The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Bourgogne Républicaine, Dijon, France, page 4, on January 13, 1954.
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After the celestial phenomenon of August 12 which, from the Jura to the Morvan, had thousands of witnesses, the appearance of November 9 [sic] seems to be a date, in turn, in the voluminous file of "non-identified aerial objects."
Information has poured in from all over the region.
Our correspondents, our readers have communicated to us the observations they have gathered.
Observations which cast a strange light on the extraordinary object which, on Saturday morning, moved for nearly two hours over eastern France.
The first reports left the door open to all hypotheses: meteor, balloon, jet plane... or saucer!
Those that we have since collected allow us to reject outright the hypothesis of a meteorite [sic], whose trajectory is perfectly regular in direction and speed, always very high: around 40,000 km. per hour.
They also make it possible to reject the hypothesis of the balloon, as its apparent speed cannot exceed those of the most violent currents: 300 km.-hour.
Indeed, what did we see on Saturday?
Saturday morning, 6:15 a.m. With a flash of blinding light, a craft of round shape tears the sky of Lunéville. It flies from North to South. No noise.
7:20 a.m.: in Neuvelle-les-Champlitte, a red glow casts a reflection of blood on the snowy countryside. Very high up, a rather long object, followed by an incandescent trail, describes an immense arc of a circle and heads north.
From Lunéville to Neuvelle: 130 km, in straight line, that the craft covered in one hour.
7:40 a.m. 40: in Nancy, a yellowish disc spins in the low sky, trailing behind it, a beam of light. Its size seems approximately that of a quarter of the moon.
From Neuvelle to Nancy: 125 kilometers, covered in 20': the pace, although still reduced, increases: 375 km per hour.
7:45 a.m. Chaumont-Montigny-le-Roy-Langres-Gemeaux. In a few tens of seconds, at an altitude which seems relatively low to the witnesses, a dazzling craft, with a capricious trajectory, splits the emerging day with its intense light, red at the front, clearer at the rear, with greenish reflections forming like a triangular bundle.
In Gemeaux, change of direction: the craft veers clearly towards the east. We see it in Oisilly, Vesoul, where a witness gave the exact time of his passage: 7:46 a.m.
Watch mismatch or temporary slowdown? It was not seen in Besançon until 4 minutes later.
New change of direction, less accentuated: Dole is overflown. From Chaumont, the object traveled about 250 kilometers, in 5 minutes. The morning snail has given way to a real racing car: 3,000 km.hour! (approximately).
And the extraordinary journey continues: Poligny, where it is seen as a disc of red yellow color, seeming to spin on itself, and followed by a bluish trail. Lons-le-Saulnier, where it moves slowly, stopping almost completely for ten seconds, before starting abruptly towards Switzerland, leaving behind it, as it accelerates, a huge glowing plume.
Which meteorite, which balloon would have indulged in such astonishing maneuvers, and, for a balloon, at such speeds?
However, to leave no doubt, we questioned the various weather stations in the region.
"No ballon was released" we were told.
Same answer at the American base in Semoutiers: it was neither one of our planes, nor a balloon launched by us!".
The Besançon observatory saw nothing, and for good reason: employees do not take service until 8:30 a.m.!
So, no question of balloons, even if we tried to admit an error of approximation of speed, speed otherwise confirmed by the figures.
These two hypotheses being eliminated, what remains?
There are only two possible explanations left: unmanned earthly vehicle... or a saucer.
However, to our knowledge, since the removal of the Mailly test station, there is no longer either in France or in Western Europe any launching base for such devices.
So here we are, once again, in front of a beautiful question mark: what was it then?
Another troubling point adds to the problem. At the same time as Haute-Marne, Doubs, Côte-d'Or, Jura were flown over, the region of Beaujeu and Mâcon also saw a circular, yellowish object moving quickly in the NNW-SSE direction, and seeming to move at a fairly low altitude.
It seems unlikely that this is the same object. Indeed, a simplified triangulation determines fairly approximately the "necessary and sufficient" conditions for the craft to have been seen from both Nancy and Beaujeu, 350 kilometers away in straight line!
Required altitude: 30,000 meters, in formal contradiction with the estimates given by witnesses, and which vary between 1,500 and 3,000 meters.
Minimum diameter so that the object has been seen as a single point (assuming that the separating power of the eye is equal to 1°) and not as "a large tangerine" or a disk as big as a quarter of the moon: a hundred meters.
And these conditions are all theoretical. They require, indeed, perfect visibility, which was not the case, many nebulous clusters covering certain places of the region.
In Dijon, and its surroundings, for example, there were two eighth covers, at 1,000 meters, at the time of observation. In Besançon: five eighths at 400 meters. In Nancy, no ceiling. The wind was calm everywhere.
We can therefore reasonably assume that it is not just one, but several unidentified objects, which furrowed the sky on Saturday morning.
[Map caption:] From Lunéville (top, right) to Lons-le-Saulnier, here is, roughly reconstructed from the testimonies collected, the extraordinary journey of the strange "unidentified object." Better than long comments, this sketch highlights the changes of direction and the variations in pace noted by the witnesses. A question mark: was it another craft that was seen at the same time in Saône-et-Loire?
And these objects were not optical illusions. Too many reliable witnesses (among them professors, school directors, engineers) in too many different places, gave details which clearly locate a material object:
What remains then as an explanation?
Those who have seen have their opinion more or less fixed: they saw one of these mysterious saucers, whose appearances in all parts of the globe have unleashed the most heated controversies.
To the others, I leave it to them to draw the conclusions that they find most satisfactory.
Anyway, here's a nice extra piece to the bulky "unidentified aerial objects" file!
Ch. GARREAU.
After America, France increasingly sees strange objects appear in its sky...
What are they? Where do they come from? The question, so far, has remained unanswered.
But the United States Air Force, the first, has opened an investigation that has dragged on for seven years.
Very soon, under the signature of an American expert [Donald Keyhoe] our journal will start publishing a fascinating series of articles; which will reveal to our readers some of the secret files of the US Air Force.
