This article was published in the daily newspaper La Charente Libre, France, on October 5, 1954.
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tells us a witness worthy of faith
For a certain time already, the sky, and by repercussion the columns of the newspapers, are filled with flying saucers, cigars and mysterious machines. We will acknowledge here that in spite of the accounts that we echo, we remain rather skeptical. This enables us to more freely report the following fact which occurred this time in the Charente and which was brought back to us by a healthy and well balanced person whose good faith can by no means be doubted.
Sunday evening, with at 11:15 p.m., Mr. Jean Allary, a young farmer, 22 year old, regained by motobike the residence of his parents, at the village of Rabaud, community of Ronsenac, after having spent the evening at the movie theater of Montmoreau, when, on the right side of the road of Montmoreau at Villebois, at the place called Maine la Fontaine, he saw a mysterious machine. Frightened, a fear that he had not shame to acknowledge, he returned at his place and told his parents the facts that he agreed to tell us again yesterday and that report verbatim:
"I was driving quietly at less than thirty kilometers per hour, I had just exceeded by 100 meters approximately the monument raised to the memory of the F.F.I [French Forces of the Interior, resistance during the occupation of 1939-1945] when all of a sudden, I saw in the light of my headlight like a kind of barrel of one meter in diameter approximately, high perhaps of one meter eighty. Kinds of yellow nails shone in the light. The unit constituted a brown mass. I acknowledge that I was very afraid. I passed without stopping at to 1 m 50 of the machine which was swinging as if it had been assembled on pivot. In a word, it did not look stable.
"A ten meters of ir, I turned myself, and I dis not see anything anymore."
Tel est, dans sa sobriété, le récit que nous a fait M. Jean Allary, garçon sérieux et posé, dont la sincérité ne peut être mise en doute. Il nous a paru encore sous le coup d'une grande et assez compréhensible émotion. Cependant nous n'hésiterons pas à dire que si nous nous en étions tenu à son récit nous n'arriverions pas à partager avec lui cette émotion. Mais les faits sont vraiment troublants, Qu'on en juge plutôt:
Such is, in its sobriety, the account that Mr. Jean Allary gave us, a serious and posed boy, whose sincerity cannot be questioned. He still appeared to us under the blow of great and rather comprehensible emotion. However we will not hesitate to say that if we had only been limited to his account we would not manage to share with him this emotion. But the facts are really disconcerting. Judge for yourself:
Accompanied by Mr. Hubert, tobacconist in Juillaguet, his son and Mr. Jean Allary, we went to the very location where the young farmer claims to have seen what we will call "the mysterious barrel" and there, we saw in grass on the low side of the road, three very clear points of impact. On the basis of one of these points of impact, a long trail of approximately seven meters was widening. Of ten centimetres approximately in its beginning the trail had twenty-five centimetres at its end. The grass was strongly crushed, curved even apparently and the fact that the pressed part began only at one meter from the road, makes us discard the assumption of a trail caused by the tire of a car.
We will of course take care not to draw any conclusion at all, but we cannot prevent us from only saying that the observations which we made corroborate in a strange way an account of which we do not have any valid reason to question the perfect authenticity.
