The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, on page 6, on October 6, 1954.
Lille, France, Oct. 5 (Reuter). Now to make a "flying saucer," you take some strong gray paper and fashion it on the fire-balloon principle.
Then you light some kerosene-soaked rags, and the warm air lifts the burning "saucers" off into the winds. That's how you get the orange and yellow lights.
That, at least, is the way a retired miner of Beuvry-les-Bethune village did it, police said tonight. And that may account for at least some of the hundreds of "flying saucers" reported in the sky here recently.
They said the miner, whose name was not disclosed, claimed he made over 1,000 of these "saucers" as a joke. Police found him out after one of his gadgets landed near a haystack and nearly set it on fire.
But the "saucer sightings" go on in France - and not only around Lille.
Several Parisians reported seeing a "flying saucer" over the capital today.
A traveling salesman, Pierre Allouis, who saw it from a taxi, said it was a big silverish disk which made a loud whistling noise.
Painter Gibert Bacon said he saw the same "saucer" but described it as triangular shaped, like a flying wing.