, leaving only his hands free. One thing especially caught my attention: his nose, or rather two small tubes which emerged from his nostrils, connected by a metal bar no thicker than a match.
- * -
THINKING FAST, Allingham decided that his responsibility both as a scientist and an earthling required him to take the conversation initiative. By way of an obvious opening gambit, he pointed a questioning finger toward the sky.
"The man nodded affirmatively and smiled," Allingham related. "He had a charming smile. I said 'Mars' and he repeated 'Mars' in a voice which can't be described but could be compared to the sound of spring water."
After this promising beginning, the conversation lagged. Further questions produced little in the way of new information about life on Mars or the working of flying saucers. It was established, however, that the Martians had also made trips to Venus and had landed on the moon. Finally, the Martian, who showed an astonishing lack of curiosity about Allingham, decided it was time to leave.
- * -
BEFORE GOING, however, he agreed to a few snapshots of himself and his machine. Unfortunately, for all his knowledge of bird lore, astronomy and interplanetary small talk, Mr. Allingham turned out to be no great shakes as a photographer. His developed film showed only the blurred but surprisingly human-looking back of the retreating space traveler. The picture of the saucer has all the definition of a badly poached egg.
Although Allingham has written a book about his experience and stood the best chance of earning Mr. Pre's reward, he has no corner on the Martian market. Within recent weeks, European newspapers have been flooded with scores of hardly less intriguing reports.
On the night of Sept. 10, near Quarouble in northern France, an oblong machine about 10 feet long landed on a railroad track a few yards from the house of a farmer Marius Dewilde. Two small man-like creature emerged, dressed in costumes that looked like divers' suits. As M. Dewilde walked toward the machine, he was paralyzed by a green light. By the time he recovered, the machine was high in the sky. Further investigation showed symmetrical scrapes on the wooden railroad ties, suggesting that the object had rested on a tripod undercarriage.
The same evening a farmer named Antoine Mazaud of the plateau of Millevaches in southern France turned in a similar report to the local authorities. Walking home, Mazaud had found himself suddenly face to face with a small, mysterious stranger, wearing something that looked like a crash helmet. Farmer Mazaud prudently extended his pitchfork. The stranger, on the contrary, held out his hand in a gesture of friendship, walked up, uttered a few sounds and kissed Mazaud on the cheek. Before the farmer could recover his poise, the amiable intruder had climbed the roadside hedge and entered a cigar-shaped contraption which took off with a faint buzzing sound.
- * -
ON SEPT. 24 at 10 a.m. in the Gardunha mountains near the Spanish border, three Portuguese peasants were startled by a fast-flying sphere which landed in a field 200 yards from them. This time, two tall creatures emerged in shiny metallic outfits and started collecting grass and stones in a brightly polished box. Spotting the peasants, they strolled over and invited the men by gestures to climb into their machine, where moving shadows could be seen behind the semitransparent center section. When the offer was declined, the strangers disappeared through a hatch. A few seconds later, the sphere took off vertically and rapidly disappeared.
On Oct. 8 at 7:15 a.m., a roadmender named Gustave Narcy was bicycling to work near Wassy, a Paris suburb, when he noticed an unusual looking creature climbing out of a 30-foot cigar. Narcy's description was very precise. The stranger was 3 feet 11 inches tall. His body was covered with hair. He was wearing a large orange corset and a helmet made of plush. A moment of mutual staring ensued after which Narcy said good-morning. The stranger apparently unreassured, scrambled back into his fuselage and flew away. An investigation on the spot revealed skid-marks on the grass and a strange milky substance.
- * -
REPORTS LIKE these are run-of-the mill, chosen at random from literally gundreds of similar incidents that have been brought to the public attention within the last two weeks. The stories have an interesting mixture of variety and consistency. The flying whatnots are always luminous by day or night. They are described as saucers, mushrooms, cigars, barrels, bananas, spheres and chamber pots. The pilots vary in size as well as wardrobe, ranging from dwarfs to giants. In all cases, the visitors have been pictured as mannerly but timid. In several cases the use of harmless weapons has been reported - in several others the intruders have shown an interest in collecting vegetable and mineral specimen near at hand.
The scientists have come up with plenty of explanations. A report from Russia that the past summer has been unusually hot on Mars has led to the journalistic deduction that the Martians are coming over for a breath of fresh air. The summer in western Europe has been anything but hot. In Africa, the vice president of the astronomic association of Nairobi suggests that Mars is conducting a geographic survey of the earth concentrated presently on Europe and Africa. The politicians are also getting nto the act: in France, Jean Nocher, Gaullist deputy from the Loire district, has formally demanded an investigation by the Secretary for Air.
All of which, probably, proves very little. Except that people in Europe today have more serious things to worry about than rearming the Germans. And that if M. Pre of Locronan is daft, he has, at least, plenty of company.
[Ref. cdn3:] "LA CROIX DU NORD" NEWSPAPER:
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Finally, a document! ... Here are the traces of the mysterious craft with the dwarf pessengers that reportedly landed at Quarouble: "claws" - circled in white by the investigators - on one of the sleepers, near P. N. 79. And here is the man who saw, Mr. Marius Devilde, with his dog Kiki whose barking alerted him.
(Morlamez photo).
[Ref. lfe1:] "LA FRONTIERE" NEWSPAPER:
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We talk too much about flying saucers so that there cannot be "no eel under rock"... and it becomes difficult to believe, in my opinion, that all those claiming to have seen something abnormal in the sky... or even on the earth have had visions! Such as this man from Quarouble who told this week the story of an unknown craft, landed near his gatekeeper house, his encounter with these little men in glass helmets and the light that blinded him when the door of the sidereal opened; which departed silently, vertically in a glowing halo...
Such again as this farmer from the Corrèze who claimed to have met in a hollow path, on his return from work, a pilot of a "flying cigar"... who would have spoken to him in an unknown language. Such again as these young Finnish or Danish (I do not remember) exactly who said they saw a flying saucer landed in a field.
Whether these strange craft come from another planet, nothing is less certain. What is curious is the frequency of their appearances in recent months!
But people are so made that they believe, like Saint-Thomas, only what they see. And there is at least one resident of Maubeuges who saw something abnormal in our northern sky.
Indeed that evening was the previous Wednesday, the renowned violinist-soloist of the Symphonic Circle, returned from having conducted his weekly rehearsal at the Harmonie de Louvroil. He was returning by the rue du Gauche Pied to his home in the Faubourg St-Lazare, when his attention was drawn to two lighted and oscillating discs, moving at high speed in the dark sky... And yet Robert Romain did not dream.
The famous German astronomer Hans Haffner may claim that the "flying saucers" are only balls of fire produced by lightning, at high altitude... The fact remains that lightning have always existed and that we had not yet reported these phenomena so much!
***
While waiting for more plausible explanations to come to light our lantern, the Bribeux will undoubtedly one day ring the key to these mysteries. Indeed, since all these awesome news have been circulating, the friend Albert, always has in his bag what to lasso the first saucer or the first Martian - if there are Martians - that would pass within his reach...
This promises a great story one of these days!
[Ref. lpn1:] "LE PROGRES DU NORD" NEWSPAPER:
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I admit it. Despite my oath to believe in this only when I see it, with my own eyes, I am weakening.
What, people who do not have the reputation of riding the chimera, "born natives" of Acheux, near Amiens, Picards with a cool head and, on top of the market, masons accustomed to handle material things, had seen them.
And they gave such details! ...
I was going to surrender, make amends.
Occurs the adventure of the inhabitant of Quarouble. It's getting closer to us.
Without doubt, the visionary, who is called Marius by chance, was not satisfied with seeing something like what our two brave masons reported.
He adds a little, up to having been grazed by the passengers of the flying saucer - because it was one, no doubt - little helmets, and saw them rush into the mysterious craft that resumed its backfiring flight.
Maybe like simple aviators more or less at home on a more or less ordinary plane.
And then patatras!
This Corrèze cultivator who lets himself be kissed by the passenger of the flying saucer speaking an unknown dialect, goes a little furtherer: he throws everything on the floor.
Including flying saucers that do not leave a trace of their passage while leaving some.
So, farewell saucer!It will be for another time.
When your passengers are more serious.
[Ref. lle1:] NEWSPAPER "LIBERTE":
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September is the month when the leaves, falling from the trees, fly with the wind, when the swallows, before leaving our regions, fly tirelessly over the rooftops. In September tax sheets also fly and, since war hysteria has driven mad, after Forrestal, a large number of American politicians, mysterious saucer-shaped or cigar-shaped craft, which journalists in search of inspiration, have baptized "flying saucers."
One already talked a lot about these fireballs that streaked in the sky.
But, this time, the matter becomes serious. Such craft have landed. Their occupants were even seen.
It was the case a few days ago, in Quarouble, and "Nord-Eclair", as fast as its title demands, was quick to delegate an envoy there, a quite special one, who swears by god, like the bloodhounds of the local police, that Mr. Dewilde's statement is entirely credible.
Of course, it was dark, Mr. Dewilde saw only a "dark mass"... but still, it's so attractive to write a novel and divert the attention of readers from German rearmament.
To achieve this goal, we welcome all the "visions" of the saucers, without being surprised that the "mysterious craft" preferably land in deserted places, always in the middle of the night, in front of a single witness...
As if by chance, the pilots of the saucers are small men with big heads, strangely similar to the Martians imagined by the authors of science-fiction novels.
That these balls of fire are simply the products of lightning, weather balloons, that would be very annoying for the piss-copy, eager for sensational news.
For my part, while waiting for a flying saucer to come and land at noon on the Grand-Place in Lille, I found a famous alibi for the evenings when I would come home very late. To my wife who asks me, furious, on the occasion: "Where have you been already?", I will no longer answer: "I met Jules whom I had not seen in 10 years". I would simply tell her: "I was crossing a field when a flying saucer came to land near me. A gnome, whose single eye shone like a beacon descended from it, kissed me, and pushed towards kindness until to offer me a drink in his craft, before the latter, in a slight rustle, took off vertically..."
[Ref. jds1:] NEWSPAPER "LE JOURNAL DE DOULLENS":
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Recently, in our region and the Pyrenees, flying saucers were seen in the sky. Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, a steelworks worker from Blanc-Misseron, living in Quarouble, in the Nord, also saw, at night about 7 meters from his garden, a dark shape, 3 meters high and with a diameter of 6 meters. Then strange little beings, about a meter tall, ran out of a nearby path. Then the craft, the door of which opened and closed, rose about ten meters, after oscillating for a while. A very bright light sprung up and, like a ball of fire, the craft disappeared towards the West...
[Ref. lle2:] "LIBERTE" NEWSPAPER:
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Saucer here, cigar there, flying pot elsewhere: the comedy continues.
Every day brings new and ever more fantastic appearances.
The craft coming from Mars, Venus, Saturn..., or the nearest weather station take every day every conceivable shape: round, oval, oblong, cubic, pyramidal, conical, rectangular, triangular, hexagonal... one looks like a saucer, the other like a pot; the latest one looks like a bowl.
If this goes on, the whole range of household utensils will pass by.
In our region, the latest saucer - basin was seen in Abbeville by an old lady of 79 years old (the age when the one can distinguish, in the darkest night, the shape and contours of the smallest object!)
The problem is that each new appearance corresponds to a new admission by the "visionaries".
So, yesterday, two young electricians from Amiens confessed that the saucer they had seen... it was only a hoax.
Of course, you shouldn't be joking with such... serious things. But finally, when they declare that they wanted to box the police and certain journalists, one cannot help but think of the special envoy of "Nord-Eclair" and the "Sherlock Holmes" of the police of the air which, in Quarouble, methodically noted the traces of claws, on the railway sleepers, and meticulously measured the interval between two traces in order to be well convinced that it is not a wild cat!
[Ref. cdv1:] "LE COURRIER DE VALENCIENNES" NEWSPAPER:
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[... news items unrelated to the "flying saucers"...]
Mr. Marius Dewilde, 34, living at Level Crossing 79 in Quarouble, in the middle of the night discovers a flying saucer and its passengers who were resting on the railroad tracks. The "saucerians" were two beings "small and stocky, with large heads...". Mr. Dewilde closed his eyes in surprise and when he opened them the machine had left without more politeness. For more information one could perhaps refer to "The War of the Worlds", a movie about these famous machines, and which has just passed last week on the screens of the region. Of course, this is just a coincidence.
[... news items unrelated to the "flying saucers"...]
[Ref. let1:] "L'EVENEMENT" WEEKLY NEWSPAPER:
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Martians have landed in France; some in Corrèze, others in Quarouble (Nord). But while the first made the unfortunate earthlings who came to greet them fell asleep, with a stroke of a green ray, the second pushed kindness to kiss them on the forehead.
These are the incredible nonsense published by our "big" daily colleagues. They testify more to the taste for hoaxing dear to some than to the respect of the reader.
But there is more!
Air Force police have been investigating in Quarouble (Nord) following statements by the "witness".
They engaged in long investigations, they analyzed the stones allegedly burned by the passage of the saucer piloted by the Martians, measuring AT THE CENTIMETER the traces of crutches supporting, according to the narrator, the interstellar craft.
Let's be serious.
[Ref. cdp1:] NEWSPAPER "LE CRI DU PEUPLE":
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THE Millevaches plateau in Corrèze is in turmoil. The Martians have appeared!
The gendarmes of Bugeat (Corrèze) have just been alerted by public rumor. A farmer claimed to have met a Martian on September 10.
The good man, when questioned, confirmed the thing. The Martian was dressed as a motorcyclist. He advanced to meet the honest peasant, kissed him, mumbling unintelligible words, and left in a cigar-shaped craft posed not far away in a field. The craft took off vertically and disappeared into the sky.
The farmer, very disturbed, went home and told the matter to his wife, making her swear secrecy.
The woman swore and told the whole village about it, and that's how the gendarmes were told.
However, the investigation undertaken did not reveal any trace of the mysterious Martian and his craft.
As a result, some evil minds deduce that it may have been a motorcyclist or a prankster.
And bad subjects are said to be planning to tell their wives that they saw the Martians, to justify late returns home.
But beware: there is nothing to confirm that the Martians put on lipstick.
OTHER extraordinary story near Valenciennes. Mr. Marius Dewilde, alerted by the barking of his dog, saw in the middle of the night two strange beings, roughly human in shape, but not more than one meter tall. The two strange characters, disturbed by Mr. Dewilde, engulfed themselves in a "flying cigar" six meters long that awaited them near there.
An intense light burst from the craft, prevented Mr. Dewilde from approaching and forced him to close his eyes. When he reopened them, the craft and the evening visitors were gone.
The air police is investigating. They reportedly noticed a bizarre trace on a railroad crossing.
Hell, the case is getting worse!
However, skeptics remain numerous in the region and point out that Mr. Dewilde, who suffered a serious accident a year ago, may be overly impressionable.
Anyway, there is nothing to worry about. These Martians seem, so far, very peaceful... much more than some Earthlings...
[Ref. din1:] "LE DIMANCHE DU NORD" NEWSPAPER:
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A resident of Quarouble, Mr. Marius Dewilde, told the police in Onnaing that he saw a flying saucer the other night land near his home. It was around 10:30 p.m. when his dog began to bark abnormally. Believing in a robbery in his barnyard, Mr. Dewilde went out and saw, less than six meters away, a craft which was hurriedly reinstated by two men, one meter tall, wearing glass helmets. Mr. Dewilde saw them in the beam of his electric flashlight and was even dazzled, he said, by the reflections reflected by the glass heads of the pilots of the saucer. The air police carried out their investigation which made it possible to find traces on one of the sleepers of the railway line near which Mr. Dewilde made his strange discovery...
The flying saucer of Estrées-Deniécourt, near Amiens, was only a joke of a few electricians of a company of the city who admitted that they wanted to have fun at the expense of the press and the gendarmerie.
Minutes were drawn up for contempt of court and a report was sent to the Public Prosecutor in Amiens.
[Ref. cpe1:] NEWSPAPER "LA CROIX DE PICARDIE":
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The flying saucers multiply at a dizzying rate. Indeed, witnesses to the evolutions of these mysterious craft have been legion in France for some time.
It is first Mr. Marius Dewilde who said he saw a saucer on September 10, at 10 p.m., posed on a railway track near Valenciennes. When he approached the apparatus, two strange and stocky men, whose size did not exceed one meter, moved quickly towards the craft. A few moments later, a square of intense light appeared on the sides of the saucer. The witness was dazzled, and when he opened his eyes, everything was gone.
In Onnaing, 70 kilometers away, a young man, Mr. Auverlot and a pensioner, Mr. Hublard, revealed to have seen on the same day, at the same time, a red glow moving in the sky. As for Mr. Emile Renard, he claims to have seen a saucer which had landed in a field near Acheux-en-Amiénois. The craft hovered slightly above the ground, and when he wanted to approach it, the craft took off and disappeared.
Better still, Mr. Mazaud, farmer of Mourieras (Corrèze), reportedly met an unknown individual, wearing a helmet, on a path, who shook his hand and kissed him, saying unintelligible words. The stranger then climbed into an unlit cigar-shaped craft, four meters long, which, taking off vertically, set off in a westward direction, making no more noise than a bee.
In Origny-en-Thiérache and in the region of Château-Thierry (Aisne), residents claim to have seen a meteor about the size of a motorcycle wheel. Its passage through the Marne valley was accompanied by a blast heard from several localities.
[Ref. lbl1:] NEWSPAPER "LA BAILLEULOISE":
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- In Quarouble, Friday, September 10, at 11 p.m., a gatekeeper reportedly saw a flying saucer posed on the track. Having approached by the light of his electric lamp, he saw two small men surmounted by a "glass head" quickly get inside. The gendamerie investigated without result.
- A farmer from the Corrèze said that he was approached by the passenger in a flying saucer who shook his hand. He was a quite man-like individual. He then climbed into a cigar-shaped craft that rose vertically.
- A "flying saucer" with a diameter of about ten meters, reportedly landed in a field near Amiens. Two masons who were on their way to work approached it by almost 100 m. and saw it disappear quickly, rising diagonally.
[Ref. tst3:] "THE STAR TRIBUNE" NEWSPAPER:
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PARIS -- (INS) -- Italy's mysterious "flying cigar" is the latest of many strange objects seen and reported throughout Europe in recent months.
Earlier this summer, Norway had reports of "interplanetary" visitors spotted in the country. They were reported as "long-haired creatures," apparently harmless.
A much more specific case of unwordly visitors, however, curretly is intruiguing France. It involves weird, three-foot-high midgets who supposedly paralyzed a French worker with a ray gun when he saw them.
The story, under investigation by police, was told by Marius Dewilde, 34, a metalurgy worker in Lille. His friendsvouch for him as a "clear-headed, solid citizen."
DEWILDE TOLD police:
"It was about 9:30 p.m. I was sitting in the kitchen reading. In the backyard, Kiki, my dog started barking so loud that I went out to see what was wrong.
"I noticed on the railroad tracks a few yards on my left, a dark-colored form, but I thought it was only a cart some farmer left near the tracks.
"Then to my right, I heard footsteps. I turned on my flashlight. Then I saw two things.
"The one marching ahead turned to look at me and my flashlight picked up a metallic reflection from his head. I had the distinct impression he had his face covered with a kind of deep-sea divers's helmet.
"THEY WERE very small - only about three feet hight, but very wide-shouldered and the helmet over the head seemed enormous to me.
"After the first few seconds of amazement, I ran toward the garden gate to cut them off. At that moment, a square opened in the dark form.
"A projector was aimed at me, giving an intense light with green reflections. Its beam paralyzed me. I wanted to shout, but I couldn't. My legs wouldn't obey me.
"Finally, I found control of my muscles and started toward the dark form. But already, it was taking off the ground."
[Ref. dse1:] "DOUAI SCARPE" NEWSPAPER:
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I would never have been interested in flying saucers if they had not, in recent days, come very close to my belfry.
A fortnight ago, they were in Mantes-la-Jolie. This week, they descend near Valenciennes and their macrocephalus occupants come to disturb the rest of a good man and make his dog howl at the moon.
Of course!
We can very well admit that the possible inhabitants of a distant planet, possessing the secret of the atom for some centuries, allow themselves to send tourists to visit our miserable regions.
The Baudart saucers and the Eugène Poullet saucers are unleashed!
But that they come, these tourists, ny night, to visit the black country, seems to me to be of the most certain masochism.
There are so many beautiful countries... the French Riviera, the Balearic Islands, the enchanted islands of the Pacific, the Orient, Greece, the Antilles, etc...
And then that a machine delicately lands on the rails of the S.N.C.F., in spite of all the regulations, leaves me dreaming. This presupposes both knowledge of timetables, not only of passenger trains, but also that of freight trains.
And that's pretty dumpy!
Finally, this railway landing requires exact knowledge of the gauge of our railways.
So, no way for the Valenciennes astronauts, to go and land in the U.R.S.S.
They came deliberately to the Atlantic country, of course, and to Western Europe!
They must therefore also have known our political divisions, which must represent a real Martian puzzle for a resident of the Milky Way.
You may think, reading these lines, that I am skeptical, if not about the good faith of the witnesses, at least about the reality of the things they claim to see?
Not at all!
I believe it!
I believe in it like uranium!
Because the curiosity and interest that I will not fail to bring to the saucers will prevent me from realizing that, less far than the moon, there are many things that are not going well round.
[Ref. lsi1:] "LE SOIR ILLUSTRE" NEWSPAPER:
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A METAL WORKER OF QUAROUBLE TELLS US
(From our special envoy.)
"I saw a flying saucer and two of his passengers, told me Marius Dewilde, saw it with my eyes, like I see you. Do not believe me if you want, I will always maintain what I say. Feel free with you to doubt my mental faculties. But do not make me say that I saw Martians, that I do not know at all!
The man who tells me this is a young metallurgist of thirty-four years, known by all as a vigorous worker, perfectly calm and with the ideas well in place. The place of our conversation is Quarouble, a small industrial village of the area of the French border, located on the road of Valenciennes, a few kilometres from Quiévrain.
The clumsy drawing of the witness. In the left corner, his house preceded by a court surrounded by lathing. The two beings (two spots) were on the right of the court when Mr. Dewilde saw them. The saucer was initially posed on the railway tracks represented by the two parallel lines skirting the house. It rose vertically while releasing smoke and disappeared at the horizon in the form from a ball of fire. In the right corner, one of the passengers of the machine such as it looked according to the witness.
[Photo caption:] Since his adventure, Mr. Marius Dewilde receives a bulky mail.
[Photo caption:] The small house in front of which the mysterious machine of the air came to land.
[Ref. nmn3:] NEWSPAPER "NORD-MATIN":
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The revelations of Mr. Marius Dewilde, of Quarouble who, two weeks ago, claimed to have been grazed by the two passengers of a flying saucer made, of the modest village of the Valenciennois, the meeting place for all the journalists from France and Navarre. For the past two weeks, Mr. Dewilde, or rather Mrs. Dewilde, has had more visitors in his humble little house at the railway crossing 79 than the President of the Council himself.
The "Martians of Quarouble", as one of our sensational colleagues put it, brought representatives of the written and film press to Mr. Dewilde's. Reporters, photographers, filmmakers, etc... questioned their host in every possible way, looking for flaw in his story that could have betrayed him. Pain lost, Mr. Dewilde has a version of the facts that, for the past two weeks, has not varied by an inch.
Those who, in the village itself and around, had peddled the rumor that Mr. Dewilde would be only a visionary, a big mouth, even a hallucinated, should only to be careful. Mr. Dewilde went to the Onnaing police station with the intention of filing a formal defamation complaint against them. Mr. Dewilde, taken for an impostor by a part of his fellow citizens, had another mishap. Tenant of a house belonging to the S.N.C.F., he was summoned, a few days ago to have to leave the premises as soon as possible. Reason: does not belong to S.N.C.F.
To live happily, let's live hidden, said La Fontaine; the formula is good.
Those who might have thought Mr. Dewilde interested would have to abandon this unfavorable prejudice: the Quarouble saucer costs him dearly. He hasn't finished paying the bill. This is an argument in favor of his testimony.
[Ref. lca1:] "LA CROIX DE L'AISNE" NEWSPAPER:
The photograph underneath was published in the regional newspaper "La Croix de l'Aisne", of Saint-Quentin, France, on September 26, 1954:
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Photo caption: "Mr Marius Dewilde draws for the investigators the saucer and its occupants as he saw them." |
[Ref. -:] MAGAZINE "RADAR":
The first page of one issue of the Radar magazine of September 1954:
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[Ref. lif1:] "LIFE" MAGAZINE:
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SAUCER SCRATCHES on railroad tie were circled in chalk by Marius Dewilde of Quarouble who carries the tie home to preserve proof of the rust-colored flying contraption he saw land on tracks.
[Ref. gbr1:] GRAY BARKER:
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But most of the tales were from France. In Quarouble, near Lille, on the night of September 10, Marius Dewilde went outdoors to see what his dogs were barking at. There, parked on the railyway at the bottom of his garden, was a 10 ft. oblong machine that looked like a cheese dish cover. Before Dewilde could make some appropriate explamation, as Frenchmen are supposed to do, he spotted three small creatures about three ft. tall, walking along the track! The little men didn't have any arms, but they had "enormous shoulders, and were wearing vast divers' helmets."
Dewilde must have been a fearless Frenchman, for he decided to take after the little men.
But wham!
A Green light shot from the saucer, paralyzing him, and the next thing he knew the thing was rising from the railway, hissing and emitting black smoke.
Police didn't believe the 34-year-old steelworker, but weren't so sure after they noticed scorched stones and strange markings on the railway, which suggested something with a tripod undercarriage had rested there.
[Ref. cgu1:] CHARLES GARREAU:
On September 10, 1954, in Quarouble (North), a metal-worker, Marius Dewilde, is in the presence of two small beings "wearing suits similar to those of divers. They were of very small size: not more than one meter... I saw their legs, On the other hand, I dis not see their arms and I am not sure that they had any arms." On the railway, near Marius Dewilde's house, the investigators found marks which, according to experts, were pressed in by a machine of about thirty tons.
[Ref. gqy1:] GUY QUINCY:
September 10 [, 1954]
[... Other cases...]
10:30 p.m.: Quarouble (8 km INS N.E. Valenciennes--Nord): "Cheese cover" + 2 dwarfs on the ground
[... Other cases...]
[Ref. pmi1:] PAUL MISRAKI:
At the present time, even taking into account our technical evolution which allows us to attend daily, and without paying any other attention to it, spectacles which would have filled our ancestors with dread - imagine Ezekiel, or Socrates, or Vercingetorix, in front of a locomotive in motion, a blast furnace, a helicopter, a jet plane - we do not feel very proud when chance makes us witness a phenomenon to which our understanding does not allow us to provide a immediate explanation.
Such was the case of this metal worker on the Belgian border, near Armentières, who, on Friday, September 10, 1954, at 10:30 p.m., had the attention drawn by the barking of dogs; coming out of his house, he saw a dark mass less than six meters from his doorstep. Then, hearing the sound of hasty footsteps, he lit his electric torch and saw in its beam two "beings" who trotted behind a palisade; one of them turned for a moment in the direction of the light and, at the place of his face, showed something like a reflection of glass or metal. They were both very short in stature, but very broad-shouldered, with short legs - like the Karib of the West Indies. One could not see their arms.
Assuming he was dealing with smugglers, the metalworker rushed towards the garden gate, so as to cut off the road to the two fugitives: he was only two meters away from them when a light as blinding as a flash of magnesium forced him to close his eyes. He wanted to scream, but could not move, but his limbs no longer obeyed him. When the light went out, and he regained control of his muscles, he saw the dark mass, already seen when he left his house, rise vertically like a helicopter; thick steam gushed out from below with a slight hiss. The machine gained height, then turned red as it moved away towards the west.
Our man, gradually coming to his senses, ran to the nearest Gendarmes station; but he was so moved that they thought he was drunk. He then headed for the police station. He was shaking in all his limbs, and could not finish his statement, because he felt terrible colic. The superintendent immediately dismissed, without hesitation, the possibility of a comedy: the worker's fear was too obvious...
The investigation, carried out jointly by the police, the Air Force and the D.S.T., revealed at the indicated place prints suggesting a weight of thirty tons, calcined stones, some blackish spots. But no footprints. It is true that one expected to find human foot marks.
This story, like the following, is reported in the book by Aimé Michel: Mystérieux Objets Célestes (Arthaud publisher). Aimé Michel, who received the authorization to consult the official reports recording the statements of Mr. Dewilde, the metalworker, hero of this adventure, notes that the testimonies of five other people, living in neighboring villages, and who - at the at the same time - had seen a "red glow" moving in the sky, appearing to come from Quarouble, where Mr. Dewilde lived, came very timely to corroborate this incredible story.
[Ref. mcs1:] "MICHEL CARROUGES":
Michel Carrouges indicates that the Dewilde observation was made at a distance of 6 meters.
Michel Carrouges indicates that in the case Dewilde the precise details provided on the topography of the places and the respective localisation of the witnesses and the objects or the pilots enforced the extreme closeness of the encounter.
[Ref. ton1:] THOMAS M. OLSEN:
| DATE | GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION | SOURCE | PAGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEPT. 10, 1954 | QUAROUBLE, FRANCE | (MICHEL-1958 P 44) 1 W. | 3-30 |
[Ref. gcn1:] GORDON CREIGHTON:
34. Quarouble, France (10.30 p.m. September 10, 1954)
Attention of Marius Dewilde was attracted by the howling of his dog outside. "Howling enough to awaken the dead". When he opened the door, the dog came crawling toward him on its belly in abject terror. (UFO and creatures were then encountered by him outside the house.)
Aimé Michel: Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, p. 44.
[Ref. psx1:] UFOLOGY MAGAZINE "PHENOMENES SPATIAUX:
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It took place on the night of September 10, 1954. A worker living in the Valenciennes region, near Quarouble, on the edge of the forest, surprised two small beings who were returning to a discoidal craft placed on the nearby railway track. As he was about to cut them off on their way back, he was paralyzed by a light ray coming from the craft (5).
Comment
Here again, the harm caused to the witness can be interpreted as a defensive measure. Imagination helping, we assign the two little beings an exploratory mission. But a few embarrasing questions arise: why pose near a house? Why pose on a railway track - disused it is true - a craft of about thirty tons (estimate made by the engineers of the S.N.C.F. according to the traces left on the sleepers), when many others observations show them landing everywhere? Was it to leave clearly visible traces? Was it because in this case they absolutely needed a substratum whose possibility of load was known beforehand?
The sources, "(5)", are noted as "Aimé Michel. A propos des soucoupes volantes, Planète Publishers. Paris 1967, pp. 59 to 63. Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet Books T 3205 A, 1967, pp. 89 to 91."
[Ref. gcn2:] GORDON CREIGHTON:
38. Quarouble, France - September 10, 1954.
Marius Dewilde's attention was drawn to the howls of his dog, who was outside the house. He opened the door and the dog rushed in, his fur bristling with fear. Dewilde, a few seconds later, got out and observed a strange craft placed on the railway tracks, as well as two "divers."
Ref. Aimé Michel: Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, p. 44.
[Ref. prn1:] PETER ROGEREON, "INTCAT":
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319 10 September 1954 2230 QUAROUBLE (FRANCE)
A metal worker, Marius Dewilde (34), came out of his house as a dog was barking and saw a dark object on the railway tracks, then observed two dwarfs walking towards it. When he tried to stop them, he found himself paralysed as a strong orange light was projected at him. The creatures were under 1 m tall, bulky, and wore dark diving suits. No faces or arms were visible. Traces made by an object of estinated weight 30 tons were noted, by French Air Force and police,
[Ref. prn2:] PETER ROGERSON:
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(Case No. 319 is repeated in this issue, as the last few lines were inadvertently omitted from the report in our laat issue.)
319 10 September l954 2230 QUAROUBLE (FRANCE)
A metal worker, Marius Dewilde (34), came out of his house as a dog was barking and saw a dark object on the railway tracks, then observed two dwarfs walking towards it. When he tried to stop them, he found himself paralysed as a strong orange light was projected at him. The creatures were under 1 m. tall, bulky, and wore dark diving suits. No faces or arms were visible. Traces made by an object of estimated weight 30 tons were noted by French Air Force and police on the ballast.
(Ml44; Le Parisien, Combat, Le Figaro, 13 September 1954; Michel II, 44; Magonia, 17)
[Ref. hdl1:] "HISTOIRE DE L'INSOLTE":
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Mr. Marius Dewilde, metallurgist in Quarouble (Nord), claimed to have seen two Martians "not measuring more than one meter, extremely broad shoulders and whose helmeted head was enormous..."
[Ref. jve4:] JACQUES VALLEE:
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We are left with only one type of "dwarfs": those in a "diver's suit." Can imagination account fot them?
A typical case is that of Quarouble. For many students interested in the phenomenon who were in France when the "Quarouble psychosis" developped, there is little doubt that imagination alone is not the cause of the rumour. Marius Dewilde has "seen something." Whether he really saw a craft and two "pilots," or some classical phenomenon seen under unusual circumstances, is another question. In order to evaluate such an account on a concrete basis one would need a complete psychological description of the witness. This experiment, to the best of our knowledge, has never been done.
[Ref. jve6:] JACQUES VALLEE:
Jacques Vallée says that France-Soir for September 15, 1954, reported the following:
"Three investigators for the air police arrived at Quarouble, Nord, yesterday to interrogate M. Marius Dewilde, the man who saw two "Martians" near his back-yard gate. They left the village with the assurance that during the night of Friday to Saturday, a mysterious craft had indeed landed, as claimed by M. Dewilde, on the railroad tracks of the line Saint-Amand-Blanc-Misseron, near the railroad crossing No. 79."
"Their inquiries seem, in effect, to confirm the statement made by the metal worker. The witness has declared that Friday, about 10:30 P.M., he had seen a machine of an elongated shape, three meters high, six meters long, sitting on the tracks a few meters away from his house. Two entities of human appearance, of very small height and apparently wearing diving suits, could be seen nearby. M. Dewilde walked toward them, but at this moment a beam of greenish light was focused on him from the craft and he found himself paralyzed. When he was able to move again the machine had started to rise and the two entities had disappeared."
"The investigators have found no trace of the existence of these entities. The ground, examined meter by meter, does not show traces of footsteps. However, one of the sleepers on the tracks showed traces that could have been made by a machine landing on it. In five places the wood of the sleepers is tapped on a surface of about four square centimeters. These markings have all the same appearance and they lie symmetrically, on one line. Three of them-those in the middle-are separated by an interval of forty-three centimeters. The last two are sixty-seven centimeters away from the preceding ones."
"A craft that would land on legs instead of wheels like our own aircraft would not leave other traces, one of the inspectors of the air police has declared."
"The narrative made by M. Dewilde is also confirmed by several inhabitants of the region. In Onnaing, a young man called Mr. Edmond Auverlot and a retired man, M. Hublard, have seen about 10:30 p.m.. (the time indicated by M. Dewilde) a reddish light traveling in the sky. The same light has been seen from Vicq by three young men."
Jacques Vallée says that the railroad specialists consulted by the investigators in respect of the markings on the wooden ties calculated that the pressure indicated by the prints corresponded to a weight of thirty ton. These marks were fresh and sharply cut, showing that the wood or the ties had been subjected at those five points to very heavy pressure.
Jacques Vallée says that according to Aimé Michel's book Mystérieux Objets Célestes, and its English version Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, in an examination of the gravel of the roadbed, the policemen found another puzzling fact: At the site of the alleged landing the stones were brittle, as if they had been calcined at high temperature (115) Some blackish traces were also found. Although nothing was determined about the existence of the "operators," it was said in the report that the ground was hard and that the absence of footprints did not disprove the story.
[Ref. lcp1:] LEONARD G. CRAMP:
There have been many such cases; one of the more notable occurred in France, near Valenciennes, in September 1954.
Marius Dewilde was 34 years old, married, the father of a family. He was a metal worker in the Blanc-Misseron steel mills on the Belgian frontier. He had the reputation of being a reliable man at his job, a good worker, certainly not a visionary.
At the time he lived with his family in a little house isolated in the midst of woods and fields, about a mile from the village of Quarouble. In front of the house there is a small fenced garden. Alongside this garden runs the National Coal Mines railway track from St. Amand-les-Eaux to Blanc-Misseron, and grade crossing No. 79 is next to the house. This is M. Dewilde's story taken down by an investigator: 'My wife and son had just gone to bed, and I was reading by the fire. The clock over the kitchen stove said 10.30 p.m., when my attention was attracted by my dog Kiki's barking. The animal was howling loud enough to wake the dead. Thinking there must be a prowler in my yard, I took my flashlight and went out.
'When I got to the garden, I noticed on the railroad track, less than six yards from my door, on the left, a sort of dark mass. Some farmer left his cart there, I thought at first, I'll have to tell the station men first thing in the morning to take it away, or we'll have an accident. Farmers do sometimes use the railbed as a road during the harvest, because in that marshy country the motor roads are in poor condition. 'Just then', M. Dewilde went on, 'my dog came up to me, crawling on her belly, and all at once I heard hurried footsteps on my right. There is a path there that we call the 'smugglers path', for they sometimes use it at night. Kiki turned towards the sound and started barking again. I turned on my flashlight and directed its beam toward the path. 'What I saw had nothing to do with smugglers. Two creatures such as I had never seen before were not more than three or four yards away from me, right behind the fence, the only thing that separated us, walking along one behind the other toward the dark mass that I had noticed on the track.
'The one in front turned around toward me. The beam of my light caught a reflection from glass or metal where his face should have been; I had the distinct impression that his head was enclosed in a diver's helmet. In fact, both creatures were dressed in one-piece outfits like the suits that divers wear. They were very short, probably less than three and-a-half feet tall, but very wide in the shoulders, and the helmets protecting their 'heads' looked enormous. I could see their legs, small in proportion to their height, it seemed to me, but on the other hand I couldn't see any arms. I don't know whether they had any.
'When the first seconds of stunned amazement had passed, I rushed towards the garden gate, intending to go around the back of the fence and cut them off from the path, to try to get hold of at least one of them. 'I was no more than six feet from the two forms when I was blinded by an extremely powerful light, like a magnesium flare, coming through a sort of square opening in the dark mass on the tracks. I closed my eyes and tried to yell, but I couldn't, it was just as if I had been paralysed, I tried to move, but my legs wouldn't obey me.
'Feeling that I was going crazy, I heard, as if in a dream, a yard away from me, the sounds of steps on the cement block that stands in front of the gate to my garden. The two creatures were going toward the railroad.
'Finally the beam of light went out. I then recovered the use of my muscles and ran toward the track. But the dark mass that had been standing there was rising from the ground and hovering lightly, like a helicopter. I had been able, however, to see a kind of door closing. A thick dark steam was coming out the bottom with a low whistling sound. The craft went up vertically for about a hundred feet and then, still gaining altitude, turned toward the east in the direction of Anzin. When it was some distance away it took on a reddish luminosity. A minute later it had disappeared completely'.
When he had partly regained his senses, M. Dewilde went and woke his wife, then called a neighbour. Then he ran to the nearest police station, in the little village of Onnaing, about a mile away. He was so agitated and his speech seemed so confused that the police took him for a lunatic and dismissed him. Then he ran to the police commissioner's office and succeeded in winning Commissioner Gouchet's attention.
Realising at once that something extraordinary had happened, the commissioner dismissed without hesitation any notion of a joke or a hoax. M. Dewilde's fear was too unmistakable.
Commissioner Gouchet's report set off a triple enquiry, conducted jointly by the regular police, air police, and the Department of Territorial Security, also somewhat similar to the American F.B.I. The following morning these three organisations took down M. Dewilde's deposition once more. They came to the same conclusion as Commissioner Gouchet and discarded any idea that the story was a deliberate invention. Then they returned to the spot on Monday, 13 September, to try to explain the phenomenon itself. The first hypothesis they considered was that of a clandestine helicopter carrying contraband. But this explanation had to be abandoned; telegraph wires would have prevented any landing in that spot.
Then the three enquirers looked for any traces and for further witnesses. They first examined, foot by foot, the land adjoining the railway tracks, where the two supposed creatures might have left footprints. They found nothing that might have confirmed M. Dewilde's story. But they said in their report that the ground was hard and the absence of footprints did not disprove the story.
They found their search along the railroad track more productive. In five places on three of the wooden ties were identical depressions, each about an inch-and-a-half square. These marks were fresh and sharply cut, revealing that the wood of the ties had been subjected at those five points to heavy pressure, as if they had supported a very heavy weight. Furthermore, the marks were symmetrically placed. Three were in a row in the middle, all on the same tie, and about 18 inches apart. The other two were on either side of the line formed by these three, and were about 28 inches away from it.
Questioned by reporters about these imprints, one of the air policemen working on the investigation replied: 'A machine that landed on feet instead of on wheels like our own craft would leave prints exactly like them'.
To explain these prints it was first suggested that they might have been left by workmen screwing on track bolts. But no work of that sort had been done for a long time, and the prints were freshly made. Neither then could it account for the prints' geometrical arrangement.
The railroad engineers, when consulted by the investigators, said they had calculated that the pressure revealed by the prints corresponded to a weight of thirty tons. Later some 25ft of track was removed for more stringent analysis. Also, closer examination at the site of the alleged landing revealed that some of the ballast between the lines had been subjected to extremely high temperature. The stones were brittle and calcined.
We may now ask, who among us is going to suggest that a humble man could go to these extraordinary lengths to perpetrate such a hoax, or even that this was a case of misinterpreted natural phenomena? If there are those who think the flying saucer explanation is untenable, then, equally, I for one find the above alternatives positively amusing! There are many similar cases where ground effects were left by saucers, therefore we can conclude that such craft are real, solid contraptions, whatever their modus operandi in space may be.
[Ref. jve1:] JACQUES VALLEE:
144
Sep. 10, 1954, 10:30 P.M., Quarouble (France).
A metal worker, Marius Dewilde, 34, came out of his house as a dog was barking and saw a dark object on the railroad tracks, then observed two dwarfs walking toward it. When he tried to stop them, he found himself paralyzed as a strong orange light was projected at him.The creatures were under 1 m tall, bulky, and wore dark diving suits. No face or arms were visible. Traces made by an object of estimated weight 30 tons were noted by French Air Force and police on the ballast. (Le Parisien, Combat, Le Figaro, 13 sept. 1954) (8; M 44; Magonia)
[Ref. jve5:] JACQUES VALLEE:
| 117 | -003.61530 | 50.39640 | 10 | 09 | 1954 | 22 | 30 | 105* | QUAROUBLE -NORD | F | 021133 | C | *064 |
[Ref. obr1:] OTTO BINDER:
September 10, 1954, Quarouble, France. The witness first came upon a UFO that landed on railroad tracks, then encountered creatures "such as I had never seen before. ... The beam of my (flash) light caught a reflection of glass or metal where his face should have been. I had the distinct impression that his head was enclosed in a diver's helmet ... They were very short, probably less than three and a half feet tall."
And, in the same book:
September 10, 1954, Nord, France. A metalworker came out of his house to see a dark object parked on the railroad tracks, and two little men were running toward it. When the observer tried to chase them, they shot back a beam of light that "paralyzed" him; then their craft shot into the sky.
[Ref. aml2:] AIME MICHEL:
Aimé Michel indicates that "Marius Dewilde, the witness of the landing of Quarouble, had undergone a trepanation a few years before."
[Ref. jve2:] JACQUES VALLEE:
The author indicates that on September 10, 1954 in Quarouble in the Nord, a workman on metal left his house because the dog barked and he saw a dark object on the railway. He thought that it was a car. Then he noticed two small beings advancing towards him, tried to stop them, but was paralysed when a strong light was projected on him. The object flew away.
[Ref. gab1:] UFOLOGY GROUP "G.A.B.R.I.E.L.":
09/10/1954 Quarouble (Nord)
Around 10.30 p.m., Mr. Marius Dewilde was alerted by the yelping of his dog. He went out into his garden with an electric lamp. Suspicious noises came from behind the fence. Believing to deal with smugglers, he illuminated and saw two beings. They were three or four meters from him and walked one behind the other. The one in front turned to him. The beam of the lamp revealed a metallic reflection in the place of the head, just as if the being had had it encased in a diving helmet. The two beings were also dressed in suits similar to those of divers. They were very broad-shouldered and the helmet was huge. Their arms were not visible but their legs were proportionate to their body. They were no taller than a meter! (J. Guieu; A. Michel, J. Giraud...)
The "Martians" had just entered our daily life and they were not going to leave it. But, disappointment! Adamski's fabrications had accustomed us to "Venusians" tall, handsome and blond like ancient gods, "Science-Fiction" novels had prepared us for monsters all in hair and scales, little green men with shape of artichoke disputed their popularity with giant reptiles... And the reality... It was two "dwarfs", two "children" who appeared! The good people were ready to believe anything, but this! Never! Dewilde could only be a madman! This was practically the official version until the appearances of "Martians" multiplying and agreeing all the good people [?] began to ask questions. Since then, the appearances of "Martians" are countless. When we say "Martians" (with a capital letter and in quotation marks it is like when we say "Flying Saucers". But we do not claim they are coming from planet Mars. We simply like this word much more picturesque than that of Extra-Terrestrials. And besides, the extra-terrestrial origin of these beings and of the "Flying Saucers" remains to be proven.
[Ref. gab2:] UFOLOGY GROUP "G.A.B.R.I.E.L.":
09/10/1954 Quarouble (Nord)
(Already cited) Around 10:30 p.m., his dog howling to death, Mr. Dewilde took a flashlight (which he did not turn on) and went outside... He noticed a dark mass on the railway and mistook it for a hay cart (proof that the darkness, if not total, was significant enough to cause a huge misinterpretation). He didn't use his lamp yet... Then he heard the sound of hasty footsteps coming from the path of the smugglers. He turned on his lamp and saw in the beam the two small beings rushing towards the thing on the railway...
If we go back a bit to the end of this story extract, we find on the one hand, Mr. Dewilde, an average human who used a lamp to be able to observe what was happening in a place that he knew perfectly well! Which leads us to suppose, as we have already said, that the night was particularly dark. On the other hand, two "Martians" who on the contrary moved quickly without light on a ground which they did not know! Moreever a difficult terrain: railway sleepers, rails and ballast stones. Our friend [member of the group G.A.B.R.I.E.L who had suggested "what if their vision was different from ours?"] had it dead right. It was as if these beings could see as well in the middle of the night than we see in broad daylight. By going through our file once again, we thus found many cases reporting specific nocturnal activities on the part of the "Martians" and this without the use of any lamp. Should this be seen as proof of perfect night vision? We have even come to wonder if their enormous luminous eyes might not be the outward appearance of an adaptation to diffuse light vision. Michel Carrouges baptized these beings the "Martians of dusk" because of their especially frequent appearances at this time of the day. Maybe they can't stand too bright sunlight?
[Ref. idb1:] ISABEL DAVIS AND TED BLOECHER:
35. Encounter at Quarouble (Nord), September 10, by Marius Dewilde: l'Aurore, September 13; Lille Nord-Eclair, September 16; Reuters, September 13, &c., and INS, September 16, lc., in many U.S. newspapers; Life, op. cit.; Time, op. cit.; Michel, op. cit., pp. 44-48.
[Ref. jre1:] JACQUES RIVOYRE:
From Italy, let us now go to France where, in this same year 1952, fertile of extraterrestrial appearances, a farmer is the subject of a strange aggression.
On September 10, at 10:30 p.m., Marius Dewilde, who lives Quarouble, in the department of Nord, hears his dog howl to the death. He comes out armed with his rifle, thinking he would fall on a smuggler (the Belgian border is very close), and sees on the railway track near his farm a dark mass which he mistakes for a cart. His attention is caught by noises of footsteps along his palisade. Lighting his flashlight, he sees two small humanoids with enormous heads. When he directs the lamp on the face of the one of them, it has, Mr. Dewilde states, like a reflection of glass or metal. The witness specifies that he clearly had the impression that it was a diving-suit helmet. The "beings" are less than one meter tall, but have very broad shoulders. Their legs are proportioned with their size, but the witness is unaware of arms. Mr. Dewilde wants to bar the passage to them to try to catch one of these creatures, but, arrived at approximately two meters of them, an extremely powerful illumination, like a magnesium flash, spouts out of the object and blinds the witness. He wants to shout, but feels paralysed. During this time, the small beings hasten to reach their craft.
At the end of a few minutes, Mr. Dewilde recovers all his forces. He looks up towards the sky and sees the craft then slipping by at sharp pace towards the horizon, leaving a thick dark vapor behind.
[Ref. tps3:] TED PHILLIPS:
|
Sep. 10, 1954
066 2230
FRANCE, Quarouble. Marius Dewilde was reading after his wife and child had retired. He heard his dog barking, thinking it might be a prowler, he took a flashlight and went outside. He walked to his garden, found nothing en route, then spotted a dark mass on the railroad tracks less than 18 ft. from his door. The dog was suddenly quite frightened and Dewilde heard footsteps and tuned the flashlight towards the dark mass. Less than 12 ft. away, were two creatures walking towards the dark mass. Both were less than 3.5 ft. tall, with large heads. Dewilde ran towards them, intending to stop them. When he was about 6 ft. from them he was blinded by a very powerful light somewhat like a magnesium flare which came from a square opening in the dark mass.He tried to move but his legs would not function. The beam of light finally went out and the object started to ascent, a low whistling sound was heard. A thick dark steam was seen at the bottom of the object. At about 100 ft. altitude, the object took on a reddish glow and was gone in less than a minute. Upon returning to the area with police and other offiials, they found five places on three of the wooden ties which had identical impressions, each about an inch and a half square. The marks were fresh and sharp, indicating that the ties had been subjected to very great pressure at those five points. An examination of the gravel of the roadbed showed that the stones were brittle as if calcinated at very high temperature. Also, several residents in the area reported that they had seen a reddish object moving in the sky at about the time Dewilde indicated the object had left. (Vallee III)
[Ref. agd1:] ALAIN GAMARD:
|
| Case # | Date | Time | Locality | Department | Witness(es) name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 017 | 10/09/1954 | 22.30 | Quarouble. | 59 | Marius Dewilde. |
[Ref. pdl1:] PIERRE DELVAL:
In his chapter on the cases of paralysis or drousiness of UFO witnesses during their experience, Pierre Delval indicates 12 cases from the French flap of 1954, among those, that in Quarouble in the department of the Nord on September 10, 1954 at 10:30 p.m.
Marius Dewilde, metal-worker, aged 34, was alerted by the barkings of his dog, and left his house. He noticed but without paying attention to it a dark form which stationed on the railway within a few tens of meters of him.
His attention was then drawn to two being of approximately 1 meter in height, dressed in diving-suits, which walked on the path. Marius Dewilde rushed towards his garden's door to cut the road to the small beings and to capture one of them if possible.
When he was hardly within two meters of them, from a square opening of the black mass that Dewilde had taken for a cart, an illumination with green reflections spouted out, as sharp as magnesium combustion, amd dazzled him.
He instinctively closed his eyes and wanted to shout but could not do this, being like "paralysed."
He tried to move, but his legs refused to obey. He was thrown into a panic, and heard as in a dream, a footsteps noise on the cement flagstone in front of his door. He supposed that both anthropoids moved towards the UFO.
Suddenly, he recovered the use of his members and the control of his muscles, he managed to reopen his eyes and noted that the projector was extinct. He then rushed towards the railway, but the dark mass had already disappeared.
[Ref. gni1:] GNEOVNI:
10/9/1954 - QUAROUBLE -59- Type I
Around 10:30 p.m. Marius DEWILDE sees a dark mass on the railroad tracks from which a light beam paralyses him, preventing him from intercepting two small beings passing near him to join the dark mass that flew away immediately. Traces were found on the railway sleepers.
(M.O.C. A. Michel p.59)
[Ref. lsd1:] LEONARD STRINGFIELD:
The American ufologist indicates that on September 10, 1954, in France, in Quarouble, Marius Dewilde, metal-worker, heard a dog bark, left his house, and saw a black object on the railway, and two small beings which moved towards him.
Having tried to stop them, he was paralysed by a ray of an intense orange color.
The creatures were small, less than one meter in height, broad, and wore "diving suits."
He indicates that this example of case of a close encounter of the third kind comes from the catalogue by Jacques Vallée who extracted it from the Aime Michel's book.
[Ref. srd1:] SELECTION DU READER'S DIGEST:
|
The photo is captionned as a sketch by "Marius de Wilde, who says he saw a UFO in Quarouble, in France, in 1954."
The book indicates that the photo comes from the United Press International agency.
[Ref. cck1:] GILBERT CORNU AND HENRI CHALOUPEK:
The authors indicate that on September 10, 1954 in Quarouble in the department of North, close to the Belgian border, Mr. Dewilde, guard of a level crossing, heard towards 10:30 p.m. his dog howl madly.
He thought that there were poachers in ramble, took his flashlight and came out to inspect the premises.
He distinguished a "large dark mass posed on the railway, and heard a noise of steps in the path which skirts his garden. He directed his lamp in this direction and saw two beings "like I had never seen" which approached while being within a few meters him, and two others a little farther.
The beings seemed dressed of divers suits and capped with helmets that wrapped all the head.
When he rushed to bar the way to them, a blinding light came out from the machine on the railway and paralysed him.
When this projector died out a few moments later and he recovered the use of his members, he saw the machine rising while swinging like a helicopter, producing a gentle whistling sound, with a thick vapor spouting out by its lower part. The machine took a reddish colouring and disappeared.
Because of the proximity of the border, there was a series of investigations. The press grabbed the story, which did much fuss at the time. One of the arguments which had then appeared convincing was deep prints in the hard wood of the cross-pieces of the railroad, which made it possible to estimate as about thirty tons the pressure which had been exerted.
The authors indicate as sources an investigation by Marc Thiroin in the Files of the AAMT, Mr. Carrouges in "Les apparitions de Martiens" and J. Guieu in " Black out sur les S.V. ", and among the Press: Le Parisian Libéré for September the 13, and 14, 1954.
[Ref. gcu1:] GILBERT CORNU:
[...]
According to this same mail, the case of Quarouble which has occurred on September 10, 1954 is supposed to be "very doubtful"! Let's point out the facts: that evening Marius Dewilde, former submariner who works as metallurgist and lives along the railway reads his newspaper when the dog starts to bark. He goes out equipped with a flashlight, believing he will have to deal with occasional smugglers; he initially sees a dark mass that he mistakes for a cart on the railway, then two beings emerge on his right, equipped like divers; he then feels paralysed while the beings join the dark mass which now is visible as a "craft" and it finally takes off...
The investigation was carried out by Marc Thiroin for the ufologic movement, but also, let us not forget it, by the police and railway authorities. The conclusions remained secret; even J.-C. Bourret could not obtain the authorization to read it when he wrote his ufology book. If there were only hot air in this official report, be sure that it would have been given to the medias for a long time!
For more certainty, I thus wrote to Mr. Bigorne, who lives in the area, for his qualities of investigator are recognized by all (not only by LDLN, but already by the formerly GEPA); here his answer. "... since 1970, I went several times on location and practically found all the material details cited in the accounts of that time..."
"The change of attitude of Dewilde in these last years does not influence the events of 1954." Here is the language of the common sense seems to me.
So why it is that today, 20 or 30 years after the events, any individual, acting on a purely personal basis or in the capacity of "president" of some unknown groupuscule grants himself the right to call anything in question. Living in the other end of France and being unaware of the entire locations, of the people of the time and perhaps of the master pieces of the file, how can anyone allow himself to throw suspicion on any case which is not his competence? In this precise case, it is precisely the current attitude of the witness, Marius Dewilde, who inspires to him these doubts. This is a total lack of understanding of ANYTHING in the psychological aspect of the UFO problem! I repeat the sentence of Mr. Bigorne who seems essential to me: "the change of attitude of Dewilde in these last years does not influence the events of 1954," I add that it is the same for Micheline G. in the previous case!
Although I can quote a good ten more cases torn so briskly apart by these young dispensers of justice of a zeal whose the courts of the Holy Enquiry would not have blushed at, I will be satisfied with these two cases [...]
[Ref. jve7:] JACQUES VALLEE:
Jacques Vallée indicates that on September 10, 1954, at about 10:30 p.m. in Quarouble, a small French village near the Belgian border, Marius Dewilde stepped outside and was at once intrigued by a dark mass on the railroad tracks. He then heard footsteps, he turned on his light and faced two beings wearing very large helmets and what seemed to be heavy diving suits. He did not see their arms, they had broad shoulders, they were less than 4 feet tall.
He moved toward them to intercept them but a light appeared on the side of the dark mass on the track and he found he could not move. When he had regained control of his body, the two beings had entered the supposed machine and flown away.
French civilian investigators collaborated closely with local police official to investigate, but there were also representatives of the Air Police from Paris on the site and other people. an enquiry was made about stones found calcinated or white hot at the spot but even the police could not obtain information on the analysis results, and the local police chief said:
"The official body working in liaison with the Air Police belongs to the Ministry of National Defense. The very name of this Ministry excludes the idea of any communication".
Vallée then discusses of Dewilde's next sighting report.
[Ref. jve9:] JACQUES VALLEE:
My interest in "flying saucers" goes back to the Fall of 1954 when there was a deluge of sightings in France, and indeed throughout Europe, from England to Italy. Every day the front page of all the newspapers, from L'Aurore to France-Soir, carried big headlines and surprising claims which the radio amplified with commentaries and on-the-air interviews. My father, a respected magistrate, a former investigative Judge who had been promoted to Paris as a Justice of the Court of Appeals, would scoff at such reports: in his profession, he pointed out, he had become leery of the weakness of human testimony. Especially that of experts.
As a kid I remember hearing one of the earliest French witnesses, a railroad worker named Marius Dewilde, telling his story to radio broadcaster Jean Nohain in a live interview on the evening news: "I had gone out to piss ..." he bluntly told the whole nation. He had seen two little robots next to a dark machine resting on the nearby railroad tracks. The air police found traces of a large mass. A strange ray issued from the object and paralyzed Dewilde. I believed his story at the time. I still do. During the three months the wave lasted I carefully gathered such clippings and glued them into a fat copybook.
[Ref. jve3:] JACQUES VALLEE:
Jacques Vallée reports that on September 10, 1954, in Quarouble, a small French village located near the Belgian border, around 10:30 p.m., Marius Dewilde went out and was immediately intrigued when he saw a dark mass on the railway tracks.
He then heard footsteps in the night, turned on his lamp, and found himself in front of two beings wearing large helmets and wearing what looked like heavy diving suits. They had broad shoulders but Dewilde saw no arms. They were less than four feet tall.
Dewilde walked towards them intending to block their path, but a light appeared on one side of the dark object that was on the tracks, and Dewilde was unable to make any movement.
When he regained control of his body, the two visitors had entered the machine and had flown away.
Vallée adds that this "classic observation had a strange consequence which was not published at the time": the civil engineers who were investigating the case cooperated very closely with the local police, but there were other people on the site, including representatives of the air police from Paris.
When an investigation was carried out about the stones found charred at the place where Dewilde had seen the saucer, it turned out that the police themselves could not obtain information on the results of these analyses. The local police chief said:
"The official body that works in liaison with the Air Force belongs to the Ministry of National Defence. The mere name of this ministry excludes any communication whatsoever."
Vallée indicates that on November 19, 1954, the police confirmed that Dewilde had made a second statement about an object he had seen "near his house"; however, according to the police:
"Dewilde and his family have decided, for fear of bad publicity, not to let anyone into their confidence regarding this second event. This is why none of the local newspapers will mention it."
In addition, the police politely but firmly informed civilian investigators that they would henceforth keep all other information relating to such incidents confidential.
[Ref. lgs1:] LOREN GROSS:
[... Other cases...]
September 10th. Two hours later at Quarouble. At approximately 10:30 the evening of September 10, 1954 a metal worker by the name of Marius Dewilde who lived in Quarouble, a village close to the Belgian border, was drawn to a window in the rear of his home because his dog Kiki was .howling loud enough to awaken the dead.
Alarmed by the fierce barking of his black and white mongel, M. Dewilde grabbed a flashlight and rushed out into his small backyard garden expecting to find a prowler. He couldn't help seeing a bulky dark mass on the railroad track only five meters away but its significane was not immediately apparent. Dewilde:
"Just then my dog came up to me, crawling on her belly, and all at once I heard hurried footsteps on my right. There is a path there that we call 'smugglers' path, for they sometimes use it at night. Kiki turned toward the sound and started barking again. I turned on my flashlight and directed its beam toward the path." 55.
Dewilde then tells what he saw:
"What I saw nothing to do with smugglers. Two creatures such as I had never seen were walking along one behind the other toward the dark mass that I had noticed on the track...both creatures were dres'sed in one-piece outfits like the dress that divers wear. They were very short, probably less than three and half feet tall, but very wide in the shoulders, and the helmets protecting their 'heads' looked enormous. I could see their legs, small in proportion to their height, it seemed to me, but on the other hand I couldn't see any arms. I don't know whether they had any. ..I was no more than six feet from the two forms when I was blinded by an extremely powerful light, like a magnesium flare...I closed my eyes and tried to yell, but I couldn't, it was just as if I had been paralyzed. I tried to move but my legs wouldn't obey me." 56.
When the ray switched off, feeling returned to Dewilde's limbs. Meanwhile the creatures had left the area in their machine.
The local police were immediately contacted by Dewilde who made such a bad impression at first by his fearfull, agitated state, that the lawmen were inc-lined to believe the fellow was crazy, but the police finally convinced themselves the story was worth checking and allowed the man to lead them to the spot of the supposed encounter, the Blanc-Misseron rail line that passed close to the rear of M. Dewilde's house. Examining the site police picked up some blacken stones that may have been affected by a rocket-like exhaust and noted five deep impressions on one of the wooden rail ties that seemed very fresh. It was suggested that actual physical evidence may exist to back up Dewilde's incredible story. 57.
Dewilde draws the craft and its two occupants.
La Voix du Nord 14 May 1968. p.1.
More drawings by Dewilde.
Nord-France 17 September 54. pp.X.XI.
"Very name excludes communication."
Besides local police led by Commissioner Gouchet, representatives of the French "Air Police" arrived from Paris to scrutinize the stones at the supposed landing site in the Dewilde case, stones that appeared to have been subjected to extreme heat, or using a better word, that seemed to have been "calcined." M. Dewilde became curious about the results of the official analysis but when he inquired, he was informed by the authorities that:
"The official body working in liason with the Air Police belong to the Ministry of National Defense. The very name of this Ministry excludes the idea of any communication." 58.
[... Other cases...]
On the 13th M. Dewilde was questioned throughly for a second time by a joint task force, an interrogation method used by law enforcement to test the suspect's memory, the theory being that if a man is telling a lie, he will be hard pressed to remember the exact details of his original answers. M. Dewilde passed the test with flying colors.
Barring a hoax, which authorities were now inclinded to do, the most rational possibility was some clandestine operation by a crime group, that perhaps a helicopter had landed at the spot that night and in the darkness Dewilde became frighten and confused. This idea was quickly abandoned however when an on-site survey was made, it was apparent there was no way a helicopter could have touched down due the maze of power lines in the area. 66.
[... Other cases...]
The French Air Police make a mistake?
It would be hard to say that the French military was engaged in any socalled "UFO cover-up" similar to one often attributed to the U.S. Air Force by UFO buffs, if one uses the Dewilde investigation as any guide. After the Air Police visited Quarouble on the 14th of September, interogating the witness and examining the area of rail crossing N.79 behind Dewilde's house, the military men could have refused comment, leaving people to speculate on Dewilde's sanity, but incredibly the officials seemed to have made little effort to play down the supposed incident or restrict the release of the results of their field investigation, freely talking to the press about how Dewilde's narrative seemed to have been confirmed by the checks being made. Indeed, the paper France-Soir reported on the Air Police investigation and called the supposed creatures "Martians" which is strong stuff when included in a news article featuring authorities.
Scrutinizing the railroad tracks, the military investigators located no footprints and had to settle for an examination of the fresh indentations discovered on a railroad tie. The distance between the marks were carefully measured. Three were clustered in the middle some 43 centimeters apart, with two others 67 centimeters away to each side. One of the Air Police suggested "the strange machine reported by Dewilde landed on "legs" rather than wheels, thus making the marks on the wood. 71. There was no compelling reason to associate the marks with the UFO report and certainly no compelling reason to assume a machine landed there on "legs." The effect was to give an unofficial blessing to a lot of wild talk about "l'homme de l'espace."
[Ref. lgs1:] LOREN GROSS:
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September 10, 1954. Time:8:30 p.m. The Mazaud case.
"Who did you meet?"
"'Who? You would better ask what"
After laboring all day, French farmer M. Antoine Mazaud returned home the evening of September lOth at 8:30 p.m. When he reached his front door his appearance shocked his wife. Madame Mazaud blurted out: "Are you sick?" you seem pale; and your hands are trembling. What happened?"
Her husband answered: "No, but I had a bizarre experience -- really an inexplicable meeting."
Concerned, the wife pressed him: "Who did you meet?"
He replied: "Who? You would better ask what. I'll tell you. But I forbid you to tell anyone. I don't want any trouble."
According to M. Mazaud, he had quit work, shouldered his pitchfork, and began the long walk home on the dirt path that meandered through the hills thick with hedgerows. On the way he paused and rolled a cigarette and then set out again. He told his wife:
"I had taken only a few steps, when in the beginning darkness I found myself face to face with a strange being dressed in a peculiar way. He was of medium height and was wearing a sort of helmet, without earpieces, somewhat like a motorcycle helmet.
"My first thought was to defend myself with my pitchfork.
"I was scared stiff. The other also was immobilized. Then, very slowly, he came towards me, making a gesture above his head with an arm. I think he wanted to calm me, perhaps to greet me or to express his friendship. His other arm was extended to me but not in a menacing manner.
"I didn't know what to do. After a monment of panic, during which I was asking myself with whom and what I was dealing. I thought perhaps it was an insane person who had disguised himself. As he continued to come slowly towards me, making strange gestures like salaams, I decided that he didn't intend to attack me.
"'He was in front of me. Then, as I still was holding my pitchfork in my right hand, I offered him my left, hesitatingly. He took it, shook it very hard and then, brusquely, held me to him, pulling my head against his helmet. All this took place in complete silence.
"I was recovering from my stupor. I took courage and spoke to him. He did not answer, but passed in front and went a couple of yards away into the heavy shadows of the woods. It seemed to me then that he kneeled. A few seconds later I heard a kind of buzzing whistle and saw rising, almost vertically, towards the sky between the branches a sort of dark machine. It seemed to be shaped like a cigar puffed out on one side and about three or four yards long. It passed under the high tension wires and disappeared to the west, in the direction of Limoges.
"It was only at this moment that my reason returned. 1 ran in the direction he had disappeared but obviously it was too late." 53.
The source "53" is indicated in a footnote as "Liberté de l'Est, 15 september 54."
|
[Ref. qse1:] MICHEL DORIER AND JEAN-PIERRE TROADEC:
At 10:30 p.m., Marius Dewilde, plant workman, living an old gate-keeper house, hears his dog howl. We are in Quarouble, in the department of Nord. He comes out and sees a large dark mass on the railway - the latter is not used for more than a few goods trains in direction of some local factories. He hears footsteps on the ballast, he turned over and saw two beings, one meter in height approximately, who walk with difficulty. They are dressed of a silver-colored outfit, and have a transparent helmet on the head, a little like divers. He wants to bar the road to them, but a beam of light comes out of the dark mass and paralyses him. The two characters pass at less than one meter of him, and reinstate the mysterious mass. It rises, swinging like a helicopter, with a slight whistling sound. A thick vapor spouts out under the craft. It takes height then moves towards the West, towards Anzin, by taking a reddish colouring. The Ari Forces, the police force, the DST, as well as private investigators, intervene on the spot. Traces are found on the railway. One considered the weight necessary to the realization of such traces, by a normal process, as 30 tons. One month later Marius Dewilde is the witness of another meeting, but this time by day. His young son also saw the scene.
[Ref. dcn1:] DOMINIQUE CAUDRON:
Dominique Caudron indicates that in Quarouble in the Nord on September 10, 1954, two "Martians" paralyse a metal-worker, and comments on - by irony - "'They' land! 'They' attack us!"
[Ref. jcd1:] JEAN-FRANCIS CROBARD:
On September 10, 1954, at 10:30 p.m., in Quarouble (France), Marius Dewilde saw a dark craft placed on the railway tracks and two creatures in spacesuits, barely a meter high, walking towards this object. He advances towards them but a beam of orange light, projected on him, paralyzes him. After the departure of the UFO, according to the traces left on the ballast, experts estimate its weight at 30 tons.
[Ref. pbh1:] PETER BROOKESMITH:
The author says that on September 10, 1954, at 10:30 p.m. in Quarouble, France, Marius Dewilde was disturbed by his dog howling. Outside he saw two 3 feet - 1 meter - tall armless entities "shuffling along on very short legs". A beam of white-green light from a "shape" nearby paralyzed him. The entities entered the shape; which rose with a whistling noise and flew away to the east, glowing red. Ground markings were discovered later, and engineer calculated that a 30-tonne weight would have been necessary to make. Five other witnesses also saw the red light.
[Ref. krs1:] KEVIN RANDLE AND RUSS ESTES:
The authors indicate that on September 10, 1954, in Valenciennes, France, Maruis [sic] Dewilde Dewilde, walking his dog along the railroad tracks at night, noticed a dark mass. Not far away were two small creatures that had wide shoulders and wore huge helmets. Dewilde planned to approach the men, but a bright light from the craft paralyzed him. The creatures returned to the craft, there was a loud whistling noise, and it rose into the sky. An examination of the rail bed revealed depressions on the ties where the object had stood.
[Ref. jsc1:] JOHN SCHUESSLER:
1954/09/10 FRANCE, VALENCIENNES
Source: October Scenario
Official UFO, Feb. 76
Marcus Dewilde was walking his dog near the railroad tracks when he saw an object sitting on the track. He saw two small beings. When he tried to approach them a beam of light from the craft paralyzed him. He was unable to speak. With a loud whistling sound the craft flew away, leaving impressions on the ties.
John Schuessler notes that the physiological effects were: "Paralysis, Mute, Sound, Ground trace"
[Ref. jca1:] JACQUES COSTAGLIOLA:
The author indicates that on September 10, 1954 around 22 hours in Quarouble in the Nord, Marius Dewilde, gate-keeper, his dog barking to death, came out, saw a dark mass on the railway, heard footsteps and saw emerging within 4 meters two small individuals in diving-suits. He wanted to approach, a luminous ray spouted out of the mass and immobilized him, the hominians reached the craft which took off. The ray disappeared, Dewilde found the use of his muscles and immediately went by bicycle to the gendarmerie which was closed then to the police station of Onnaing. The police force, the gendarmerie of the air and the DST investigated. It was not a helicopter because of the proximity of power lines, on a cross-piece of the rails one found three symmetrical marks. The SNCF said that there was a pressure of 30 tons. The stones were crushed, like burned at high temperature. There was an identical observation and the same marks on October 10.
[Ref. mkr1:] MARTIN KOTTMEYER:
There were no fully realized Grays in the Fifties. Partial approximations can be said to exist, as in [other case] the 1954 French wave encounter tales of Marius Dewilde, [other cases]
[Ref. abr1:] ALAN BAKER:
The author indicates that there was an encounter with a landed UFO and alien beings in September 1954 in Quarouble, one of the most impressive examples of a UFO leaving landing traces on record, and that the events were described in the 15 September 1954 issue of France-Soir.
Three investigators for the air police arrived at Quarouble Nord yesterday to interview M. Marius Dewilde, the man who saw two 'Martians' near his back-yard gate. They left the village convinced that, during the night of Friday to Saturday, a mysterious craft had indeed landed, as claimed by M. Dewilde, on the tracks of the Saint-Amand-Blanc-Misseron railway line, near crossing No. 79.
Their inquiries seem, in effect, to confirm the statement made by the metal-worker. The witness declared that on Friday, about 10:30 p.m., he had seen a machine of an elongated shape, three metres high, six metres long, sitting on the tracks a few metres away from his house. Two beings of human appearance, of very small height and apparently wearing diving suits, could be seen nearby. Mr. Dewilde walked toward them, but at that moment a beam of greenish light was focused on him from the craft and he found himself paralysed. When he was able to move again the machine had started to rise and the two beings had disappeared.
...The ground, examined metre by metre, shows a trace of footsteps ...There are traces on the sleepers that could have been made by a machine landing on (them). In five places the wood of the sleepers is compressed over an area of about four square centimetres. These markings all have the same appearance and they lie symmetrically, on one line. Three of them - those in the middle are 43 centimetres apart. The last two are 67 centimetres away from the preceding ones.
A craft landing on legs instead of wheels like our own aircraft would leave just such traces, one of the inspectors of the air police has declared.
M. Dewilde's story is also confirmed by several inhabitants of the region. In Onnaing, at about 10.30 p.m. (the time indicated by M. Dewilde), a young man called M. Edmond Auverlot and a retired man, M. Hublard, saw a reddish light travelling in the sky. The same light was seen from Vicq by three young men.
The air police concentrated their investigations on the markings found on the railway sleepers, and consulted several railway specialists, who concluded that an object exerting a pressure of thirty tons had been present. Examinations were also made of the gravel of the railway bed, which revealed calcination of the stones. They had become brittle, indicating the presence of intense heat, which had raised their temperature to just below melting point. Whatever had landed on the railway line had caused oxidation in the gravel.
[Ref. hnt1:] HUGO HNART:
The author indicates that on September 10, 1954 in Quarouble, Marius Dewilde tried to intercept two humanoids, and found himself paralysed, as indicated in the report by Marc Thirouin in Ouranos #24 on page 12:
"Then, I heard like the very fast closing of a sliding door. Then the beam died out and, I at once recovered my senses..."
The author notes that when he was giving lecture in Tours or the surroundings, he knew Marius Dewilde very well, and he affirms that some time before his death, Marius Dewilde told him that the attacks he most suffered did not come from people who denied the UFO phenomenon but indeed from ufologists, including some who made much money at his expense.
[Ref. bjn1:] DESMOND BRAGG ET PAUL JOSLIN:
The authors indicate that Vallée reported a case for September 15, 1954 at Quarouble in France, in which Maurice Dewilde reported that at 10:30 p.m. he observed a three meters high elongated machine and six meters long resting on a railroad tracks a few meters of his house. Two small entities less than 4 feet tall, of human appearance, wearing "heavy diving suits" and helmets were seen nearby. A beam of greenish light came from the craft and paralyzed Dewilde when he approached. Marks that were left of the railroad crossties indicated the weight of the craft was in the order of 30 tons.
[Ref. cln4:] CORAL AND JIM LORENZEN:
These ufologists say that one of the best-known sightings of UFO occupants in France took place near Valenciennes on the night of September 10, 1954. It was such a strange incident that it received international press notice.
Marius Dewilde, 34 years old at the time, was a metalworker in the Blanc-Misseron steel mills on the Belgian frontier, living with his family in a small home in the midst of fields and woods about a mile from Quarouble. His garden was adjacent to the National Coal Mines railway track running from Blanc-Misseron to St Armand-les Eaux, and grade crossing 79 was next to his house.
On that night, he was reading after his wife and children had retired. At 10:30 p.m. he heard his dog Kiki barking, and thinking there was a prowler in the vicinity of his property, he took a flashlight and went outside.
He walked to his garden, found nothing en route, then spotted a dark mass on the railroad tracks less than 6 yards from his door. He thought at first that someone had left a farm cart there. At that point his dog approached, crawling on her belly and whining, and simultaneously he heard hurried footsteps to the right of him.
The dog began barking again and Dewilde directed his flashlight toward the sound of the footsteps. What Dewilde saw startled him greatly: less than 3 or 4 yards away, beyond the fence, were two creatures, walking in single file toward the dark mass at the tracks, both dressed in suits similar to those of divers, and light was reflected off glass or metal in the area of their heads. Both were small, less than 3.5 feet tall, but had very wide shoulders. The legs looked very short in proportion to the height of the little "men", and Dewilde could not make out any arms.
After the first fright passed, Dewilde rushed to the gate, intending to cut them off from the path or to grapple with one of them. When he was about 6 feet from them, he was blinded by a very powerful light somewhat like a magnesium flare which came from a square opening in the dark mass on the tracks. He closed his eyes and tried to scream but couldn't, and he felt paralyzed. He tried to move but his legs would not function.
Shortly, Dewilde heard the sound of steps at his garden gate, and the two creatures seemed to be going toward the railroad. The beam of light finally went out and he recovered the use of this legs and headed for the track. But the dark object had begun to rise, hovering lightly, and Dewilde saw a kind of door closing. A low whistling sound accompanied a thick dark steam which issued from the bottom of the object. The object ascended vertically till about 100 feet altitude, turned east, and when it was some distance away it took on a reddish glow. A minute later it was completely out of sight.
After he regained his senses, Dewilde woke his wife and a neighbor, told them of this experience, then ran to the police station in the village of Onnaing, a mile distant. He was so upset and his speech so confused that the police thought he was a lunatic and dismissed him. From there he went to the office of the police commissioner where he told his story to Commissioner Gouchet.
Dewilde's fear was so evident that Gouchet realized something extraordinary must have taken place, and the next morning his report brought investigators from the Air Police and the Department of Territorial Security. These teams, along with police investigators, questioned Dewilde and then examined the area where the dark object had rested. They found no footprints in the area, but the ground was very hard. However, they did find five places on three of the wooden ties which had identical impressions, each about 1.5 inches square. The marks were fresh and sharply cut, indicating that the wooden ties had been subjected to very great pressure at those five points.
The impressions were never satisfactorily explained, but railroad engineers who were consulted by the investigators, calculated that the amount of pressure required to make the marks was approximately thirty tons.
An examination of the gravel of the roadbed showed that at the site of the alleged landing the stones were brittle as if calcined at very high temperature.
Lastly, several residents in the area reported that they had seen a reddish object or glow moving in the sky at about the time Dewilde indicated that the object had left.
The authors give as reference their own books "Flying Saucer Occupants", Signet/NAL, 1967, and "Encounters with UFO Occupants", Berkley Medallion Books, 1976.
[Ref. sdn1:] STEVEN DUNN:
| DATE | DESCRIPTION | MICAP_CLAS | REF |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09/10/1954 |
Valencinnes, FR 10 Sep 54 Walking his dog along railroad tracks at night, Dewilde saw a dark mass. Also two small creatures with wide shoulders and huge helmets. He planned to approach, but a bright light from the craft paralyzed him. Creatures returned to craft, which took off with a loud whistling noise. Exam of rail bed showed depressions in rail ties where craft was reported. |
CE-3-113 | Randle/Estes FOV pg 265 |
[Ref. djn1:] DONALD JOHNSON:
On this Day
September 10
[...]
1954 - A metal worker, Marius Dewilde, age 34, came out of his house in Quarouble, France when his dog was barking and saw a dark object sitting on the railroad tracks. He then observed two dwarfs walking toward it. When he tried to stop them, he found himself paralyzed as a strong orange beam of light that was projected at him. The beings were under 1 meter (3.3 feet) tall, bulky, and wore dark diving suits. No faces or arms were visible. Imprints were made by an object, that an engineer estimated must have weighed 30 tons. French police and the French Air Force investigated the case. (Sources: Le Parisien, September 13, 1954; Aime Michel, Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, p. 44; Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia, p. 209).
[Ref. ars1:] ALBERT ROSALES:
79.
Location. Quarouble France
Date: September 10 1954
Time: 2230
Hearing his dogs barking, Marius Dewilde went out and saw a dark mass on the railroad track, less than 6 yards away. On hearing footsteps, he turned his flashlight on the path, where he saw 2 very short beings (less than 3.5 ft) wearing "diver's suits." No arms could be seen. He approached within 6 ft, when he was blinded and paralyzed by a brilliant light emanating from the mass of the tracks. The two creatures went toward the object. When the beam of paralyzing light went out, he ran towards the track, but the object was now rising, emitting a "thick dark steam" and a low whistling sound. It became red luminous and flew away. On the railroad ties where found 5 imprints; it was calculated that a 30-ton weight would have been necessary to produce them. Recent information uncovered about the case indicates that Dewilde found after the craft took off a mysterious metallic black box. He took the box home and attempted to open it, without telling local police about it. After several failed attempts he finally gave up and hid the black box inside a carton. According to Dewilde shortly after this several French Air Force officers who somehow knew about the existence of the black box and took possession of it visited him.
Humcat 1954-48
Source: Aime Michel
Type: C
[Ref. rhl1] RICHARD HALL:
TABLE 1. UFO OCCUPANT SIGHTINGS, 1954-1963
[...]
September 10, 1954 Marius Dewilde, Quarouble, France 10:30 P.M.
Two beings 3-1/2 ft. tall, coveralls, diver's helmet; dark mass on ground; dog howled, witness blinded by light from craft, paralyzed.
[...]
[Ref. tps1:] TED PHILLIPS:
Ted Phillips listed the case as a "top" case in his "preliminary list of top cases":
Report 9/10/54 Quarouble, France, 2230: multiple witnesses, animal reaction, area heated to high temperature, imprints.
[Ref. lhh1:] LARRY HATCH - "*U* COMPUTER DATABASE":
3766: 1954/09/10 22:30 20 3:37:40 E 50:23:40 N 3333 WEU FRN NRD 8:6
QUAROUBLE,FR:30-TON SCR ON RR TRACKS:2 OIDS/HELMETS TAKE DIRT+ROCKS:>>SW:/r217
Ref# 2 VALLEE:UFOS IN SPACE:Anatomy/phenon. Page No. 95 : ROAD+RAILS
[Ref. kbd1:] KEITH BASTERFIELD:
The Australian ufologist indicates that on 10 September 1954 at 2230 in Quarouble France, Marius DeWilde, aged 34, went outside and saw a dark mass was visible on railway tracks only 6m away. Two 1.3m tall creatures in one piece outfits were noticed. He approached these creatures and when only 2m away, was blinded by a brilliant light from the dark mass. he found himself paralysed. The beam of light went out, he could then move, and the object departed.
He says it is one of the 15 cases in France in 1954 where there was a reported paralysis of the witness or witnesses when they were within a certain distance of a low-level UFO, distances that are 6m (1 case), 20m (2), 50m (2) 100m (1) and 150m (1). He adds that there seems little doubt about a relationship between the UFO and the paralysis, as the paralysis commenced upon observing the UFO and then ceased when the UFO left.
[Ref. lgm1:] LUIS GONZALES:
September 10, 1954 - Quarouble
CONFUSION / HOAX?
10:30 p.m.. Marius Dewilde (aged 34), metalurgy workman, leaves his house when hearing his dog bark and sees a dark object on the railway; he then observed two dwarves who walked towards him. When he tried to stop them, an intense orange light was projected on him, and at this time, he felt paralysed. The beings measured less than 1 m, were squat and carried dark diving-suits. Neither the faces nor the arms were visible. Technicians of the French Aviation and gendarmerie observed traces in the railway, which were calculated to have been caused by an object which weighed some 30 tons. The witness had a second encounter one month later.
Sources:
[Ref. tps2:] TED PHILLIPS:
09/10/54 Quarouble, France:
Animal reaction-area heated to high temperature-dark mass on railroad tracks less than 6 yards away-two 3 ft beings. The witness approached to within 6 ft when he was blinded and paralyzed by a brilliant light from the dark mass.. The beings returned to the object, and it ascended with a low whistling sound, emitting a "thick dark steam," becoming red luminous, and flying away. On the railroad ties were 5 imprints. It was calculated that a 30-ton weight would have been necessary to produce them.
(Ref. uoi1:) UFOLOGY MAGAZINE "UFOVNI":
By Eudes Jolonquy
Marius Dewilde was a metalworker at the Blanc-Misseron steelworks at the time. He lives with his wife and son in a small isolated house in the middle of woods and fields, 2 km from the small village of Quarouble, located near the Belgian border, in the Nord, east of Valenciennes. In front of his house, a small garden surrounded by a palisade. The Houillères Nationales railway line, which goes from Saint-Amand to Blanc-Misseron, runs along this garden, and next to it is the level crossing nr 79 of the Houillères Nationales track.
September 10, 1954 Marius Dewilde witnessed the landing of a ship (and its occupants) on the railway near his gatekeeper's house. His story hit the headlines at the time, and he later told his story in a book: "Ne Résistez pas aux Extraterrestres".
"It is Friday, September 10, 1954, it is around 10:30 p.m. I live in a small house in Quarouble, in the North of France. It is a barrier house, so very close to the track. Flying saucers?, don't know or rather, I hear about it like everyone else, but for me, it's rubbish.
I am a simple man, a metalworker who only thinks of improving his comfort. I was able to buy a television: in 1954, it's already not so bad. That evening, my wife was watching the small screen while I preferred to read my newspaper, because as a former sailor, an article fascinated me, it was the drama of l'Abeille.
Suddenly, Kiki, my dog, starts barking abnormally from his kennel outside the house.
- What's wrong with him? asks my wife.
- I don't know, I'll go see.
I put down my newspaper, take a flashlight and leave the house where my wife is still sitting in front of the television set
When I arrived in the garden, I saw on the railway tracks, less than 6 m from my door, on the left, a kind of dark mass. "It's a peasant who musthave unhitched his cart there", I thought at first. "I will have to warn the station agents tomorrow first thing in the morning so that they remove it, otherwise there will be an accident" (farmers sometimes use the ballast of the railway to bring in their crops, because the paths, in this marshy terrain, are quite poor.
At that moment, my dog ??came crawling towards me, and suddenly, on my right, I heard the sound of rushing footsteps. There is a path there called "the smugglers' path", because they sometimes use it at night (to cross the Franco-Belgian border). My dog ??had turned that way again and started barking again. I turned on my flashlight and projected its beam of light down the path.
What I discovered had nothing in common with smugglers: 2 "beings" like I had never seen before, barely 3 or 4 meters from me, just behind the palisade, which alone separated me of them, walked one behind the other in the direction of the dark mass that I had noticed on the railway tracks.
One of them, the one walking in front, turned to me. The beam of my lamp caught, at the place of his face, a reflection of glass or metal. I had the distinct impression that his head was locked in a diving helmet. The 2 beings were also dressed in suits similar to those of divers. They were very small in stature, probably less than 1m, but extremely broad-shouldered, and the helmet protecting the "head" seemed enormous to me. I saw their legs, small, proportionate to their size, it seemed to me, but on the other hand I saw no arms. I don't know if they had any.
The first seconds of stupor passed, I rushed towards the garden gate with the intention of going around the palisade and cutting them off the path to capture at least one of them. I was no more than 2 m from the 2 silhouettes when, suddenly springing through a kind of square of the dark mass that I had first seen on the tracks, an extremely powerful illumination, like a glow of magnesium (with green reflections?), blinded me. I closed my eyes and wanted to scream, but I couldn't. I was paralyzed. I tried to move, but my legs no longer obeyed me. Only my brain works in a way that could not be more lucid. I feel tingles all over my body as I see and hear perfectly.
Distraught, I heard like in a dream, 1 m from me, the sound of footsteps on the cement slab that is placed in front of the door to my garden. They were the 2 beings heading towards the railway tracks.
Finally, the projector turned off. I regained control of my muscles and ran towards the railway tracks. But already the dark mass that was placed there was rising from the ground, swaying slightly like a helicopter. However, I had been able to see a sort of door closing. A thick, dark vapor was billowing out from below with a slight hiss (emitting hot wind and smelling of ozone?).
The machine rose vertically to about 30 m, then, without ceasing to gain altitude, dived west towards Anzin. From a certain distance, it took on a reddish luminosity. A minute later, everything was gone."
After recovering his senses a little, Dewilde would wake up his wife, then a neighbor. He then runs to the nearest gendarmerie in the small town of Onnaing, 2 km away. He is so moved and his words seem so disjointed that people take him for a madman and ask him to go home without hearing him.
Dewilde then goes to the police station, where he arrives around midnight. Commissioner Gouchet agrees to hear him. Dewilde is shaking in all his limbs and is seized with intestinal contractions. Gouchet rules out the hypothesis of a comedy or simulation, and his report will trigger a triple investigation.
The next morning (a few hours after the statement to the police) Dewilde was visited by a journalist from La Voix du Nord, who came to interview him.
"It starts with a man's voice behind me.
- Mr. Dewilde? I turn around
- Yes, it's me
- This is for La Voix du Nord. Could you give me an interview, please?
After taking notes in his notebook, the journalist scrutinizes me
- You should go home, Mr. Dewilde, there are a lot of people...
A lot of people: quite an understatement!"
Rapidly during the day, a crowd comes to see Dewilde. While a cordon of police prevents onlookers from invading the land surrounding the house, Dewilde's wife is questioned by Gouchet, and the Air Force and the DST disembark to take Dewilde's statement in turn.
In this one my wife receives Superintendent Gouchet while, at the same time, the Air Force and the D.S.T. arrive
The Lille and Paris Air Police are also arriving, fitted with equipment. Orders are flying from all sides, and everyone is demanding priority action: in this respect, it is soldiers wearing anti-radiation suits who impose themselves first and foremost: the tenant of Dewilde, his whole family, himself. Likewise, the animals and the terrain are subject to the detection of Geiger counters. Result of the operation: The radioactivity is bearable for humans and animals.
The investigation of the scene is suddenly interrupted by a shrill creak, followed by a dull rumble: a train, passing slowly so as not to cause an accident among the crowd, has caused the track to collapse while its wheels slipped on the rails. The collapse occurred at the very place where the object seen by Dewilde was. The machinist immobilizes his locomotive, dismounts to use the telephone in the courtyard of the house, while the investigators, amazed, note an abnormal friability of the track and the ballast. A few moments later, the machinist exclaims: - The telephone isn't working. - I know, answers Dewilde, it hasn't worked since landing. - What is this story again? Rumbles the voice of a soldier. Indeed the batteries, which look like new, are empty. Dewilde then shows his electric torch and his transistor radios, also discharged.
Near the track, an officer draws everyone's attention: - Come and see here! There is a hollow, a kind of bowl over a length of at least 6 m, there are also traces on the side of the ballast and notches on the sleepers of the rails.
Like Gouchet, they take the story seriously. On Monday, September 13, all three go to the scene again to try to clear up the mystery.
The first hypothesis considered is that of a clandestine helicopter doing smuggling. It is however rejected, in the sight of the telegraph wires preventing any landing on the place.
One then examines, meter by meter, the land adjacent to the railway line where the 2 beings could have left their footprints. No footprints are found, but the hard ground seems inauspicious.
On the railway, 3 wooden sleepers bear the same marks, fresh and clean, 5 depressions of 4 cm arranged symmetrically. They correspond to a weight of approximately 30 t according to the estimate of the railway engineers consulted.
Furthermore, the ballast stones have become friable as if they had been calcined at high temperatures. In addition, the investigation reveals several witnesses in the surroundings who confirm the passage of the UFO that evening in the sky of the region.
The civilian investigators (including Marc Thirouin) who are investigating the Dewilde case cooperated very closely with the local police, but there are also other people on the scene, including representatives of the air force, who came from Paris. When one proceeds to an investigation about the stones found calcined at the place where Dewilde saw the saucer, it turns out that the police themselves cannot obtain information on the results of these analyses. The local police chief says: The official body that works in liaison with the air police belongs to the Ministry of National Defence. The mere name of this ministry excludes any communication whatsoever.
Subsequently Dewilde suffers from colic and loss of breath. His dog will now remain nervous, until its death 6 months later.
Other phenomena and witnesses
2 or 3 days later, one discovered 3 dead cows in a pasture. An autopsy will reveal that the animals were drained of their blood (as in most cases of cattle mutilation.
A week later, a farmer will encounter an identical creature and was immobilized in the same way near Cenon (Gironde). These are probably the same creatures that, on September 26, Lucette Leboeuf will observe.
In 1991, during a conference on UFOs in Arras, a lady between 50 and 60 took the floor to share her testimony with us: the day when Marius Dewilde met the ETs (I don't know if it is the 1st or the 2nd), this lady was present in Quarouble (not far from the Belgian border), not very far from the dwelling of the previous one, and saw the ship fly away in the sky in a halo of red light. I know, we can say what we want about the testimony and its fragility, but I can assure you that we were a pair in the audience who believed in its authenticity.
Detention
A few days later, Dewilde finds himself in a hospital where indiscriminately insane people, "dangerous individuals" and lepers are locked up. For several days he is taken in a van for 1 hour, without a belt or laces, to a military camp (a former civilian prison), where he finds a doctor (a commander who officiates in the department of Professor Merle d'Aubigne), injections that keep him in a semi-comatose state, and repeated interrogations where he is asked the same question over and over again: you haven't said everything, have you? Following the advice of a nurse, he becomes gentle as a lamb, and he adds nothing to his previous depositions. A ride that lasts 3 days.
Dewilde speaks to the scientist Georges Claude, also an inmate classified as "dangerous" or "crazy". He converses with him at length, and does not seem to him either dangerous or mad. Claude had wanted to sell his invention to France, which had refused because it considered it as useless as it was expensive, and Claude had then found a buyer in Germany. The Nazis attributed it to von Braun. I am now accused of treason! Georges Claude told him. But if I betrayed, why isn't public opinion informed? Because I would have my say!
Violence and brutality by the Air Force and D.S.T. Police
Electric shocks, pentothal, hypnosis sessions... Finally, Dewilde wonders if, without his knowledge, he has cracked: I probably spoke. One evening they wake him up and take him to a van which, at dawn, arrives at the edge of the sea (but he does not know anything about it. The sound of the waves in the darkness of the night and breathe in the salty air, the accompaniment points to loopholes in the mass of concrete: - Look inside.
Dewilde complies and, paralyzed, does not believe his eyes. The officer whispers in his ear: - Is that what you saw? In a large room, inside the building, he sees an enormous machine of lenticular shape, long about 10 m and perfectly lit. He observes it while it is located below in relation to his angle of view. - Does the craft you saw look like this one? Insists the officer. Dewilde swallowed hard. - It is impossible for me to answer affirmatively, because I did not see any detail during the night of September 10, except the approximate shape of the machine. To Dewilde's great surprise, the officer seems satisfied with this answer. He leaves it entirely to his observation, which will last no less than 30 minutes, after which, he is brought back to his home, in Quarouble.
Barely 15 minutes after his return, an Army Jeep stops in front of his house. On board 1 commander, 1 captain and 2 armed troops. Followed closely by the captain, the commander approaches: - Mr. Dewilde, give us the box. - The box? What box? - Come on... you know the box! - I don't know what you're talking about. - We know where it is, Mr. Dewilde. - Well, then you just have to take it. The commander has a cautious smile. - That's what we'll do. Dewilde then sees, to his great astonishment, the 2 officers and the 2 soldiers heading towards the cellar, and reappearing a few moments later with a box. - Mr. Dewilde, declares the commander, we will pay you for this object. You will be paid dearly for it. The sum you will receive will be really very important. But Dewilde will never hear about this box again, nor about the money promised by the commander.
- END QUOTE -
The pressures, incarcerations, violence and brutality that Marius Dewilde endured by the Air Force Police and the D.S.T. show that the army and the secret services attached the utmost importance to this case.
My wife is also watching it while I prefer to read my newspaper: as a former sailor an article fascinates me, it is the drama of the l'Abeille.
It is obviously because this "incident" left traces, inexplicable in terms of known phenomena, natural or artificial, that we chose it. Investigators discovered:
1. No footprints on the surrounding hard terrain.
2. On the sleepers of the railway, in five places, prints on an area of ??4 cm? each, distributed over three sleepers; these are indentations caused by bodies with a rectangular section and comprising a bevel of penetration, and having exerted a pressure of 30 tons on the wood of the sleepers. These marks reveal a certain symmetry.
Note: The sleepers at this location have since been replaced, over a distance of about fifty metres; the rest was however in the same state of dilapidation; where were they taken, and for what purpose? ("Ouranos", Anno IX, No. 25, p. 21).
3. Blackish traces were noted on the gravel of the ballast; they would correspond to the jet of vapor or smoke, coming out of the lower part of the UFO, and observed by Mr. Dewilde.
4. Ballast samples were taken by the D.S.T. investigators, at the place of the presumed landing, that is to say between the sleepers bearing the prints; these hard stones had become friable, as if they had been calcined in a high-temperature electric furnace, the rest of the ballast having remained normal. These samples were analyzed... but the results were never published.
5. After years, Mr. Dewilde has never contradicted himself during the numerous cross-examinations to which he willingly submitted himself.
6. Mr. Dewilde's eyewitness account of a UFO in flight was confirmed by two other eyewitness accounts of glowing craft moving across the sky around 10:30 p.m.:
a) In Vicq, 2 kilometers northwest of Quarouble, by several people.
b) In Onnaing; 2 kilometers SW of Quarouble, by two people.
For more details on this now classic case, see: Aimé Michel, op. cit. 1, p. 58 to 65; Michel Carrouges, op. cit., pp. 109 to 115; Jimmy Guieu, op. cit. II. p.p. 130 to 133; Ouranos, IX/24, pp. 11 et seq.; ibidem, IX/25, pp. 20 et seq. This is the case nr 144 of J. Vallée "A century of landings".
On November 19, the police confirmed that Dewilde made a second statement about an object he had seen near his house. However, says the police:
Dewilde and his family have decided, for fear of bad publicity, not to let anyone into their confidence regarding this second event. That's why none of the local newspapers will mention it.
In addition, they let civilian investigators know - politely but firmly - that they will henceforth keep confidential all other information relating to such incidents.
As much as his first encounter with Uranians, on September 10, 1954, received wide publicity from the press, so his second encounter, on October 10, 1954, was glossed over; we only find traces of it in the few lines published by "Nord-Matin" (10/20/1954) and "France Soir" (10/301954) and during an interview with the Parisian post... 16 months later. Were instructions given? Who gave them? Why?
Here is the testimony of Marius Dewilde, collected by Mr. Marc Thirouin, founder of the C.I.E.S. "Ouranos":
Quarouble (Nord), France, October 10, 1954 (11:30 a.m. - 12 p.m. local time): "It was between 11:30 a.m. and noon when my three-and-a-half-year-old son came to tell me that there was "a car on the track". I got out. I saw at 50 meters, a craft of the same shape and dimensions as one month earlier. It was not on the same track, but on the one that passes on the other side of the house. There was a rectangular opening at the base of the dome of the craft. All around this base was a series of bumps whose meaning I did not understand. There was also, above the opening, a horizontal row of portholes; I could make out three or four of them but saw nothing through them.
Human-like beings, clad in dark gray enveloping overalls, were milling around the craft; There were two of them on the disc platter (one on each side of the rectangular opening); later I saw two more come out from behind the disc or - perhaps more precisely - from underneath. A fifth came out of the opening, descended to the ground, spoke to the others; he seemed to me to be the chief. He came to me. I myself had been constantly advancing towards the craft while making these observations, so that we met about 3 meters from the craft.
The being flattered my son whom I was holding in my arms, patted me on the shoulder, smiling, and began to speak in a language I did not know. I could hear him very well, which is quite curious since he was talking to me through his helmet. I saw that he had very white, impeccable teeth. Overall her face was regular and really beautiful. His smile was quite human, as well as his facial expressions and his gestures. The beings, similar to him, that I saw around the craft, smiled, too, at times.
I was 3 meters from the craft and heard dull complaints inside. I thought I heard it repeated: boukak... boukak... Looking through the opening, I saw two other beings, one lying on the floor - I assumed it was he who was moaning - the other standing near him. As I was almost in the axis of the door, I could see inside a "bricked" and really strange material, very many small things - buttons of different colors, kinds of pressure gauges, etc. - metal (?) Dark, gray, spotlessly clean.
The language in which the being spoke to me was apparently neither Chinese, nor an Indochinese language, nor Siamese (the witness made this declaration following some imitations that I made him hear somehow); The sequence of sounds seemed rather European to me, but it was, in my opinion, neither English, nor German, nor a Latin language. I am really unable to specify more, not being at all familiar with foreign languages. The being took a few steps towards my poultry, which was pecking not far from us, bent down, grabbed a hen. Instead of running away screaming as these animals do when I try to catch them, this one "sabound" and let itself be taken obediently; I was amazed. He showed it in his hands then gave it to the two beings who had remained near the door. They took it, bending down a little.
Finally the being caressed my child again, on the head, and again tapped me on the shoulder, gently, then motioned for me to step aside. He climbed into the craft, preceded by the two characters to whom he had given the hen and followed by the two others who were behind or under the machine a moment before. Two of them helped him up by shaking his hand. The figure standing inside had bent down to move the one who was lying down, in order to leave the entrance free. Seeing them move like this, I noticed that they were well proportioned, that they had a free pace, that while remaining subject to gravity they did not seem, in any way, to feel its weight or feel tired.
A panel closed the door, sliding up and down, rather quickly but without abruptness. Then the craft took off vertically, without noise and without smoke, and disappeared towards the east. I had time to see the underside of the disk: there was a raised central part, surrounded by small circles and lines arranged in rays. I was not very inclined to reveal this observation, remembering the hassle the first one had cost me. My wife spoke about it and the affair spread, which again brought a flood of investigators to the scene."
Traces (investigation by Mr. Marc Thirouin)
"On the second track the grass is thick and I expect to find no remains (...). I count ten (prints) spread over four sleepers; it is difficult to count them and to "noting their location (...). I must therefore confine myself to noting on my block the position of the most recognizable traces and to measuring their spacing. When, on my return to the hotel, I will reproduce my diagram on the scale, I will realize that I have before my eyes an image endowed with an approximate symmetry (....
Comments (by Mr. Marc Thirouin)
"The S.N.C.F. engineers who came to examine these prints declared that "the pressure they reveal corresponds to a weight of 30 tons". I wonder how such experts could seriously talk about pressure on the sleepers, then that obviously what I have in front of my eyes at this moment is on the contrary the trace of material tearing off!. On each imprint one can clearly distinguish a cut at approximately 45° at one end, another vertical at the other end. Between the two, the wood has chipped following the cleavage plane of its different layers, and - when these sink obliquely into the crosspiece - leaving characteristic interlocking, detachments and serrations in the fracture zone. Proof that the latter was not pressed by the pressure of the disc (...). The shape and orientation of the terminal cuts seem to suggest the action of two sharp appendages sinking into the wood, one vertically to ensure the lateral immobilization of the machine, the other oblique, in the direction of the first, to keep it from rising. If so, whatever its dimensions, the craft must have been very light since it was enough to moor it with a "bolt" of a few millimeters every 40 to 80 centimeters approximately.
In December 1979, Dewilde phoned Jimmy Guieu and told him: I have extraordinary revelations to share with you, I live in Tours and cannot move. The following year his book of revelations co-written with Roger-Luc Mary was released.
Don't Resist Aliens
Marius Dewilde's book
In 1954, and in the years that followed, the Dewilde Affair hit the headlines in newspapers around the world: Allan Hynek himself came to France to meet the metalworker who said he had seen "extraordinary things" on a railway, in Quarouble, in the north of France: indeed, Marius Dewilde had material proof of his statement, a mysterious object which, obviously, interested all the police, the Air Police in particular.
A month later, after much hassle that Mr. Dewilde reports in this book, a second landing takes place in the same place: this time, Dewilde and his son board the craft, and Dewilde obtains a second physical evidence that he still owns. However, for almost thirty years, Marius Dewilde seems to have been forced into silence. Then, in December 1979, he phoned the ufologist Jimmy Guieu to tell him: "I have extraordinary revelations to deliver to you, I live in Tours and cannot move.
Like Franck Fontaine, from Cergy-Pontoise, Marius Dewilde predicts close extraterrestrial contact on a planetary scale, and he issues a warning that may seem bizarre: DON'T RESIST ALIENS.
References:
[Ref. jca2:] JACQUES COSTAGLIOLA:
The MD and ufologist indicates that on September 10, 1954, Marius Dewilde was paralyzed on the spot by green ray that spouted of a metallic craft on the way.
He further adds that it was not on the head.
This is illustrated by the sketch published in "Radar" magazine:
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[Ref. unw1:] "UFO NORTHWEST" WEBSITE:
The website indicates that Dr. Jacques Vallee wrote a book titled "Passport to Magnolia" [sic] that highlighted French humanoid incidents associated with UFOs in 1954, which were also described in the more recent book "Situation Red - The UFO Siege" (1977) by Leonard H. Stringfield, including the following:
On September 10 in Quarouble, a metal worker, Marius DeWilde, came out of his house as a dog was barking and saw a dark object on the railroad tracks, then saw two dwarfs walking toward it. When he tried to stop them, he was paralyzed by a strong orange light beam. The creatures were under one meter tall, bulky, and wore dark "diving" suits.
[Ref. mre1:] MICHEL RIBARDIERE:
September 20, 2010
1954 is an important year in the history of French ufology.
[General information]
Here some one of the encounters:
September 10, 1954, in Quarouble, in the North of France, Marius Dewilde, as he was reading the newspaper, sees, on the railway a dark mass. He hears steps that approach and sees two small beings who advance towards him. As he approaches to catch one of them, he is paralysed by a ray. The two small beings disappear then in their machine which rises from the ground.
[... Other cases]
[Ref. ovo1:] "OVNI 61" BLOG:
September 10, 1954, in Quarouble, in the North of France, Marius Dewilde, as he was reading the newspaper, sees, on the railway a dark mass. He hears footsteps which approach and sees two small beings which advance towards him. As he approaches to catch one of them, he is paralysed by a ray. The two small beings then disappear in their craft which rises from the ground.
[Ref. prn3:] PETER ROGERSON:
September 10 1954, 2230hrs.
QUAROUBLE (NORD : FRANCE)
Marius Dewilde (34), a metal worker at the Blanc-Misseron steel works, was at reading by the fire in his house in a wooded area 1.5km from Quarouble, his wife and son having gone to bed, when the dog outside began howling. Thinking there was a prowler, he went to investigate. From his garden he noticed a dark mass, which he took to be a farmer's cart, on the railway tracks, less than 6m away. Just then his dog crawled up to him, and he heard footsteps to his right. Turning his flashlight, he saw, behind the fence 3-4m away, not the expected smugglers (Quarouble is close to the Belgian border), but two creatures dressed in one piece divers' suits, with their heads encased in divers' helmets. They were only about 1m tall, but very broad shouldered, and their helmets looked enormous. Their legs appeared small and he was unable to see any arms.
Marius rushed to the garden fence to grab one of the creatures, but as he got within 2m, he was blinded by a brilliant beam, like a magnesium flash, coming from a square opening in the dark mass on the railway tracks. He found himself paralysed, unable to move or cry out, and while in that state heard the creatures depart towards the railway. When the beam of light went out he recovered his senses and saw the dark mass hovering of the railway and a sort of door closing, thick black steam was coming out of the bottom of this object, with a low whistle. The object then rose up to 30m then turned east towards Anzin, becoming a reddish luminosity then disappearing. Marius, in a state of shock, woke his wife, and then reported the matter to the police at Onnaing about 1.5km away in an extremely agitated manner.
Police investigations found that in five places, on three of the wooden sleepers, identical depressions about 345mm square, fresh and sharply cut, three in a row 45cm apart on one tier, the other two on either side of the lie formed by these three and 70cm from it. The gravel in the rail bed appeared brittle as if subjected to a high temperature, and blackish traces were found. The prints were such that it was calculated that a weight of 30 tons would have been need to produce them.
Michel 1958, p.44.
Vallee 1969, p.17.
Vallee Case 144 citing Le Parisien + Combat+ Le Figaro, all of 13 September 1970.
[Ref. unw1:] "UFO NORTHWEST" WEBSITE:
A few dramatic cases [in France in 1954] from the book Situation Red - The UFO Siege are listed below:
Sep. 10 - Quarouble. A metal worker, Marius DeWilde, came out of his house as a dog was barking and saw a dark object on the railroad tracks, then saw two dwarfs walking toward it. When he tried to stop them, he was paralyzed by a strong orange light beam. The creatures were under one meter tall, bulky, and wore dark "diving" suits.
[Ref. nfr1:] WEBSITE "LE NORD.FR":
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Published August 05, 2014
In its section "History of a day", the magazine "Nord le Département" of August-September 2014 evokes the adventure of Marius Dewilde, who witnessed an "appearance of Martians" on September 10, 1954... Here are the sources for this article.
The article from the magazine "Nord le Département" (PDF - 191.08 Ko)
No. 275 - August-September 2014
The main source of our article is the remarkable website of Patrick Gross, which presents irreplaceable documentation on this affair, in particular facsimiles of the articles of Nord-Eclair and many other press titles. There are also accounts of many other cases of the "great wave" of 1954 in France. ufology.patrickgross.org/1954/10sep1954quaroublef.htm
UFOs over the North
Dominique Loison's book Des Ovnis sur le Nord devotes no less than two chapters to Marius Dewilde, including one to his second "encounter", much less documented (and much more disputed), during which he will claim to have boarded the saucer with his son.
The report devoted to Marius Dewilde by Actualités Pathé in 1954, as well as extracts from other television appearances, have reached us thanks to Benzemas who shared them on Dailymotion. In particular, we see Marius Dewilde drawing with chalk the "Martians" he saw, but also, many years later, the former metalworker who became "Quarouble's contactee".
Marius Dewilde in the Pathé News, 1954
See the video on Dailymotion
Finally, the illustrations in our article come from the collection of the Agence Martienne.
[Ref. nip1:] "THE NICAP WEBSITE":
*Sep. 10, 1954 - A metal worker, Marius Dewilde, age 34, came out of his house in Quarouble, France when his dog was barking and saw a dark object sitting on the railroad tracks. He then observed two dwarfs walking toward it. When he tried to stop them, he found himself paralyzed as a strong orange beam of light that was projected at him. The beings were under 1 meter (3.3 feet) tall, bulky, and wore dark diving suits. No faces or arms were visible. Imprints were made by an object, that an engineer estimated must have weighed 30 tons. French police and the French Air Force investigated the case. (Sources: Le Parisien, September 13, 1954; Aime Michel, Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, p. 44; Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia, p. 209).
[Ref. dnd1:] "DAILY NORD" WEBSITE:
In Quarouble, around 10:30 p.m. on September 10, 1954, Marius Dewilde, walking his dog, nervous, would fall face to face with the two occupants of what appears to be a flying saucer. Illuminating them with his flashlight, he notices that they are small and covered with a suit accompanied by a helmet. At his approach, both are paralyzing him and leave him on the spot to get away with the gear nearby. The batteries in the lamp were unloaded and the dog died six months later.
[Ref. nom1:] MAGAZINE "NORD LE DEPARTEMENT":
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September 10, 1954
A "dark mass" on the railway In 1963, the Quarouble saucer, represented by Henri Dimpre, illustrated the cover of Michel Carrouges' book Les Apparitions de Martiens. This "encounter of the 3rd kind" remains a classic of the genre. It is certainly one of the most famous cases in the history of UFO sightings in France.
Coll. Agence Martienne
Quarouble, near Valenciennes. One evening in September 1954, Marius Dewilde leaves his house and comes face to face with two little helmeted men...
"KIKI, aren't you finished soon?" Friday, September 10, 1954, around 10:30 p.m.: outside, Marius Dewilde's dog is barking furiously. If it goes on, it will wake up Marius' wife and two sons, who have just gone to bed upstairs. The 34-year-old metalworker closes the illustrated book he was reading and goes out, grumbling. Flashlight in hand, he goes to his garden bordered by a "little used" railway line.
It is on this path, "50 meters away", that Marius sees a "dark mass". Hearing a noise, he points his lamp towards the path and sees "a little man" running towards the object. He first thought of a child, he said later, then of smugglers when he sees a second man running behind the other.
"It was then that the light of the lamp illuminated the head of one of the individuals and Mr. Dewilde noticed that it was covered with a sort of diving suit or glass helmet. He also saw that the man is wearing a very loose jumpsuit..." told Nord-Eclair in their issue of September 16. Suddenly blinded by a bright light, the worker then sees the object, which he had initially taken for "a cart loaded with hay", rise in the air and move away quickly, almost without a sound.
The affair is in the headlines: all the press is talking about it, the Pathé newsreels devote a report to it and... the CIA a brief report. It must be said that the testimony of Marius Dewilde is reinforced by that of two Onnaing residents who stated having seen, at the same time, "a red glow moving in the sky, seeming to come from the direction of Quarouble". Because the adventure of Marius Dewilde is not an isolated case: in the fall of 1954, the "apparitions of Martians" multiply throughout the country. Seven years after the first modern UFO sighting by an American civilian pilot, France experiences its first "big wave". As for the Quarouble worker, he reported other encounters that the investigators deemed much less credible, even claiming to have climbed into the saucer with his son!
Franck Périgny
[Ref. tai1:] "THINK ABOUT IT" WEBSITE:
Date: September 10 1954
Location: Quarouble France
Time: 2230
Summary: Hearing his dogs barking, Marius Dewilde went out and saw a dark mass on the railroad track, less than 6 yards away. On hearing footsteps, he turned his flashlight on the path, where he saw 2 very short beings (less than 3.5 ft) wearing “diver's suits.” No arms could be seen. He approached within 6 ft, when he was blinded and paralyzed by a brilliant light emanating from the mass of the tracks. The two creatures went toward the object. When the beam of paralyzing light went out, he ran towards the track, but the object was now rising, emitting a “thick dark steam” and a low whistling sound. It became red luminous and flew away. On the railroad ties where found 5 imprints; it was calculated that a 30-ton weight would have been necessary to produce them. Recent information uncovered about the case indicates that Dewilde found after the craft took off a mysterious metallic black box. He took the box home and attempted to open it, without telling local police about it. After several failed attempts he finally gave up and hid the black box inside a carton. According to Dewilde shortly after this several French Air Force officers who somehow knew about the existence of the black box and took possession of it visited him.
Source: Aime Michel.
[Ref. ubk1:] "UFO-DATENBANK":
This database recorded this case 53 times instead of one!
| Case Nr. | New case Nr. | Investigator | Date of observation | Zip | Place of observation | Country of observation | Hour of observation | Classification | Comments | Identification |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2051219540000 | 00.00.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 2400319540900 | 00.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 3493619540900 | 00.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 4619540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.15 | ||||||
| 300019540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 403219540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 469819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 728119540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 837019540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 947419540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1062219540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1166219540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1621819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1652919540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.15 | CE III | |||||
| 1653719540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1673919540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1678619540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2287519540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.15 | CE III | |||||
| 2287619540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2287719540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2287819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2287919540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2288019540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2288119540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2288219540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2288319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2288419540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2288519540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2339019540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2431319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2490819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2570219540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | CE I | ||||||
| 2570919540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2572819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.00 | CE III | |||||
| 2585419540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2667819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2688319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2856619540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2893919540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.00 | CE III | |||||
| 3384819540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 3400319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 3404419540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 3469319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 3507319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quaroble | France | |||||||
| 3545619540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 3776319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | |||||||
| 4073319540910 | 10.09.1954 | Valencienes | France | |||||||
| 439919540912 | 12.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | Afternoon | CE III | |||||
| 477519540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1664719540910 | 10.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 1721019540910 | 10.09.1954 | Valenciennes | France | 22.30 | CE III | |||||
| 2290819540915 | 15.09.1954 | Quarouble | France | Okt 30 | ||||||
| 2292319540916 | 16.09.1954 | Quarouble | France |
[Ref. prn4:] PETER ROGERSON - "INTCAT":
September 10 1954. 2230hrs.
QUAROUBLE (NORD : FRANCE)
Marius Dewilde (34), a metal worker at the Blanc-Misseron steel works, was at reading by the fire in his house in a wooded area 1.5km from Quarouble, his wife and son having gone to bed, when the dog outside began howling. Thinking there was a prowler, he went to investigate. From his garden he noticed a dark mass, which he took to be a farmer's cart, on the railway tracks, less than 6m away. Just then his dog crawled up to him, and he heard footsteps to his right. Turning his flashlight, he saw, behind the fence 3-4m away, not the expected smugglers, but two creatures dressed in one piece divers' suits, with their heads encased in divers' helmets. They were only about 1m tall, but very broad shouldered, and their helmets looked enormous. Their legs appeared small and he was unable to see any arms. Marius rushed to the garden fence to grab one of the creatures, but as he got within 2m, he was blinded by a brilliant beam, like a magnesium flash, coming from a square opening in the dark mass on the railway tracks. He found himself paralysed, unable to move or cry out, and while in that state heard the creatures depart towards the railway. When the beam of light went out he recovered his senses and saw the dark mass hovering of the railway and a sort of door closing, thick black steam was coming out of the bottom of this object, with a low whistle. The object then rose up to 30m then turned east towards Anzin, becoming a reddish luminosity then disappearing. Marius, in a state of shock, woke his wife, and then reported the matter to the police at Onnaing about 1.5km away in an extremely agitated manner. Police investigations found that in five places, on three of the wooded tiers, identical depressions about 375mm square, fresh and sharply cut, three in a row 45cm apart on one tier, the other two on either side of the lie formed by these three and 70cm from it. The gravel in the rail bed appeared brittle as if subjected to a high temperature, and blackish traces were found. The prints were such that it was calculated that a weight of 30 tons would have been need to produce them.
[Ref. wia1:] "WIKIPEDIA FR" WEBSITE:
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In their web page about the 1954 French flap in France, Wikipedia FR mentions 21 sightings of the "flap", including:
September 10 [, 1954]: Marius Dewilde claims to have seen a ufo in Quarouble.
[... other cases...]
No source is given.
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Marius Dewilde with a police officer during the police investigation. |
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Marius Dewilde with a police officer and other people, probably co-workers. |
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Dewilde with his kid in front of his little house near the railway. |
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Dewilde interviewed at his house by a Pathé reporter. |
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Dewilde interviewed at his house by a Pathé reporter. Wife and kid at the door behind. |
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The little house, near the railway. |
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Dewilde interviewed. The reporter made fun of his modest background, asking irrelevant questions with complicated words Dewilde could not understand: "What do you think of the antagonism between the US and the Soviet?" |
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Drawing the bottom of the strange apparatus with chalk on his door. |
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Left: sketch of the entities he claimed to have seen, by Marius Dewilde in front of the camera of Pathé movie news, in September 1954. |
Not looked for yet.
The case file is huge, please understand that there is much more to it, including the witness's own book on the events.
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(These keywords are only to help queries and are not implying anything.)
Marius Dewilde, Quarouble, Nord, trace, traces, ufonauts, occupants, humanoïds, trace, traces, paralyzed, ray, train
[----] indicates sources that are not yet available to me.
| Version: | Created/Changed By: | Date: | Change Description: |
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| 0.1 | Patrick Gross | July 22, 2004 | First published. |
| 1.0 | Patrick Gross | June 16, 2010 | Conversion from HTML to XHTML Strict. Additions [jve5], [dcn1], [pbh1], [mkr1], [bjn1]. |
| 1.1 | Patrick Gross | June 24, 2010 | Addition [jsc1]. |
| 1.2 | Patrick Gross | July 4, 2010 | Additions [jre1], [jve7], [cln4], [abr1], [hnt1]. |
| 1.3 | Patrick Gross | July 6, 2010 | Addition [jve6]. |
| 1.4 | Patrick Gross | July 14, 2010 | Additions [lin1], [gcu1], [lcp1], [ud2]. |
| 1.5 | Patrick Gross | August 16, 2010 | Addition [unw1]. |
| 1.6 | Patrick Gross | October 19, 2011 | Addition [ovo3]. |
| 1.7 | Patrick Gross | August 13, 2013 | Additions [prn3], [unw1]. |
| 1.8 | Patrick Gross | November 15, 2014 | Additions [nip1], [tai1]. |
| 1.9 | Patrick Gross | October 17, 2016 | Additions [fas1], [fas2], [mre1]. |
| 2.0 | Patrick Gross | November 23, 2016 | Addition [ler1]. |
| 2.1 | Patrick Gross | December 9, 2016 | Additions [lsi1], [gbr1], [jve9], [lgs1], [qse1], [ubk1]. |
| 2.2 | Patrick Gross | January 5, 2017 | Additions [fso1], [idb1]. |
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| 2.4 | Patrick Gross | September 19, 2017 | Addition [tms1]. |
| 2.5 | Patrick Gross | September 23, 2017 | Additions [tst1], [tst2]. |
| 2.6 | Patrick Gross | January 15, 2020 | Additions [let1], [gni1], [krs1], [ton1], [prn2], [prn4]. |
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| 5.1 | Patrick Gross | March 12, 2022 | Additions [cdt1], [cns1], [jve4], [gqy1]. |
| 5.2 | Patrick Gross | June 14, 2022 | Additions [lie1], [rdr2], [nom1]. |
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| 5.5 | Patrick Gross | July 21, 2022 | Additions [aml2], [hdl1], [gab1], [gab2], [jve3], [uoi1]. |
