The article below was published in the daily newspaper Le Provençal, Marseille, France, page 5, on February 24, 1954.
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London (A.F.P.).
The "Evening News" reports a "strange incident" involving a pilot, Mr. Douglas Gilbert, who was flying a light aircraft from Cheltenham to Croydon.
He stated that during his flight, the compass installed on his instrument panel suddenly shattered for no apparent reason. Upon arriving at Croydon airfield, Mr. Gilbert checked his map and realized that the compass had broken just as he was flying over a section of the London–Portsmouth road nicknamed the "projectile mile" because of the hundreds of incidents recently reported there.
On numerous occasions, motorists had complained that while driving along this 1,600-meter stretch, their car windshields suddenly shattered. An investigation had been carried out without success. Various theories had been proposed, generally attributing the damage to some kind of projectile launched by a malicious individual. The issue now appears to be resurfacing.
Mr. Gilbert, who has been flying aircraft for fifteen years, and several of his colleagues, believe these damages are likely caused by air vibrations. These could have been triggered by an aircraft breaking the sound barrier.
However, although several jet aircraft were maneuvering at the time of Mr. Gilbert's incident, none of them broke the sound barrier. Even so, that would not fully explain the mystery — or at least, an additional explanation would be necessary, since the phenomenon only affects a specific stretch of road in the case of the cars.
The windshields "explosions" in 1954, called "window cancer" or "parebrisite" in French, has become an often cited example of "collective illusion" or "mass hysteria". Sociologists and psychologists refer to these incidents in France and in the United States to ensure that "crowds" can easily fall into unfounded collective myths.
And of course, some "skeptical" ufologists explain that the "window cancer" that preceded the wave of "flying saucers" of 1954 proves that the saucers too were only illusions.
None put forward the following point: "collective hysteria" here would in any case concern only the interpretation of the facts, not the facts themselves. And the interpretations were not really "hysterical", they were attempts at rationalization quite understandable and sensible in the context of the time.
All sorts of explanations were advanced at the time for the "window cancer", such as an effect of atomic experiments, Martian activity, or "vandals". In the United States, the police found that the epidemic affected mainly old cars, and it was thought that the windows would explode as a result of their wear.
In the windshield explosions reported in France in 1954, I find "constants": the mention of a light or a flash, blue when the color is mentioned, the lack of sense of the explanations by vandals, Martians, atomic tests, the insistence of the witness(es) that no pebble struck the windshield, the hearing of an explosion sound, the opacity of the window after the explosion.
Some of these characteristics have really no strangeness: an explosion noise is perfectly normal when a windshield breaks. The window becomes opaque because the anti-burst protection layer produced this. The lack of notice of a shock by a pebble or something else can also be explained: the windshield may have been hit and weakened by a hit long before, and then explodes only later when nothing hits it.
I have less ideas about the flash or the light. Is it an illusion caused by the sudden opacity of the glass?
In 1954, the French science-fiction author and pioneering ufologist Jimmy Guieu linked this mystery to the extraterrestrials, but few ufologists followed him on this path. The Press did it sometimes, but without claiming this "explanation" was serious.
