The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Croix, Paris, France, le 16 octobre 1954.
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The flying saucers and cigars that make people look up—and sometimes dizzy—could not, of course, ignore the Breton sky. For the past fortnight, they have been appearing all over, from Quimper to Rennes and from Saint-Brieuc to Landerneau, in various shapes and with varying luminosity. There was even, in Loctudy, the strange apparition of a small, hairy man about 1.20 meters tall with round eyes... But let's move on.
Now, these phenomena, about which nothing is known, must have given a good laugh to some venerable centenarians enjoying their old age in Armorica. Without consulting any of these elders, I suppose that at least one of them must have responded to the news of these flying saucers and cigars with: "But in the past, we knew about the 'flying pans'..."
Don't shrug it off - flying pans did exist. At least in the past, people spoke of them seriously and with certainty. In fact, they were feared. For they were said to announce that a dying person was taking their last breath. Which was, to be fair, no laughing matter.
I discovered this in an astonishing book that was recently published but had been in preparation for 18 years. It was written by a historian, Mr. Henri-François Buffet, an archivist in Rennes, who aimed to preserve the oldest traditions of the Gallo region before they disappeared (1). Let's clarify right away—Mr. Buffet did not write his book as a response to flying saucers. He had no intention of making such a connection, as he was busy gathering and compiling everything that once belonged to the Gallo region and gave it its charm, from language and customs to dwellings, furniture, art, and more.
The flying pans were classified under the category of "étavas." The word, whose etymology remains unexplained, means nothing to most Bretons today. These were celestial phenomena, signs, omens of death, which multiplied as much in the imagination of our ancestors as they did above their lands. They sometimes took the form of candles that lit up and went out three times in farmyards (Penguily, Côtes-du-Nord), or of two mysterious candles planted and floating on a pond, or of an upside-down burning candle near a well that would only disappear when the foretold death occurred.
These candles appeared and behaved differently depending on the region. In Redon, their light was directed toward the ground while wandering through the countryside but became normal again when they appeared at the foot of a bed. In the Gallo-speaking Morbihan, they moved slowly before vanishing into homes marked by the sign of death. In Radenac, they were called "bluettes" and were distinct from the "étavas," which, in Saint-Marcel, were reserved for married people.
The "étavas," shining like stars and shaped like pans, were mainly found in the Malestroit and Josselin regions. Like today's saucers, they looked like a disc with a tail (Guéhenno, Plumelec). Their light was a greenish-blue. They would depart from the birthplace of the person about to die (Serent, Plumelec) or from the church of their baptism (Guéhenno, Saint-Marcel, Reminiac), move slowly across the sky at a low altitude, illuminate everything in their path, and then fall upon the hearth or the window of the fated house.
Perhaps this is where the flying pans differ from saucers and cigars. But isn't it astonishing that people believed in them for so long?
What were these étavas? The product of a collective imagination? No doubt. But perhaps, here and there, at their origin, there were some planetary phenomena. For, by a curious coincidence, the flying pan also had the appearance of a disc.
At that time, the Breton faith was too deep for these apparitions—which were surely less numerous and automatic than claimed—to remain without cause. No one expected science to explain them. People turned instead to the beyond. That is still done today. But the "beyond" of that time could only be that of the souls. And it surely had as much significance as that of the Martians.
J. FONTAINE
(1) En Haute-Bretagne, by H. François Buffet. Librairie Celtique, 108, bis, rue de Rennes, Paris VIe. The term "Gallo" refers to the area where French has long been the primary language of communication.
