The article below was published in the daily newspaper France Soir, Paris, France, pages 1 and 8, on October 13, 1954.
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An investigation by André FONTAIN and Jacques BERGEAL
Flying saucers have become the issue of the day. More and more testimonies are being produced by people who, in good faith, claim to have observed mysterious craft. Still an unexplained reality or a collective fiction, flying saucers are the great unknown of this late 1954.
"France-Soir" opens the file. We do not claim to provide a definite answer to the question. We aim to tell you how these mysterious craft appeared in our universe, how, starting from the astonishment of an American pilot more than seven years ago, the number of testimonies has grown month by month into the tidal wave that today seems to overwhelm our country.
After this account, in which we will present the hypotheses put forward at various times of observation, "France-Soir" will publish the informed opinions of scientists and technicians in physics, aviation, astronautics, and astronomy.
In this way, we will have made a - provisional - assessment of a problem still unfolding.
The skies over France now seem to be darkened by the flight of countless mysterious craft. These anonymous aircraft are sometimes disks, sometimes cigars, sometimes funnels. We've just been informed of something that the witness hesitantly described as a... chamber pot.
These flying machines, despite the variety in their appearances, have a few features in common. They are ultra-fast. Accidental observers who witnessed them speak of speeds around 6,000, 8,000, even 12,000 or 14,000 kilometers per hour.
They are generally silent. Their acceleration is lightning-fast. They can make 90-degree turns without slowing down their tremendous speed. They are surrounded by a luminous halo, sometimes orange, sometimes greenish. They vanish into the sky.
Finally, these "unidentified flying objects" are more and more often attributed an extraterrestrial origin - more precisely, Martian. And people now talk daily about "flying saucers." In the subway, on the street, at cafés, in workshops - flying saucers have entered our daily lives. They are to the man of 1954 what the announcement of the end of the world was to the man of 999. The year 1000 did not bring about the end of the world.
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The year 1955 may perhaps reveal what flying saucers really are.
Today, among the most reasonable possibilities, they are still only hypotheses.
As they are, however - in their mysterious and alarming imprecision - they cover French territory with a multiform, fleeting but omnipresent network.
This armada that haunts our skies first appeared in the United States. That's where the first unidentified craft was seen - precisely on June 24, 1947.
The affair has come a long way since then...
It began, then, on June 24, 1947. The weather is beautiful. Mr. Kenneth Arnold is flying his private plane at about 3,000 meters over the state of Washington.
A bright flash catches his eye, and he counts, lined up single file, nine shiny discs that, as if linked together, move at very high speed. Mr. Arnold estimates their speed at 2,000 kilometers per hour. This strange sight lasts two or three minutes, then vanishes.
Mr. Kenneth Arnold lands at Yakima and recounts his experience.
The flying saucer is henceforth revealed to mankind. From that point, it will spread, proliferate, and invade the American continent. Once Mr. Arnold's story is published, newspapers are flooded with testimonies. At first, not much importance is attached to them, though each new piece of information - unchecked and uncheckable - leads to a flood of stories in which flying discs play an increasingly menacing role.
Fifteen days pass in this fever that refuses to subside, and then - this time over California skies, and under even more troubling circumstances - two mysterious flying objects appear.
It is July 8, 1947. At the Muroc airfield, secret tests of a new supersonic plane are underway. Two craft "in the shape of discs or spheres" are seen flying at 3,000 meters above the field. They vanish after a few minutes.
The idea - if one can call it that - is in the air. A commercial airline pilot flying toward Seattle encounters four discs "smooth on the bottom and bumpy on top"... For the average American, the saucer is everywhere.
For Captain aviator Thomas F. Mantell, it is death. Mantell is the first victim of flying saucers.
He belongs to the Mustang P-51 fighter squadron at Godman Field, Kentucky.
On January 2, 1948, the control tower is alerted that a "circular object about 90 to 100 meters in diameter has been sighted less than 130 kilometers away."
Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Blackwell of the control tower sees the object above the airfield. He alerts his superiors. They rush to the field. Soon, all base personnel are assembled. The craft maneuvers - it appears enormous: several hundred meters in diameter. A red glow surrounds it.
The Mustang squadron is finally launched after the object. Three planes take off. Captain Mantell is piloting one of the fighters.
Mantell gains altitude. At 2:43 p.m., he reports by radio that he is approaching the object.
At 3:15 p.m., Mantell reports that he is still climbing toward the object. Two of the fighters drop out. Mantell alone speeds toward his mysterious target. He says:
- I'm climbing to 6,000 meters. If I haven't gotten closer, I'll turn back.
Mantell climbs to 8,000 meters. It is assumed he lost consciousness. He has no oxygen equipment. The plane continues its climb on momentum. It likely reaches 10,000 meters, then noses down. A terrifying dive. The plane explodes, breaks apart. The debris crashes to the ground. Captain Mantell is dead.
It could be a philosophical tale - this pursuit of an elusive chimera, and its fatal failure.
But was it a chimera? All of America is asking the question.
Scientists offer two hypotheses, both of which exclude the one Americans secretly prefer: that the mysterious object, defending its secret, killed the man who tried to approach it.
This mythology is rejected by technicians who propose:
1. IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE PLANET VENUS. Astronomy professor Hynek, who teaches at Ohio University and is one of the experts assigned to the official investigation, states that the position of Venus on the day of the accident roughly matches that of the object pursued by Mantell. Dr. Langmuir, Nobel Prize winner in physics, also affirms that on the day Mantell died, Venus was near one of its periods of extreme brightness. (Hynek's theory will be confirmed by the scientist himself at Godman Field, where a new "bright object" is seen - this time, it is Venus.)
2. IT COULD HAVE BEEN A NAVY WEATHER BALLOON. These balloons can rise up to 35,000 meters, expanding as they ascend until they reach a diameter of 28 meters and a thickness of 35 meters. When the observation ends, the measurement instruments are automatically released and descend by parachute. As for the balloon, it bursts, and its fragments, catching the sunlight, never fail to puzzle anyone watching them drift on the wind from the ground...
These rational explanations disappoint the American public, which regains hope when a mass-market book is published - soon a best-seller - in which the author, Frank Scully, firmly convinced of the reality of flying saucers, rejects the official version of Mantell's death.
He proposes this: the object pursued by Mantell is occupied, directed by a mysterious crew. The crew sees the Mustang give chase. Feeling threatened, they use a weapon as mysterious as everything else: they direct at the American pilot a "death ray," which Scully describes as a "demagnetization ray," causing the instant disintegration of the Mustang and its pilot.
This hypothesis - blending fiction and science - supports the idea that flying saucers truly exist. It is all the more appealing because the author attributes to the craft an extraterrestrial origin. Spurred by this excitement of the imagination, Venus and Mars enter the picture.
As for the first observer of "objects," he states on the radio that, after all, these craft called saucers bear only a very distant resemblance to the piece of tableware they're named after.
Kenneth Arnold, the involuntary godfather of flying saucers, has nonetheless brought to the world the revelation of a still unexplained phenomenon.
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34 unexplained cases
