The article below was published in the daily newspaper Libération, Paris, France, pages 1 and 6, on October 6, 1954.
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Yesterday brought us a fresh crop of "saucers" and other "unidentified flying objects" - or rather, sightings just as unverifiable as ever - along with further proof of the existence... of hoaxers. This time, it isn't a supposed witness guilty of contempt of court by digging tripod marks into the ground, but a mischievous maker of aerial devices who was issued a citation for a dangerous prank.
Sunday evening, around 9:30 p.m., two residents of Ablain-Saint-Nazaire (Pas-de-Calais) spotted a "flying pot" spinning in the sky, emitting a reddish glow and moving at high speed. At the same time, a "flying crescent" hovered in the sky over Liévin, near Béthune, then split into two parts—one rising higher, the other descending toward the ground between two haystacks.
Meanwhile, the Hennebelle family from Sailly (in the same district), who had also seen a luminous craft go dark and fall, rushed to the
Jacques DEROGY
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locations... only to find advertising leaflets and bits of wire. The rural guard immediately alerted the police commissioner of Beuvry-les-Béthune, who, after a brief investigation, questioned a retired miner, Mr. Victor Oliveira, 60 years old, a great fan of pranks and practical jokes.
"I'm very surprised anyone's taking notice of me," said the old fellow. "Everyone around here knows full well that I make balloons, and that I enjoy watching them rise, all lit up. Here, let me show you."
And the retiree began, in front of the police officers and journalists, to inflate an oval hot air balloon three meters in diameter, with a wrapping-paper envelope and a small receptacle at its base containing a tuft of tow soaked in a flammable liquid. He only had to light the tow for the craft to rise and disappear in a zigzag pattern, carried by the wind, surrounded by yellowish and orange hues. Under Mr. Oliveira's shed were numerous prototypes of varying sizes and shapes.
"I've launched more than a thousand of them like this," concluded the cheerful prankster. "But I regret that these days I can no longer find those multicolored tissue papers that once allowed me to make pretty little balloons for fairgrounds."
Of course, it's not Mr. Oliveira's balloons that are being spotted in every sky where "sightings" multiply. Yesterday, a hundred visitors to the Pomological Exhibition in Remiremont (Vosges) followed the movements of a cigar and a disc around the sun. It's true they were participating in a contest for "anomalies" with over 100,000 Francs in prizes, and after searching the fair's booths for anomalies, they naturally turned their eyes to the sky.
Saucers, barrels, cigars, crescents, and other household objects were also reported in eastern France, from Champigneulles to Besançon, and in places as scattered as Deauville, Aurec-sur-Loire (Haute-Loire), where a large headlight was seen crossing the sky from north to south; Epinac-les-Mines (Saône-et-Loire); Angoulême; Clermont-Ferrand; Nîmes; in the Ain, the Isère, and even in Paris. Yes, in Paris: Around 4:30 p.m., Mr. Pierre Allouis, a cardboard goods salesman, stopped at a red light at Porte Dorée, heard a shrill whistling and saw a craft rise vertically in a plume of smoke, while Mr. Gilbert Bacon and Mr. Paul Julien, house painters, "clearly" saw a flying wing shaped like a triangle with rounded edges.
All in all, an impressive stack of saucers.
So impressive, in fact, that two scientists—considered as such until recent years—German rocket and astronautics specialist Hermann Oberth and the vice-president of the Astronomical Association of Kenya, Duncan Flechter [sic, Fletcher], have now aligned themselves with science fiction authors. The former asserted, during a lecture in Hamburg, the existence of extraterrestrial flying saucers crewed by beings similar to humans but thousands of years ahead of our time, and proposed calling them "uranides" (why not, after all). The latter went even further, claiming that geographers from another world are observing the Earth in every detail in order to map it—exactly as we would before attempting to reach Venus, for example.
However, as A. Ananoff, founder of the International Astronautics Society and recipient of the Hermann Oberth Prize, stated last night, if these hypothetical visitors were truly so far ahead of us—and assuming evolution took the same course on another planet—they would have been on Earth long ago, especially since we ourselves will be able to send craft to the Moon before the end of this century.
"Fearing the possibility that these mysterious saucers might one day be revealed as Soviet in origin, the Americans would rather throw themselves into the arms of the Martians," he concluded with a smile.
