The article below was published in the daily newspaper Le Nouveau Nord Maritime, France, page 9, on October 10, 1954.
Cherbourg, 9. -- Thursday evening, around 9 p.m., a resident of Octeville (Manche), Mr. Maurice Crestey, designer at the Arsenal, and several of his neighbors saw, in the sky, at a fairly high altitude, a luminous sphere which, after having stopped above the city, disappeared towards the South.
Quimper, 9. -- Mr. François Cariou, itinerant fish merchants [sic] in Plozevet (Finistère), his wife and two daughters saw a bright glow in the sky which seemed to be surrounded by dense smoke. This glow, initially motionless, directed towards them, at an altitude of about ten meters it had the appearance of an orange sphere.
Frightened, the Cariou family returned to the house.
Several fishermen who were about to set sail at the same time confirmed these statements.
Mulhouse, 9. -- Mr. René Ott, 35, from Jettingen, an SNCF employee, said he saw in a field on his way to work, an aluminum-colored semi-spherical dome, lit from the inside, which was about three meters from the road and one meter from the ground.
Frightened, Mr. Ott fled. He had, however, he said, time to notice that a door opened in the craft. The latter moved above him on a distance of 800 meters before disappearing the gendarmes did not detect any trace.
Le Mans, 9. - Mr. Alexandre Tremblaix, milk collector, said that the truck he was driving had suddenly stopped, for an unknown reason yesterday morning, on a small departmental road near Saint-Jean d'Asse and that its headlights had gone out. He got out of his cabin and saw a luminous red and blue flying cigar pass over him, about a meter long.
The machine disappeared on the horizon a few minutes later, the truck's engine started to function again and the headlights came on. Isn't that somewhat... chilling? [untranslatable joke about the witness name]