The article below was published in the daily newspaper Libération, Paris, France, pages 1 and 5, on October 7, 1954.
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Like the fireworks maker in the delightful pre-war American film "You Can't Take It With You", the retired miner from Beuvry-les-Béthune (Pas-de-Calais), Victor Oliveira, launched more than a thousand "flying saucers" into the sky by crafting, as we mentioned yesterday, three-meter diameter hot-air balloons made of wrapping paper, with a flaming tow attached. Alas! One of these contraptions, which had puzzled the local "chtimi" populations, nearly set fire to a haystack. And the former miner had to give up his favorite pastime.
(See our news page 5.)
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Something had been missing from the appearances of the "Martians" on our territory: contact with their hosts. This gap has now been cheerfully filled since yesterday. The visitors, until now timid or hesitant - in any case, very discreet - have finally broken their silence in an attempt to start a conversation with the people they had the good fortune to meet.
Around 4 a.m., a baker's apprentice from Loctudy (Finistère), Mr. Pierre Lucas, was drawing water in the courtyard of the bakery when he saw in the dark a saucer about 2.5 to 3 meters in diameter (approximately). He saw a dwarf emerge, about 1.20 meters tall, who approached him, patted him in a friendly way on the shoulder, and uttered a few perfectly unintelligible sounds. Remaining calm, the worker led the unknown being to the bakehouse, where in the light he could take a better look at his interlocutor: an oval, scruffy, very ugly face, with eyes the size of a crow's egg. The young man called his boss, but by the time the baker arrived, the strange pilot had vanished with his mysterious craft, leaving no trace.
Meanwhile, a beer merchant from Concarneau saw two discs swoop down from the sky after launching a flare.
But the baker's apprentice from Loctudy is thoroughly outdone by a resident of Chaleix (Dordogne), Mr. Garreau, known as a calm, level-headed man, lacking any sense of humor. From a "flying soup tureen" as large as a cart that had landed in his field without so much as a warning, he saw with his own eyes two individuals emerge through a sliding door; they were of European type and dressed in khaki coveralls!!!
After shaking the witness's hand, one of them asked in a strong Anglo-Saxon accent: "Paris? North?"
Surprised by the question, it was Mr. Garreau who fell silent. Disappointed, the two individuals petted the farm dog before disappearing into their craft at breakneck speed.
Next to these two sightings, the other testimonies of the day pale in comparison - even if, as in Poncey-sur-Lignon [sic] (Côte-d'Or), the residents, armed with rifles, patrolled all night because of suction marks arranged in a trapezoid left by a flying cigar, which one witness saw take off with lightning speed; and even if, as in Jouy-sur-Morin (Seine-et-Oise), a member of the Society of Civil Engineers of France, Mr. E. Farnier, former commissioner of the Aéro-Club of France, witnessed the maneuvers of a 10-meter-wide disc spinning for 20 minutes at an altitude of 400 meters, emitting reddish-violet lights before vanishing with a whistle in the direction of Coulommiers.
When will we see the first romances with the "Uranides"?
J. DEROGY.
