The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Est Républicain, Nancy, France, page 7, on October 9, 1954.
See the case file.
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While his little brother, wide-eyed, watched "The Burning Field"
Then he fled, thinking he saw a ghost
MOREZ (from our correspondent). -- In a recent edition, we briefly reported the misadventure of a 12-year-old boy, a victim of a strange being resembling a huge piece of sugar," coming from another world, with one of those mysterious unidentified objects that are currently sweeping across Europe.
Investigation. Observations... Could a 12-year-old from the Jura region have been the hero of the first interplanetary battle?
Perhaps, the future will tell one day. But certainly, this little story will always be unknown in the great History!
6:00 p.m. Raymond will not come. The green delivery truck from the baker in Les Rousses, which is making its bi-weekly rounds today, has long since disappeared around the bend in the road. Raymond didn't come for bread tonight. He, like his brothers and sisters, did not attend school that day.
I had approached the little house, lying "Under the Rock." I had seen the child playing nearby; but at the sight of me, he fled.
Since that Wednesday, when the gendarmerie of Les Rousses had traveled "Under the Rock," near Prémanon, a small village nestled in the Jura forest, just a few kilometers from the French-Swiss border, since the extraordinary adventure of Raymond Romand had become known, dozens of cars had passed through the rocky path. A thousand times the boy had answered the same questions; shown the crushed colchicum flowers, the marks on the large fir mast...
His parents had grown tired. He too, and he no longer wanted to talk about this strange story; about the unreal being he had "played" or "fought" with, on a rainy evening, in a setting at the end of the world.
And yet, Raymond's 12 years had that evening, with a handful of stones and a child's dart gun shooting rubber-tipped arrows, written one of the most beautiful chapters in the voluminous file: "Flying Saucers"!
That Monday, the Romand family lived a night like any other. It was eight-thirty. Night was falling, and with it, a light cold rain that unpleasantly announced that October was rapidly moving towards snow.
In the barn, Raymond, 12, Jeannine, 9, Gislaine, 8, and Claude, 4, were organizing a big game. They were about to experience another. A game that the most imaginative of children at this age could not create, and probably never even dream of!
Captain Brustel of the Saint-Claude section will tell us. Mrs. Genillon, a teacher in Prémanon, too: Raymond is not imaginative. Tall, sturdy for his age, lost in the heart of his native Jura, he doesn't read illustrated magazines for children. Clearly, he had never heard of "flying saucers".
So?
So, Raymond didn't dream it. His brothers and sisters didn't either, and throughout the investigation, none of them "contradicted" each other once.
A mysterious craft would have landed "Under the Rock".
But let's return to that Monday, September 29, the moment when, suddenly, everything unfolded as in the best science fiction novels.
A dog's bark. A child's laugh. Raymond steps out onto the doorstep of the barn where Jeannine, Gislaine, and Claude are looking for a good hiding spot. Cops and robbers... Raymond, armed with a dart gun, will be the representative of the law. He waits outside for a few minutes, and then, thanks to his instincts...
But what is that? The little boy, half anxious, half curious, suddenly sees, a few meters away from him, something moving in the dim light - a "shiny object".
"It was as tall as the door," the child will say, "and looked like a big rectangle..."
A nervous little finger presses the trigger of a child's gun. A fraction of a second in which a heart beats wildly. Then a shock that produces a metallic sound.
Raymond becomes bolder. A handful of stones flies toward the "shiny object," which makes the same "metallic" sound.
It is then that, moving closer still, Raymond feels "something cold, intangible and freezing" pressing down on his shoulder. Stunned, he screams in fear, trembling, and runs home, where, as is common in the mountains, he says nothing to his family.
But Jeannine, too, inside the barn, while she was hiding behind the hay, saw a "similar object," aluminum-colored, moving silently.
A few minutes later, the youngest of the children, Claude Romand, will pull her by the hem of her skirt, leading her out in front of the farm to show her "the burning field": a fireball moving back and forth at more than 200 meters, in a field below.
Without a word, they will lie down.
But the next day, at school, Mrs. Genillon will be their confidante.
"We saw ghosts last night," they will tell her. And Raymond, at 12 years old, will not boast of having fought one of them.
Two days passed, and the rain still fell, when the gendarmerie of Les Rousses opened the investigation. Perhaps there were traces... No, they were still very visible.
And at the foot of a mast erected by a vacation colony, at the exact spot indicated by the children, in front of the grass pressed in a circular motion opposite to the direction of a clock's hands, more than one curious observer would express their perplexity.
Four triangular holes in the ground, tilted at 45 degrees, and the large fir mast marked at a height of 1.5 meters, showed further evidence supporting the Romand children's testimony!
As for the large parallelepiped seen by Raymond and Jeannine, it can be assumed that it was the passenger of the mysterious craft.
And, a small part of great History, perhaps it will always be unknown that a handful of stones and a dart gun were the weapons of the first interplanetary battle, in which the sole soldier was a 12-year-old boy...
J. M.
