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The 1954 French flap:

The index page for the 1954 French flap section of this site is here.

The October 14, 1954, 06:15 p.m. meteor

I started to collect and organized the documentation about all UFO sighting reports in France in 1954 in 2003. As of April 9, 2009, I had 74 cases on file for that day.

Many of them do describe a meteor, even when it is called a "craft" of "a disc".

A pattern soon appeared to emerge. It seemed very easy to follow the meteor's trajectory over the French territory.

The data

The following table is a subset of the 74 October 14, 1954 cases on record. It shows all cases, i.e. 55 cases, where the hour of observation is either unspecified, or near to the hour when the meteor crossed the skies, or by a mention of the hour or by them mention that it was at twilight. Filtered out from this subset are all cases located at places incompatible with the meteor and the cases where the duration is clearly incompatible with a meteor flyover.

The table is sorted by latitude, as the meteor flew approximately from south to north.

About the hours.

The hours given above come from the most primary and most reliable sources for the report, i.e. the newspapers in almost all cases. This means that if the newspaper said "approximately 18:15" and a later ufology source turned this into "at 18:15", I noted "Approx 18:15" and not "18:15".

In the past, and maybe today still, some ufologist interpret the hour indicated in a report with too much confidence.

A look at the above table indicates clearly that this confidence is often in error: if the hour were always noted and reported with accuracy, there would not be so many values such as "18:00", "18:15", "18:30" and much more values such as "18:13" or "18:16".

It is obvious that witnesses so not necessarily look at their watch when a sighting occur. They are not "careful ufologists" and should not be expected to be or believed to be. They much more look at the phenomenon and think only a bit later about the hour it was, or give an hour only when a journalist asks about it hours or days later. This is then an approximate hour, based on memory of the time's events and not on a look at the watch. Hence the values such as "18:00", "18:15". In many cases, the original source does specify that it is an approximate hour.

Another reason not to be too confident is that in France, in 1954, wristwatches were not like moden digital watches. They use mechanical clockwork, the quality was not always there, and the owner did not necessarily reset it often enough to get a minute accuracy.

Some of the sightings are indicated to be "at twilight" or "at nightfall". In some cases, an hour is then given later to the case by ufologists. But as of October 14, 1954, "twilight" and "nightfall" can be any hour between 18:00 and 20:00, so a mention of nightfall or twilight in the original report without an indication of the hour cannot should not have been turned into a precise hour later.

A dramatic example of the result of placing too much value into indicated hour was when French journalist and pioneer of French ufology Charles Garreau drew the map below to plot sightings which all occurred on January 9, 1954, between 06:15 a.m. and 07:50 a.m. in the East of France on January 9, 1954. Garreau took the indicated hours very seriously, and thus what was simply a meteor moving in straight line and causing reports with approximate hours became one or two unknown objects performing complex flights over the area, with dramatic "speed variations":

About the data.

The 1954 French flap cases were generally not investigated. Ufologists of the times were a handful, were not very trained, experienced and competent. Most of the time, all that was done was to write a more or less accurate summary of what they had read in the Press, not necessarily from the original newspaper who first reported the story but often from second-hand articles in the national Press, where spelling errors, misdating, omissions were often made.

The two contemporary sources in the ufology litterature were Jimmy Guieu's book "Black-Out sur les Soucoupes volantes", a book that was not dedicated to the French flap and thus provided summaries from a number of cases, but obiously not all, only a very small fraction. The second source was Aimé Michel's book "Mystérieux Objets Célestes", truly dedicated to the flap but still not an exhaustive catalogue as it published more or less detailed summaries or mentions of about a quarter of the sightings only.

From then on, several books took up on these two sources, adding little new information. Vallée's catalogue concentrates in theory only on cases where a UFO landed, and is self-admitted to be a catalogue od cases "of various reliability". Figuet and Julien's catalogue "OVNI Le Premier Dossier des Rencontres Rapprochées en France" concentrates on close encounters, simply with additions for each day of some "other sightings the same day" with little details. Garreau and Lavier's "Face aux ET" intended to be complete as the authors claimed to distinguish a geometrical pattern in all the sightings in France; hence they had to consider all sightings. In these books, almost no effort is done to reinvestigate the cases, and only Figuet and Ruchon, and Garreau and Lavier, do very occasionally report that a certain case was found to have a trivial explanation.

In the Internet age, many "web-ufologists" provided catalogues or chronologies that range from the mildly useful to the perfectly disastrous. Generally, short summaries are provided from only one source. The unique source is almost never a primary source. Cases that had been explained in ordinary terms are still thriving in these catalogues. These catalogues are generally not well-defined as for their goals, border, limitation, ambition. They generally look like catalogues of unexplained cases only and as many IFO cases are not published, it gives the impression that the authors indeed wanted to display only "truly unexplained UFO sightings". But with generally little success, as the tendency is to take one source, such as Vallée's catalogue, and to publish the content without effort to check whether the cases were not explained as IFO's in any other source.

To get the picture about the October 14, 1954, 18:15 meteor, I display the "main" sources in the table below. By "main" source, I mean that I include the primary known source, generally a newspapers, the various catalogues, the contemporary books such as Guieu, Michel, the main websites, chronologically from left to right. The green color indicates that the author did realize that the sighting was that of a meteor. The red color indicates that it was not realized. The grey color indicates an ambiguous explanation statement.

Document history:

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This page was last updated on April 9, 2009.