UFOs in the daily Press:

THE DAILY COLUMN

"Give us our daily wonder..."

A FARMER FROM THE CORREZE HUGGED THE PILOT OF A FLYING SAUCER (THE NEWSPAPERS)

One day, while walking with André Gide, Oscar Wilde, the author of "The Picture of Dorian Gray," took his friend by the arm and said to him: "Understand well that there are two worlds: the one that exists without being spoken of. It is called the real world, because there is no need to speak of it in order to see it. And the other is the world of fiction, the one that must be spoken of because it would not exist otherwise."

With that, he began recounting to him the adventures of a strange character.

There was, once, a man who, in his village, was well liked because he was helpful when needed, drank heartily at the inn, and told stories.

In the evening, the villagers would gather around him (they had worked hard all day, noses bent over their tools), and all—or almost all—would say to him: "Come on, tell us, what did you see today?"

He would tell them: "In the forest, I saw a faun playing the flute... The rabbits had formed a circle around him and were dancing the mazurka..."

"Tell us more," the people would say.

"By the sea," he continued, "I saw three mermaids emerge from the waves and comb their steel-blue hair with a verdigris comb... A dolphin splashing beside them... its tail was shaped like a circumflex accent, its scales were made of an unknown metal, with an unbearable brilliance..."

One day, however, the storyteller actually saw in the forest a faun playing the flute and, by the sea, three mermaids and a dolphin.

That evening, when he returned to his village and was asked: "Come on, tell us! What did you see?" he replied: "I saw nothing."

Thus it happens to us, on days when we are truly weary of always seeing the same faces (and hearing the same words and attending the same ceremonies and reading the same accounts), to wish to see the appearance of a truly new man. A man who would not have the face of a great-grandfather—who would use a wholly fresh language. Whose eyes, extraordinarily clear-sighted, would make lies unnecessary...

That is, no doubt, why the story of this inhabitant of another planet, stopping his "cigar" for a few minutes in a remote corner of the Plateau de Millevaches and embracing the storyteller like good bread, seemed so beautiful to us.

If it had been "true," it is obvious, no one would ever have known anything about it.

Too moved to perceive its astonishing significance, the farmer would have hidden it from his wife, from the gendarmerie captain, from the special correspondents of the evening newspapers...

He would have kept his "cigar" to himself. That would truly have been a shame.