The index page for the 1954 French flap section of this website is here.
Reference for this case: Mid-Oct-54-Vaubexy.
Please cite this reference in any correspondence with me regarding this case.
Around 2015, the ufology group Comité Nord-Est des Groupements Ufologiques (CNEGU) published in its "Northeast Catalog of Humanoid Sightings" a case they had found in the newspaper La Liberté de l'Est dated October 23, 1954:
In October 1954 in Vaubexy, in the Vosges, a meeting of farmers was interrupted by someone knocking at the door. At the traditional call of "Come in," the fifteen people present saw a strange being appear and, "listening only to their courage, the witnesses seized the 'Martian.'"
They then realized "that it was a hoax, a man dressed in plastic, with a brand-new winegrower's funnel on his head."
The CNEGU then gave their explanation of the case: it was a "hoax spread by the local press in an ironic tone ('a sign of the times, and... it was a harvest evening')."
[Ref. cnu1:] UFOLOGY GROUP "CNEGU":
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Case No. 26:
In October 1954, in Vaubexy (88), a meeting of farmers was interrupted by someone knocking at the door. At the customary call of "Enter," the 15 people saw a strange being appear. Acting on courage, the witnesses confronted the "Martian."
They soon realized it was a prank: a man dressed in plastic with a brand-new large winemaker's funnel on his head.
Explanation: A hoax reported by the local press with an ironic tone ("sign of the times... and it was grape harvest night").
Source: La Liberté de l'Est, 10/23-24/1954; 1954 press archives, CVLDLN, 1987.
[Ref. cnu2:] RAOUL ROBE AND JEAN-MICHEL ABRASSART - "CNEGU":
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| N° | Date | Place (Department number) | Category |
| 26 | October 194 | Vaubexy (88) | U |
Note: the "U" category indicated above is explained in this source as: "U: Humanoid sighting with a UFO"; obviously an error, it should have been "NU: Humanoid sighting without a UFO".
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This is what is called in ufology a "negative case," that is, a case that was explained from the outset, either by the witnesses themselves or by others, fairly quickly, before anyone had declared the case to be "unidentified" or "extraterrestrial."
Negative cases are important in ufology because they allow for the evaluation of questions such as "are there or are there not differences between 'unexplained' cases and 'explained' cases?" They enable comparative ufology.
For some of suc cases published in the Press at the time, it is not even certain that they were not pure inventions of the press: no names of "witnesses," vague locations, unspecified dates, source of the report unknown, etc.
Toward the end of the "French wave of 1954," I note that cases of this kind multiplied in the newspapers. Increasingly, rather crude "pranks" and amusing "misidentifications" were published in the press. It seems reasonable to me to say that this contributed to "ridiculing" the question of "flying saucers," and in my view, this constitutes an important element in explaining why the "wave" ended after October, at least in the press; that is, the "cases" that numbered in the tens per day decreased to the point of returning to a "normal" temporal distribution.
Note the rather unsophisticated nature of this prank, with this "Martian" without a saucer, knocking at the door, wearing a funnel on his head, etc.
(These keywords are only to help queries and are not implying anything.)
Vaubexy, Vosges, hoax, prank, negative case, Martian, plastic, funnel
[----] indicates sources that are not yet available to me.
| Version: | Created/Changed by: | Date: | Change Description: |
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| 1.0 | Patrick Gross | October 16, 2025 | First published, [cnu1], [cnu2]. |
