The article below was published in the daily newspaper Var-Matin - République, France, on August 25, 1966.
When some forty days ago, Mr. René Pèbre and a group of his friends claimed to have observed a flying saucer in the Nartuby gorges, between Rebouillon and Lentier, there was practically no one to believe their statements. For some, it was a hoax made up from scratch. For others, it was an optical illusion that some malicious tongues considered inevitable following an excessive ingestion of alcoholic beverages. The adventure of the financial employee and his friends was nevertheless going to cross the departmental limit. And if in Draguignan, it had until now, mostly given rise to smiles, there are people elsewhere in France, who took it very seriously.
The Groupe d'Etude des Phénomènes Aériens [Aerial Phenomena Study Group]
This is how a few days ago we received at our Draguignan agency, a letter in which Mr. René Fouéré, secretary general of the GEPA, asked us to send Mr. Pèbre, an extremely precise questionnaire on the circumstances of his observations. However, the GEPA is not an assembly of jokers. It would be quite the opposite. This official organization, founded in 1952 and placed under the presidency of Air Force General Chassin, has given itself the task of studying in a scientific and objective manner, what some strong (but a little limited) minds refuse to consider other than as mirages or inventions of journalists in need of material. Better still, at the request of the GEPA, the Draguignan gendarmerie, in turn, opened an investigation and summoned Pèbre and his friends for questioning.
A "sphere" at the bottom of the gorges
What did the young man tell the gendarmes? What he saw, quite simply.
It was last July 28, at the wheel of his car. Mr. Pèbre was returning from the Marthe festival, where he had played in the orchestra with two friends: Miss Annie Guillaume and Mr. André Bouchaud.
The car was approaching Draguignan, when suddenly, the radio that was playing quietly, stopped. At the same time, the three young people saw a craft, a kind of sphere, moving slowly in the Nartuby gorges, between Rebouillon and Lentier.
The craft was lit by two headlights, placed at the front and which spread over the surrounding landscape a light that was both very bright and very diffuse, in no way comparable to that emitted by car headlights for example.
Surprised, Mr. Pèbre cut his headlights and stopped his car. For at least a quarter of an hour, he observed, with his two comrades, the movements of the unknown machine.
Illuminated portholes
It had just turned off its headlights at the front and turned on others below it to illuminate the ground towards which it was descending.
For a long moment, it tried to stabilize itself, turning on itself. This movement was clearly perceptible thanks to the portholes also lit by the same diffuse light as that of the headlights.
Then the sphere turned off its vertical headlights, turned on those placed at the front again and began to move again in the gorge.
Fascinated, Mr. Pèbre let himself slide in freewheel down the descent to follow the machine. Which he did until reaching the Laget quarry. But there, on the bridge, a truck was coming.
Mr. Pèbre had to turn his headlights back on and start his engine again to approach the hill. It was about four in the morning. The sphere had disappeared...
A shepherd from Ampus too
A few minutes later, the three young people joined three of their fellow musicians in Draguignan who had been driving a few hundred meters ahead of them when they stopped at the side of the road.
Two of them, Maurice Neiman and Georges Meiffret, had indeed seen the craft, but fleetingly and at a certain altitude.
The third had seen nothing for the very simple reason that he was sleeping on the back seat...
Wanting to be sure that they had not been the victim of an optical illusion, reflections or simply lights from houses or public lighting, the three young people, two evenings in a row, returned to the place of their observations. They came back convinced: no light in this place could cause confusion.
But in the face of general skepticism, they preferred to keep their thoughts to themselves from then on.
And it was not with a certain relief that they learned, Saturday, that they were finally being taken seriously. And that the sphere they had observed had also been seen, the same night, by a shepherd from Ampus.
Similarly, certain details that they hardly dared to talk about, such as the "cut" radio, the unusual light emitted by the headlights of the craft, do not seem to surprise the "specialists" of the GEPA who, in the questionnaire sent to Mr. Pèbre, on the contrary, ask for the maximum details on this subject.
Thus, thanks to three Dracénois, the study of unusual objects will, perhaps, progress somewhat... Confirm, in any case, the thousands of similar observations already made in the past, a little everywhere, in the four corners of the world.
