The article below was published in the daily newspaper France Soir, Paris, France, page 6, on October 29, 1954.
See the case file.
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Great commotion the other evening at the freight station in Creil (Oise): a Martian was wandering among the tracks. A Martian, it seemed, most authentic-looking, with his face hidden behind a strange mask pierced with phosphorescent holes.
Some railway workers set off in pursuit. After a clever flanking maneuver, twenty of them, led by a train conductor, managed to corner him in the depot yard.
"Catch him," he shouted to his men. "There's a reward!"
But the Martian aimed at him, through an opening in his helmet, a beam from a flashlight — the terrifying green beam so often described. At the same time, he charged toward his pursuers while making strange shrieking sounds.
The twenty railway workers and their leader, seized with panic, retreated toward the station, where they immediately held a war council. They were in the middle of planning a new encirclement tactic when one of their colleagues — Georges Ollivier — came to join them:
"Haven't you seen the Martian?" they asked him.
Georges Ollivier hadn't seen the terrifying figure. And for good reason! The Martian was him. He let his coworkers stew in anxiety all night. Finally, he told them the truth.
But in the meantime, many trains had departed the Creil depot for various destinations. At each station where they stopped, the engineers and conductors recounted how a Martian had landed in Creil. The next day, from Lille to Le Bourget, from Dunkirk to Longwy, across the entire northern rail network, thousands of railway workers were ready to swear that Creil was in the hands of Martians.
Georges Ollivier was the first to be surprised by the scale his prank had taken.
"The day before," he recounted, "we had been talking about Martians in the workshop. I wanted to play a good prank on my colleagues. I spent several hours putting together my Martian outfit. I made the helmet from an old oil can. I punched four holes in it: three at the forehead and one at the nose. I attached a flashlight inside and painted the bulb green. I added two ‘antennas' made from telephone coils. I fashioned a spacesuit from an old women's nylon raincoat. Dressed like that, I entered the depot. I crouched down to bring myself to ‘average Martian height,' and I moved by hopping with my feet together. I've never laughed so much."
The railway supervisors had mixed reactions to the prank. But Georges Ollivier had the foresight to carry out his joke before his official working hours. As a result, the administration, showing some "fair play," decided to laugh along.
