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Case of Willer, on September 30, 1954:

Case number:

ALSACAT-1954-09-30-WILLER-1

Summary:

On October 5, 1954, the regional newspaper L'Alsace in its French edition at least, reported on page 10 that "flying saucers" were seen in the sky of the Sundgau, the area south of the Haut-Rhin.

The newspaper reported that in the afternoon at about 4 p.m., two girls from Willer who worked in the fields, B. M., aged 16, and her sister C., aged 20, saw in the sky, passing at high speed, two dark-colored and oval discs one on the top or above the other.

These objects reportedly emitted absolutely no light and made no noise. They quickly disappeared in the direction of Windenhof.

The newspaper adds that farmers from Grentzingen said they also saw, the same day, at the same hour, the two mysterious craft.

The case later appeared in the UFO literature with a wrong date and almost no details, probably because it was found by ufologist Aimé Michel in a later article in L'Alsace that mentioned it again but did not give the date and the details.

Data:

Temporal data:

Geographical data:

Witnesses data:

Ufology data:

Classifications:

Sources:

[Ref. lae1:] NEWSPAPER "L'ALSACE":

[Ref. lae2] NEWSPAPER "L'ALSACE":

The newspaper reports on October 6, 1954, with no other information, that there was a sighting in Willer, the Haut-Rhin. The date is not given but the sighting is mentioned among others that took place on October 2 and 3, 1954.

See the article here.

[Ref. aml1:] AIME MICHEL:

Aimé Michel reports that there was a sighting on October 2, 1954, in Willer, France.

[Ref. jve5:] JACQUES VALLEE:

[Ref. aldl:] MRS. GUEUDELOT, "LUMIERES DANS LA NUIT" ARCHIVE:

[Ref. lcn1:] LUC CHASTAN:

Luc Chastan indicates in his database that in the Haut-Rhin in Willer on October 2, 1954, at an unknown hour, there was an observation of a disc.

The source is indicated as "M.O.C. by Michel Aimé ** Arthaud 1958".

[Ref. pcs1:] PATRICK COMBES:

Patrick Combes copied the [lc1] source, crediting it by a link.

[Ref. cvn2:] CHRISTIAN VALENTIN:

Former journalist Christian Valentin published in 2012 a very interesting book telling the story of UFO sightings, flying saucers sightings, in Alsace, from the beginning to 1980.

In this book, he lists the case for Thursday, September30, 1954, at 16:00 in Willer in the Haut-Rhin.

He documents it by giving the source, the article of the newspaper L'Alsace, for Tuesday October 5, 1954, page 10 of the French issue, saying:

[Ref. spa4:] UFOLOGY GROUP "SPICA":

[Ref. ubk1:] "UFO-DATENBANK":

This database recorded the case 3 times:

Discussion:

About Christian Valentin's book:

It is not at all my habit to "advertise" a book or anything, and I have no interested relationship with the author, but I wanted to say a word on the book by Christian Valentin, "Mythes et Réalités des Phénomènes Aériens Non Identifiés" (i.e. "Myths and Realities of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" (cover on the left) , ref. [cv2]; which, as its subtitle indicates, is about Alsatian UFO sighting reports and the saucer lore in Alsace.

I think Alsatian ufologists and, generally, people interested in the UFO question, or in the history of Alsace, my region, would probably like this book.

The 144 pages book is sober but well presented, unbiased, richly documented and illustrated. It is the first work in print specifically about UFO sightings in Alsace. (There was another one a few years ago, but it was partly made by copying - pasting without mention of the sources, portions of my website, especially the Alsatians cases I almost exhaustively documented in my catalog of UFO sightings in France in 1954, and copies from another websites; the trivial explanations I proposed or gave there being almost always stripped off!)

The author does not want to prove or disprove the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors or some other so-called "extraordinary" explanation, he rather offers a chronologically ordered review of Alsatian UFO reports, starting from the origin and stopping in 1980, based on known sources ufology, on the articles of the regional Press, and cases less known or even unreleased so far that he collected directly with the witnesses. His own comments are printed in a different color, references to the sources are always given. A very nice work in my opinion!

The author currently has a blog where he shows what libraries in Alsace have the book available, see: christian.valentin.overblog.com

Without the first article in the newspaper L'Alsace for October 5, 1954, it was not possible for me to see that the date given by Vallée, Michel, Chastan, was wrong. The description, very meager, was not right either as this was not "one" disc but two, etc.

So we have here a case that became stranger again than it was in the UFO literature case, with among other things, what seems to be independent witnesses.

Unfortunately it was apparently not investigated and many details are missing, such as angular size, angular speed, distances, etc. So there is no way to disprove that it may have been planes of helicopters, as in the distance they make look like oval-shaped, and silent.

Above:

Willer, Grentzingen, distant from center to center of about kilometers. We do not know ehere the witnesses were, we only know the girls were from Willer and the men from Grentzingen.

The Windenhof, near Jettingen, seen from the start of the arrow would be in the direction indicated by the arrow. But again we do not know where the girls were so the arrow does not tell us anything absolute.

Evaluation:

Unidentified, not enough information.

Sources references:

* = Source is available to me.
? = Source I am told about but could not get so far. Help needed.

• [lae1] * "Des "soucoupes volantes" dans le ciel du Sundgau", article in the regional newspaper L'Alsace, page 10, October 5, 1954.
• [lae2] * Article in the regional newspaper L'Alsace, Mulhouse, France, October 6, 1954.
• [aml1] * "Mystérieux Objets Célestes", book by Aimé Michel, Arthaud publisher, France, 1958.
• [aml1] * "Flying Saucers and the Straight Lines Mystery", book by Aimé Michel, English version of "Mystérieux Objets Célestes", S.G. Phillips publisher, USA, 1958.
• [jve5] * "Catalogue préliminaire de 500 observations", listing in "Les Phénomènes Insolites de l'Espace", book by Jacques and Jannine Vallée, Table Ronde publisher, France, 1966.
• [aml1] * "A Propos des Soucoupes Volantes", book by Aimé Michel, reprint of "Mystérieux Objets Célestes" Planète publisher, France, 1972.
• [aml1] * "Mystérieux Objets Célestes", book by Aimé Michel, Seghers publisher, France, page 148, 1977.
• [jve5] * "Catalogue préliminaire de 500 observations", listing in "Les Phénomènes Insolites de l'Espace", book by Jacques and Jannine Vallée, Robert Laffont publisher, France, page 249, 1978.
• [ald1] * Record in the archive by Mrs. Gueudelot, of the ufology magazine Lumières Dans La Nuit (LDLN), France, not dated, published circa 2020 by the ufology association SCEAU, France, at https://sceau-archives-ovni.org/fonds/fond_gueudelot/base_guy_jpr_fiches_gueudelot.html
• [lcn1] * Base OVNI France, website by Luc Chastan, France, circa 2005, at baseovnifrance.free.fr/detobs.php?numobs=2442
• [pcs1] * OVNI - Infos, UFO website by Patrick Combes, France, March 3, 2008, at http://space-ovni.xooit.fr/t118-2-Octobre-1954-a-Willer-Disque.htm
• [cvn2] * "Mythes et Réalités des Phénomènes Aériens Non Identifiés - Histoire des soucoupes volantes en Alsace jusqu'en 1980", book by Christian Valentin, Grimoires d'Alsace publishers, France, page 32, 2012.
• [spa4] * "DEPARTEMENT 68 - HAUT-RHIN", listing of UFO sighting reports by the Alsatian ufology group SPICA, Alsace, France, not dated, found in May 2015, at http://www.spica.org/Page_Listing_68.htm
• [ubk1] * Online database UFO-Datenbank, Germany, found in 2016, at ufodatenbank.de

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This page was last updated on August 6, 2023.