The 1954 French flap:

Flying saucer?

The above document is not an artist's conception of a "flying saucer", it is indeed a real photo, representing, in flight, the famous English plane without wings, the "flying cage-bed", announced by the British Minister for Communications last week at the opening of the "Farnborough Air Show."

As one would add a body to an automobile chassis, our designer coated the craft with a coating which, in reality, could be made of aluminum.

The result looks quite like a small flying saucer. The "bed-cage" has interesting characteristics: taking off and landing vertically, it can, thanks to its - classic - reactors, move in all directions.

Is this craft a reduced version of the saucers that claim to have recently seen in the Oise, Mr. and Mrs. Lucien Masse from Villers-sur-Coudun and Mr. Pérez of Compiègne? Nothing allows us to say so.

The day when this will be possible will disappear a mystery that began, there is almost

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FLYING
SAUCER?

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eight years old, when the poor Portuguese fisherman saw a flying disc above the sea performing strange acrobatics in the sky.

A few weeks later, an A.F.P. dispatch reported that in Switzerland, a group of tourists observed a saucer moving at high altitude over a lake.

A little later the "saucers", successively reported above Italy, France, Mexico and the United States, were attributed the first victim.

An aviator at a US military base took to the air after believing he spotted a "saucer". He never returned to his base. The next day, a patrol discovered his charred plane. We never knew what happened.

At this time, the "saucers" became for many, a danger. Weren't they, some journalists wondered, craft from an enemy country, didn't they pose a threat?

In the United States, where one is most passionate about this matter, the secret service of the US Air Force knew dark days.

The public was starting to worry. The "saucers" had even been seen above Washington, where one followed, the "Washington Post" said their movements on a radar screen. A squadron of "jets" had taken to the air but the fantastic devices, the newspaper concluded, quickly disappeared.

Brains were boiling, some specialists argued that the saucers came from Mars or Venus, which has a breathable atmosphere.

An explanation - the first of a dozen others, all different - was given on August 6, 1952, to the press.

A US Army physicist, Mr. Noel Scott, put lightly ionized air molecules into a glass bell inside which the vacuum had been created. The air molecules became phosphorescent.

For its part, the great magazine "Life" published photos of "saucers" taken by amateurs.

Are flying saucers an illusion or a reality? The question remains open and the "flying cage-bed" is obviously not a sufficient explanation.