The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Croix, Paris, France, page 2, on October 5, 1954.
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Flying saucers exist and represent at least 10 percent of the craft observed in the sky, Professor Hermann Oberth, German rocket specialist, and honorary president of the "German Astronautical Society", just declared during a lecture in Hamburg.
According to this scientist, it is possible that these craft are guided by crews of creatures similar to humans, but probably several thousand years ahead of our time.
To explain why a flying saucer has not yet crashed to earth, Professor Oberth suggests that pilots may have perfect mastery of their apparatuses and may not desire any contact with earthly creatures.
Considering another possibility, Professor Oberth recalled that the saucers observed could be considered as an improvement of the V-7, German rockets from the end of the war, of which several prototypes would have fallen, according to them, in Russian hands in 1945.
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The passing of flying "saucers" or "cigars" is reported almost everywhere in the skies of France.
Mr. Anicet Corneille, agricultural worker, declared to have seen Friday evening, in Comines, a machine having the shape of a cigar, 8 to 10 meters in length and three meters in width, which moved at about forty meters height and gave off a bright purple glow, after flying over the city for a few seconds.
These statements were confirmed by a motorist from Tourcoing passing through Comines.
Mrs. widow Janiki, residing in the village of Le Cerisier, commune of Levrous (Indre) warned the gendarmerie that she had seen in the sky a luminous craft with a diameter of about 3 meters and which was at the height of the buildings.
Widow Lacotte, living about 800 meters from Ms. Janiki's home, said she witnessed the same phenomenon.
An employee of the slaughterhouse, Mr. Angelo Girardeau, 53, living in Breuil-Chaussée (Deux-Sèvres), who, Sunday morning, went to his work reportedly saw a circular craft near which there was a being who appeared to him dressed in a diving suit. That being moved towards M. Girardeau who, frightened, fled. Shortly after, the circular craft set off again at very high speed.
Two young people from Vron (Somme) said they saw on the national road, between Crécy and Ligescourt, a curious machine around which prowled oddly shaped individuals. They approached the craft, resembling a haystack, but the craft took off.
The two young people told their adventure to the gendarmes.
The saucer seen by roadmenders along the road to Coulommiers only existed in their imagination.
In a written question, Mr. Jean Nocher, deputy for the Loire, told the Secretary of State for Air of the emotion aroused in the public by the many and various testimonies concerning the "flying saucers".
He asks him "wether his predecessors at the Secretary of State for the Air had been concerned, as in the United States and the U.S.S.R. for many years, to open an investigation into the presence in our atmosphere of unidentified flying objects.
If so, he asks him for the publishable results of his investigations; if not, he asks him to constitute a Commission broadly extended to all the scientific branches concerned in order to objectively study this phenomenon by freeing the truth from the errors or possible mystifications."
