The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Dépêche du Midi, Albi issue, France, on June 24, 2008.
"It was so hot on the night of Sunday to Monday that I couldn't sleep. So I went to my bedroom window and looked at the sky, waiting for sleep to return... But it didn't, and for good reason. After half an hour, I heard a loud whistle and saw an object descending from the sky at high speed. It turned purple from green. It was coming from the direction of Léguevin. My heart was beating very fast..."
Michel Saint-Marc, a resident of Tournefeuille, retired from Semvat, then called his wife who also noticed the phenomenon and immediately grabbed his camera, always within reach. He had time to take two shots unfortunately with a wide-angle setting. The craft had stopped abruptly. "It was bright," says Michel Saint-Marc, "it had, with small black dots on the side, like portholes. In my opinion it was 5 or 600 meters from me and must have been as big as a bus." After a few seconds, the object left as quickly as it had come, this time in the direction of Portet, and still with its characteristic whistling sound. A red glow had appeared below it.
For Michel Saint-Marc, the movement, the speed, the noise, do not correspond to a normal flying machine: plane, weather balloon, rockets, nor to an atmospheric phenomenon.
Curiously, for several weeks strange observations have been made all over France, the most spectacular having been noted at the beginning of May on the island of Yeu by several witnesses including a private plane pilot. An observation that had also motivated the trip of Jacques Patenet, engineer, head of the Group for Studies and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (Geipan). Michel Saint-Marc would obviously be happy to meet other witnesses of his observation. Contacted, the gendarmes did not report, for their part, having received testimonies of yesterday morning's phenomenon.
Jean-Michel Lamotte
