The article below was published in the daily newspaper Nord-Matin, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, page 10, on October 12, 1954.
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SINCE Saturday, the residents of the small commune of Pournoy-la-Chétive, near Verny (Moselle) have been divided into two clans: Those who believe in it, those who laugh at it.
We mean the flying saucer, of course.
Three children from the village claim, indeed, that they saw a saucer and its passenger. They told their story to their parents, repeated it to the teacher and confirmed it to Mr. The Mayor. All three were roller-skating on Friday afternoon near the cemetery. There were there: Gilbert Calba, 12; Daniel Hirsch, 9, and his brother, Jean-Pierre, 5.
"At around 6:30 p.m., says Gilbert, we saw a luminous and round object, about 2.50 m. in diameter, land. The craft landed near us, it had yellow and white stripes and was resting on three feet.
"Soon a man came out, holding an electric lamp in his hand.
"He was very small (about 1.20 m), had big eyes, a hairy face and wore a black cassock like Mr. the Priest. The man came to speak to us in incomprehensible language and we fled, frightened.
"We looked back a little further. The very bright object rose very high and very quickly in the sky."
This story is partially confirmed by another resident of Pournoy-la-Chétive, Robert Maguin, 16, who said he also saw a mysterious craft around the same time, but he was not close enough to distinguish the details.
Mr. Hoge, a film operator by trade, said he saw four men outside a flying saucer on Saturday night near Muenster.
These men, 1.20 m. tall or so, have a strongly developed torso and a large head. On the other hand, their lower limbs are small and lean.
Mr. Hoge was on his way home when he saw a blue light in a field, 60 meters from the road. He thought it was a plane crash, then he saw that the light was coming from an object having a shape of cigar. Four men, in rubber overalls, worked under the craft. None of them said a word.
Mr. Hoge watched them work for 10 minutes, not approaching, because he was afraid. Finally, the four men, by a kind of ladder, went into the cigar which, a few meters after taking off, took the shape of a saucer, projecting a dazzling light.
Many witnesses said they saw, in the sky of Calais, a "flying saucer". The testimonies are, above all, around the Fontinettes roundabout.
Mr. Jean Pinot, butcher, boulevard Pasteur; Norbert, hairdresser, his neighbor, were formal. According to them, the craft, ovoid in shape, with metallic reflections, came from the direction of the East and headed towards the West-North-West, passing over the chimney of the Belier factory, rue Van Grutten.
Another witness said the disc was spinning silently.
Another person tried not to lose sight of it and drove to the Jourdan bridge. There, in front of the curious gathered in the street, the "flying saucer" disappeared in the distance.
Other saucers have been seen:
In Lebanon, in Beirut, by the sea.
In Cameroon, where several doctors clearly saw, for 15 seconds, a kind of mushroom, beneath which a cylinder swayed with a length equal to the diameter of the hat and, too, very bright.
In Egypt, above the control tower of Muzha airport. The craft, in the shape of an elongated "saucer", changed color, changing from red to orange, then from green to gray, before moving away at lightning speed.
Finally, a "flying saucer" was observed for about two minutes, by 13 members of a gliding school, above the Ockstadt airport, near Frankfurt.
The 13 pilots and student pilots were watching the progress of a monitor, when they saw appearing above the glider in flight, at an altitude of about three thousand meters, a "slightly swollen silver disc", which moved without the slightest noise. The witnesses, including several former Luftwaffe aviators, are formal to declare that they cannot have been victims of an optical illusion.
Mr. K. M. Gibbons of Nelson was able to telephoto a series of photographs of three flying saucers.
When he took two snapshots of the three mysterious craft, they disappeared vertically at high speed. However, he continued to take photographs in the direction of the saucers. The developed film shows cylindrical objects, having a kind of dark core.
