The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Croix de Picardie, France, page 3, October 24, 1954.
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If the saraband of flying saucers over France remains at the current rate, we will have a hard time finding a Frenchman who has not seen such a "craft" in the near future. Indeed, every day, dozens of discs are reported across the country. Not content with having seen them move in our sky of Framce, eyewitnesses told to have seen, with their own eyes, weird apparatuses land, from which ame down no less weird living beings, oddly dressed, very polite, but who were little talkative, unless they speak an incomprehensible language. These mysterious hosts returned to the air almost immediately, silently and vertically.
So, very recently, Mr. Labassière and his wife, who were returning from Saintes (Charente-Maritime), saw a kind of scale waddling at low altitude. The scourge was dazzling green; one of the trays was red and the other orange. After taking an immobile position, these two plates detached to land in a field. Two small beings then left each ball and, after crossing each other, changed craft. The two craft then returned to their original place and the phenomenon disappeared in a dazzling flash.
In Livry-sur-Seine, two farmers saw a strange being the size of a man, without ears, but whose body was covered with abundant brown hair. He gestured for them to approach, but panicking, the two men fled with all their legs.
In Saint-Ambroix, in the Gard, several hunters claimed to have seen various small "Martians" who vaguely resembled human beings. They were flying in a phosphorescent machine. The hunters collected, at the place where the "Martians" had landed, curious seeds that no one has yet managed to identify.
Dreams, hallucinations, bad jokes? Difficult question to decide for the moment. But if some are convinced of the arrival of the Martians on our planet, if others shake their heads, incredulous, there are some who have this obsession with flying saucers almost play a bad trick on them.
This is particularly the case for Mr. M. Ruant, farmer in Sinceny, near Chauny (Aisne). In the evening of October 17, he was busy repairing his car in a meadow near his home, when two shots were fired in his direction. The pellets crashed onto the body of his vehicle, not far from his head. Mr. Ruant filed a complaint, and the investigation immediately opened made it possible to quickly find the author of the shots: a neighbor, Mr. Faisan, who believed "seeing a silhouette moving in the light of the headlights, to be in the presence of a Martian busy repairing his flying saucer."
Less "saucerophobic" than Mr. Faisan, Mr. Raymond Rodel, president of the "Martians welcome Committee", promised the first of them who would come to the capital a series of festivities in his honor, including a lunch at Maxim's, a reception at the Paris City Council and an audience at the Elysée. In addition, 1 million francs would be paid to whoever, the first, can prove irrefutably having seen a Martian.
Obviously if, believing to meet an inhabitant of the planet Mars and you ask him: "Are you Martian?" he answers you: "No, I'm French", as happened to one of our compatriots, you can forget the bonus.
