The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Oise-Matin, France, pages 1 and 10, on October 1, 1954.
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Dozens of flying saucers were seen in the last 24 hours in the skies of France, North Africa, the Netherlands and even as far as Denmark and Sweden.
Some believe they have met "Martians"; a witness, manager of a Parisian music hall even went so far as to film one of these mysterious craft which he said was moving at around 700 meters of height, in a sky clear of clouds, for once.
The film is not yet developed and it will only be in a few hours that we will know wether the witness has been the victim, or not, of an illusion.
The craft was one of the many "flying cigars" or "discs" that witnesses said they saw in the departments of Rhône, Isère, Drôme and Savoie.
In this latter region, 15 witnesses saw, for a few minutes, an apparatus in the shape of a disc moving near Lac du Bourget above Mont Revard, then suddenly disappearing.
One of the witnesses, a doctor from Chambéry is a former artillery observer. He carefully noted his observations and drew a sketch showing the path of the mysterious craft.
Another group which claims to have seen "an object of an indefinite color moving at high speed", seven workers in a factory in the suburb of Perpignan specified that the craft would have crossed the Pyrenees towards Spain.
In the Haute-Garonne, three residents of Lanta, near Villefranche-de-Lauraguais, saw Tuesday evening above the village a luminous disc of
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orange color. The object, they said, was flying at a great height and moving in a North-South direction.
In Kourigra, a locality located about 130 kilometers from Casablanca, reliable witnesses said they saw the day before yesterday, a circular-shaped craft of red color moving at a high altitude and at a high speed.
In Denmark, many residents of the town of Strib also said they spotted a "cigar" while in Sweden a luminous sphere that left a trail of fire behind was photographed Tuesday evening in Bjuv, in the south-east of the country, by a witness.
It is in the Netherlands, where the testimonies relating to the passage of "saucers" multiply, that one is most currently passionate about these aerial phenomena. The curiosity of the population was carried to its maximum by the impressive story given by the captain of a freighter, Mr. J. P. Boshoff of the Holland-United States line. The captain says in fact that with five of his officers and using all the optical equipment on board, he was able to observe at leisure an object "the size of a half-moon" which finally disappeared on the way up, at an altitude of about 14,000 meters.
Such sightings are apparently not without danger to human nature judging by the adventure of Mssrs. Gérard, mechanic and Paroux, driver, who, driving a locomotive coming from Nantes, said they saw, while passing near Saint-Nicolas de Redon, in the Ille-et-Vilaine, a craft that rose from nearby swamps to quickly disappear into the sky.
The mechanic said he had kept his cool but the driver was so scared, said the A.F.P. dispatch recounting the incident, that he fell sick and had to undergo a medical examination the next day.
There are also reports of new encounters with strange beings.
The first case is that of Mr. Yves David, 28, farmer in Les Brouloux, commune of Vouneuil-sur-Vienne, in Vienne, who declared - belatedly - to have seen on September 19, at 2 o'clock, a sort of diver who came to stroke him on the arm while emitting unintelligible sounds before flying away inside a saucer.
In the Drôme, a resident of Valence who was walking near Chabeuil also lived, she said, an encounter with a small being which she at first took for a "cellophane scarecrow".
She took refuge, in the company of her dog, as terrified as herself, in a thicket. A few minutes later, she witnessed, she clarified, the start of a disc from which a whistling sound came.
This upsurge in testimonies obviously does not fail to excite public opinion. Will it be possible one day to unravel the mystery of the "saucers"?
