The article below was published in the daily newspaper Combat, Paris, France, page 6, on September 20, 1954.
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ROME, September 19. -- A new flying saucer was sighted in Italy by several people. The object was seen over Mount Naturno (2,600 meters above sea level), in the Merano region, South Tyrol. It was a disc, rotating on itself from left to right, moving very slowly from west to east in a perfectly horizontal line. The saucer was observed by two fruit store employees and about twenty young women working in the same store sorting fruit, as well as by the station master of Naturno.
Another mysterious object had crossed the sky over Rome the previous day. It was observed for about 40 minutes by the observation station of the military command at Ciampino airfield. The object, shaped like a "half-cigar," was flying slowly at about 1,200 meters altitude. A trail of luminous smoke came from its narrower end.
While tracking the object's movements, the Ciampino observation station noted that it suddenly dropped 400 meters before immediately gaining altitude again, shifting from a horizontal to a vertical position.
As the object moved away toward the sea, Ciampino airfield reported its presence to the military control station at Pratica di Mare, about 30 kilometers from Rome, which managed to "lock onto" it with radar and track it for about twenty minutes. The radar reportedly indicated the presence of an antenna at the center of the wider part of the "half-cigar."
The Monte Mario Observatory (Rome) ruled out the possibility of a meteor, stating that no celestial bodies had crossed the Roman sky during the day. The object was sighted at 4:45 p.m. (GMT) and disappeared in a northwesterly direction at 6:21 p.m.
WURZBURG. — "No reasonable person can believe in the nonsense of flying saucers," declared Professor Otto Hahn in Würzburg, a German atomic expert and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry (1945).
"If Martians or other beings were taking joyrides to Earth, they would say hello instead of speeding around the globe," added Professor Hahn, speaking at a scientific meeting.
