The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Alsace, Colmar, France, on May 3, 1950.
From several sides we were informed yesterday of a curious celestial phenomenon that was seen Monday afternoon at 02:50 p.m. exactly above the Vosges, in a westerly direction.
Two residents of Mulhouse, who were at the Markstein at the said hour, saw the appearance while standing at the foot of the last hill, they looked toward the end station of the ski lift, thus westward. For several seconds they saw a bright oblong body, shining like silver and absolutely silent which seemed to descend from the sky at breakneck speed. The object left in its wake a jet of flames, comparable it seemed, to the release of fire of some exhausts. They saw the strange craft literally dissolve in the atmosphere.
There was too much talk about flying saucers in all countries of the world not to make a connection into the minds of the witnesses. And the assumption that it must have been a mechanical device was reinforced in their minds by the metallic luster of the fireball.
At the same time a girl working at "L'Alsace", who was riding her bicycle in the direction of Thann, was also a witness of the phenomenon. "An elongated object", she described, "very bright, and that vanished into space."
Finally, a fourth person, who spent his day at the lac Bleu also saw the appearance. In his opinion, it was a meteorite of exceptional brightness." No doubt if the onset occurred at night, she has added to her story, she had lit up the whole sky ." This witness also was struck by the luminous trail, a real jet of flames, that the meteor left behind.
A mechanical device? It seems that we should stick to the hypothesis of the meteorite, the celestial body heated to incandescence in contact with our atmosphere and which, if it has not disintegrated in the fall - which is more than likely - had to go fall somewhere on the other side of the Vosges, at a distance that nothing obviously allows to estimate with any certainty.
Let's not forget that we are in a season where falling celestial bodies are more frequent.
