The article below was published in the daily newspaper France Soir, Paris, France, page 4, on October 12, 1954.
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METZ, October 11 (dispatch "France-Soir").
In POURNOY-LA-CHETIVE, near Verny (Moselle), three children claim they saw a flying saucer and its passenger.
They told their parents, the mayor, and their teacher Mr. Martignon. One of them swore he had a conversation with a Martian, and since Saturday, Pournoy-la-Chétive has been divided into two camps: those who believe it and those who laugh at it.
As for the three children - Gilbert Calba, 12 years old, Daniel Hirsch, 9 years old, and his brother Jean-Pierre, 5 and a half - here is what they declared:
– It was 6:30 p.m. on Friday. The three of us were roller-skating when suddenly, near the cemetery, we saw something luminous. It was a round object, about 2.5 meters in diameter. It landed very close to us. The craft had yellow and white stripes. It landed on three legs.
"Soon, a man came out of it. He was holding a lit flashlight in one hand. This light blinded us, but we clearly saw that the man had large eyes, a hairy face, and was very small - about 1.2 meters tall. He wore a sort of black cassock, like the priest's. The man looked at us. He said something we didn’t understand. He turned off his light and, scared, we ran away.
"As we turned back, we saw something in the sky flying away, very high, very fast, and very bright."
Another resident of Pournoy-la-Chétive, Robert Maguin, 16 years old, also said he saw the mysterious craft, but he wasn’t close enough to see the details.
Coincidence: a "Martian" matching the same description (shiny eyes, thick mustache, and a flashlight, but no cassock) was seen in Lavoux (Vienne) by Mr. Roger Barrault, a laborer.