UFOs in the daily Press:

SAUCERS or MOON BEAMS?

Our estimated neighbor, "Le Journal de Rue", recounts the weird encounter that two of our fellow citizens made on Sunday evening in Pont-à-Cailloux.

"This is Mr. and Mrs. Galland, the well-known butchers on avenue Caudron.

"Sunday October 3, in the evening, they were coming back from Berck, by car, with their son Patrick. Around 9:15 p.m., while they were on the old Pont à Cailloux, they saw in the sky a flying object, orange in color, shaped like a cigar.

"This craft descended about 200 meters from the ground and went along the road from Quend to Rue to Herre. It was flying silently and seemed to want to escort us, says Mr. Galland.

"But arrived in Herre it branched off and disappeared from view. We had the impression that it had landed on the ground.

"Mr. Galland adds: I would have liked to search for it and find it to look at it more closely; but my wife and my son were not very reassured. And we returned to Rue."

Let's look for the explanation.

The professor of the Faculty of Sciences of Lille, Mr. Antoine Bonte, I.D.N. engineer, gives us one in the "Croix du Nord":

"I also saw, on Sunday evening, flying saucers.

The descriptions which are given agree in all points with my personal observations. Only I do not agree with their interpretation because, in this case, it was simply a moonset.

"On Sunday, at nightfall, the moon shone on a clear day in the form of a beautiful crescent. Later, it disappeared in the misty zone which surmounted the horizon, only to reappear for a few moments, reddish and deformed - which is normal at this level - and crossed out in a line as it passes behind a stratus. Finally it fades definitively on returning to the clouds again.

"In this particular case, therefore, this is a totlla ordinary phenomenon to which our fathers would not have even paid attention.

"Besides, in most of the other cases, these are analogous phenomena as I have seen it several times. The psychosis of flying saucers is a phenomenon of collective hallucination which responds to a natural need for marvelous, maintained by a press with large coverage, and fed by a whole category of for children or... adults comics. The descriptions of the so-called Martians are so close to the Tintin spacesuits that one cannot stop smiling."

And Mr. Bonte to conclude, in full agreement with us on this point:

"It is even your duty (that of journalists) to fight against this weakening of the critical mind which characterizes our epoch of universal but too superficial culture.

"90% if not 99% of the cases can be explained."

When will there be an indisputable photograph of one of these craft?