The article below was published in the daily newspaper France Soir, Paris, France, pages 1 and 7, on September 14, 1954.
See the case file.
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"They were two beings no more than one meter tall, extremely broad-shouldered, and whose heads seemed enormous"
LILLE, September 13 (by phone).
"Martians landed on Earth..."
Such is the rumor that spread yesterday in Quarouble (Nord). A rumor that can only be relayed with the utmost caution: the "Martians," if there were any, left no tangible trace of their stay on Earth.
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But one man claims to have seen them, and he describes them with such precision, such conviction, that even the most skeptical begin to believe in the reality of the incident.
This man is a 34-year-old metalworker, Mr. Marius Dewilde.
He is a serious man. At the Blanc-Misseron steelworks, where he works, he has a reputation for being level-headed and grounded. He apparently has no reason to fabricate a hoax of such magnitude. And yet, he maintains this incredible claim: he saw, at the gate of his garden, next to a mysterious oblong-shaped craft, beings of human appearance, enclosed in diving suits: two "Martians."
It was Friday night. The clock hanging above the stove showed 10:30 p.m. Mrs. Dewilde and their son had just gone to bed. And Marius Dewilde, sitting in the kitchen, was reading.
In the yard, "Kiki," his dog, began barking with such insistence that his master grabbed a flashlight and went outside.
"Upon entering the garden," he recounts, "I noticed on the railway tracks, a few meters to my left, a dark mass. I thought: it's a farmer who has unhitched a cart. Tomorrow morning I’ll have to warn the track workers so they can remove it."
"I had barely formed this thought when, on my right, on the other side of the garden fence, on the smugglers' path, I heard footsteps. My dog was facing that direction and still barking. I turned on my flashlight. Then I saw two beings. They were three or four meters from me. Only the fence separated us. They were walking one behind the other, heading toward the dark mass I had seen on the tracks. One of them, the one in front, turned toward me. The beam of my flashlight caught a metallic reflection where his face should have been. I clearly saw that his head was enclosed in a helmet, like a diving suit. Both beings were dressed in suits similar to those of deep-sea divers. They were very short-no more than one meter tall-but extremely broad-shouldered, and the helmet protecting the head seemed enormous. I saw their legs: proportionate to their size. But I didn’t see any arms. I don’t know if they had any."
"After the initial seconds of shock, I ran to the garden gate, intending to intercept them. At that moment, a square-shaped window opened on the dark mass resting on the tracks. A spotlight was aimed at me. This spotlight emitted an intense light with greenish reflections. Its beam paralyzed me. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I wanted to move, but my legs no longer obeyed. I heard, as if in a dream, footsteps one meter from me on the cement slab in front of my garden gate. It was the two beings heading toward the railway tracks."
"Finally, the spotlight turned off. I regained control of my muscles. I moved toward the tracks. But already the dark mass resting there was lifting off the ground. It rose while swaying slightly, like a helicopter, making no noise except for the hissing of thick black smoke it blew in my face. The craft ascended vertically to about thirty meters, then shot westward, climbing even higher. It was shaped like a cheese bell, about 3 meters tall and 5 to 6 meters in diameter. When it reached a certain distance, it took on a reddish glow. Within a minute, it had vanished."
A commissioner and an inspector went to the site yesterday. They noted that, at the spot where Mr. Dewilde said the flying craft landed on the railway, the sleepers showed signs of hammering. The ballast stones were crumbling, as if exposed to high heat. But these traces prove nothing: the hammering marks could have come from track workers installing bolts, and the ballast is naturally made from a brittle type of slag.
Furthermore, no footprints of the "Martians" were found on the path-though the nature of the ground makes it difficult to preserve such prints.
