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The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Est Républicain, Nancy, France, January 8, 1954.
Dieppe. -- Yesterday morning, between 4:30 a.m. and 5:15 a.m., nearly seventy dockworkers from the port of Dieppe saw a blinding glow in the sky followed, four minutes later, by a formidable explosion who opened many doors and smashed windows.
Most of the residents of Dieppe were woken up by this deafening noise. There are only some discrepancies among the witnesses as to the direction of the light which, according to some, came from the North and, according to others, from the West.
It should be noted that about a week ago a fishing boat arrived in Dieppe all riddled with small shards that could come from an aerolite.
The Dieppe semaphore was put in touch with that of Fécamp and with those of all the small ports on the coast. Everyone agrees that yesterday morning's phenomenon was seen at these different points.
However several witnesses living in La Mailleraye, a locality approximately 80 km south of Dieppe are categorical. They saw the glow, which came from the direction of Dieppe.
Equally disturbing observations were made in the Nord: at 4:27 a.m., a railway employee who was on duty at Orchies station saw a disc of fire in the sky moving at the horizontal at breakneck speed. A luminous trail followed the glowing disc in its path. The same phenomenon was seen around the same time in Arras. A witness said he saw the disc motionless for a moment in the sky, but did not have time to contemplate it. It immediately resumed its course and disappeared on the horizon.
It is very likely, according to the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, that the phenomenon observed yesterday morning in the Dieppe region was a fireball. The very time that this sighting was made - shortly before sunrise - helps support this view.
The bolides are bodies whose origin and composition are poorly known and which move in the sky with extreme rapidity, heat up when they come into contact with the Earth's atmosphere due to the resistance that opposes them. It is then that they become incandescent. Sometimes they erupt silently, sometimes with a crash. It also happens that they fall to the surface of the globe, whole or fragmented. This is the origin of aerolithic falls.
