The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Record-Eagle, Traverse City, Michigan, USA, on page 4, on October 20, 1954.
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Flying saucer stories originated in the United States, spread to Canada, and have now burst out in France. The French saucer tales have a gallic quality that adds to their fascination.
For instance, a French farmer claims that as he was walking along a lonely road, a creature came up to him, caressed his arm, and made unintelligible noises. Then it moved off to a waiting saucer, says the farmer, which he could no see because he was blinded and temporarily paralyzed by a green ray directed at him. (Only in France would a creature from outer space caress a man who chanced upon him on a lonely road.)
Then a former artillery officer in France reported he saw a dark-gray object hovering over some mountains at about 6.000 feet. As he stopped his car to look, the mass sudeenly "shot away like lightning and disappeared." The element of ramce is missing here, but not that of wonder.
It's impossible to say that flying saucers don't exist; certainly stories about them appear to be universal. But so, at one time, did stories of witches and fairies come from all over the world. What is universal today is the jitters. It may be these, along with the fantastic devices assembled by science, that cause people to see things in the sky which exist only in their imagination.
