UFOs in the daily Press:

IMAGINATION OR REALITY?

A flying saucer in Merxheim?

"Do flying saucers exist or not?" The problem is far from being solved: from time to time we announce the appearance of unidentified objects, but to this day these extraterrestrial machines seemed to sulk our region. Did they change their flight plan and take an interest in the country between the Vosges and the Rhine? This is the question that can be asked following the statements of several children of Merxheim.

These 10-year-old children who attend the community primary school told their teacher and gendarmes Bollwiller, in our presence, to have seen, Thursday around 09:45 p.m., a flying saucer move around the locality. The young Denis Dubich, who lives in Merxheim, would have even seen it land in a field about fifty meters from his house. According to him, while reading in his bedroom, he was alerted by the barking of his dog. Having come down to see what was happening, he noticed that the animal was burrowing in his kennel, as if it were frightened, then he saw 50 m from his house a very luminous object, red, orange, which landed.

The light would have forced him to hide his face with his forearm. He would have distinguished a row of very bright portholes and four wickets below the craft, from which three folding feet would have emerged and an arm with pliers that would have collected cabbages from the field. Still according to him an antenna surmounted the machine. It would have been retracted back in the machine, a hood would have opened then, and a completely white individual would have come out to the chest. The individual would have looked around, would have closed the hood, then the machine would have gone up in the air, very quickly, before leaving towards the Southeast. The child stated that all the time the craft was whistling, and that he himself felt a strong heat and that before rising in the air the machine would have turned on itself, the portholes appearing to him to stay still. The mother of the child told us that while she was going to bed, she had seen through the shutters a very strong light, and that at 9 o'clock, the TV shows and the light would have been disturbed.

The other children living on the Guebwiller road, about 200 m from the spot, also saw a bright orange light and a ball spinning to the southeast. A young girl who lives on the road to Raedersheim, thus on the other side of the village, would have noticed, too, when she had just come home with her parents, about the same time, a dazzling ball in the direction of Reguisheim. Information received from the teacher, there was no mention of flying saucers at school and the children said they did not watch television that night. Having visited the field we did not notice any trace, except the location where cabbages were torn off. But by what mystery?

A sounding balloon?

The machine sighted at Merxheim was not reported by the personal at Air Base 132 (it would have been only a few hundred meters south of the base, according to the witnesses, stating that it was following a path facing East).

No mention either of the appearance of Merxheim at the radar observation center of the air base of Contrexéville (which controls the whole of the East of France): "though, the assistant of the commander of base specifies, our radars are "blind" for a craft moving at very low altitude, especially in the Rhine basin."

For this officer, the hypothesis of a stratospheric balloon used for some scientific experiment at very high altitude, and which would have descended to the ground is not to be rejected: in your region, the fact has already occurred several times before. This is not extraordinary: the flight duration of such balloons is only 8 days on average.

There is still a part to the UFO hypothesis that cannot be rejected: didn't Mr. Robert Galley, while he was Minister of Armies, questioned on this matter, even affirm this?

At the NATO air base in Bremgarten (Germany), the duty officer was very dubious... although there was no air traffic yesterday. "Often," he says, "fog or atmospheric pressure explains why people believe they see UFOs, which was never the case with one of our pilots." Similarly, no luminous signal appeared on one of our radar set has ever remained unexplained..."