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The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Bourgogne Républicaine, pages 1 and 10, October 7, 1954.
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(FROM OUR SPECIAL ENVOY CHARLES GARREAU)
From her bedroom window, Mrs. Thérèse Fourneret shows me the meadow stretching out at the bottom of a valley.
"It is there, to the right of the plum tree that I saw the thing. Distraught, I fled to my neighbor's, Mrs. Bouiller, taking my little Yves..."
In her haste, Mme Fourneret left the shutter and windows wide open; she barely took care to lock the door behind her.
The "thing" is indeed a strange apparition which surprised Mrs. Fourneret, a sympathetic young woman of 23, as she closed her shutters, Monday evening, around 8 a.m.
She lives with her husband in a house adjoining the asbestos factory in Poncey-sur-l'Ignon, where Mr. Fourneret works. The factory is extending
Continued on page 10, under the title
CRAFT
[Photo caption 1:] "It is above the wood that I saw the strange phenomenon", Mrs. Gainet explains, who, with her husband, her daughter and many neighbors, had seen on Saturday, a cylindrical luminous object.
Inset: Mr. François Bouiller, who saw the "cigar" on Monday as it flew off.
[Photo caption 2:] Mrs. Thérèse Fourneret shows the traces left by the craft where it landed. A surface of one square meter was stripped. On the edges of the imprint, the earth has been sucked under the grass, as shown by the position of our collaborator's hand. (Photo B. R.)
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between the two wooded slopes of the hills, a few hundred meters from the village.
Monday evening, Mrs. Fourneret was alone. She was getting ready to put her toddler to bed, and opened the window.
What she saw nailed her on the spot.
At about twenty meters, a luminous body was swinging gently in the air at the height of the plum tree, as if it was preparing to land.
Its dimensions? "About three meters in diameter," Mrs. Fourneret told me.
That's all the precision she can give. She hardly remembers that the object was of an orange-yellow color, dimly illuminating the foliage of the nearby plum tree.
For an hour, Mrs. Fourneret and Mrs. Bouiller remained locked at home in double lock.
It is then that two neighbors arrived, MM. Girardot and Vincent. Informed, they armed themselves with their rifles and headed for the meadow.
There was nothing left, neither craft nor marauding "Martian". But, less than three meters from the trunk of the tree, a very fresh imprint attests that Mrs. Fourneret has not been dreaming.
Forming a trapezoid, with quite irregular sides, of about 1.50 m. in height, 0.50 m. at its small base and 0.70 m. to the large, an entire area of the meadow has been stripped, exposing the land. On the fresh scratch, white worms are still stirring, cut in half.
The grass fell in clumps within a radius of three to four meters, following a vaguely ovoid line, which "roughly" follows the shape of the trace.
On its edges, the earth is "excavated" under the grass. It seems that this part of the meadow was sucked up with extraordinary violence, when the craft left, and that the lifted clods fell back in sheaves, like drops from a jet of water. Curious detail: a plant with deep roots remained, alone, in the center of the bare earth.
No traces of burns. No footprints around.
Yet the craft remained at least half an hour in the same place. Indeed, returning from his work, a young 18-year-old man, François Bouiller saw it as it was gaining altitude, heading south.
"I was terribly scared," young François said to me. "I saw this craft which sped in the night, taking on a greenish yellow hue as it moved away. It looked like a fuselage of a plane without wings."
François returned home, looking defeated. What he saw confirms Mrs. Fourneret's statements.
Other people in the area also saw the cigar when it left.
Alerted, the gendarmes of the Saint-Seine brigade came to carry out an investigation under the direction of Captain Millet, commander of the Semur section.
Photos and samples have been taken.
But will they make it possible to identify the object which in all likelihood landed on Monday evening in the meadow of the factory?
Would the region in turn be the target of the strange sky prowlers, which are reported everywhere every day?
We learned, during our investigation, that several reliable people, including the former mayor, Mr. Guainet had seen, on Saturday evening, a strange luminous apparition.
"I was finishing milking the cows, Mrs. Guainet told me. The dogs who usually stay with me had come out a few seconds earlier barking in the direction of the wood. One of them, Grignousse, came back to me, "all wrapped up", as I stepped out into the courtyard.
"A strange fact struck me: the courtyard was softly lit as by the moon in its waning.
"The moon is very odd tonight, I thought. Looking up, I saw, above the wood, a strange luminous craft, a kind of cylinder moving vertically and appearing to fly low. It was moving east at about the speed of a large airplane.
"Terrorized, I called my husband and my daughter Yvette. A neighbor joined us".
All of them saw the extraordinary apparition, the orange mass which was surrounded in green, slowly disappear behind the hill.
Several other residents witnessed the phenomenon, as well as Mr. Boucherot, who was in Pelbrey.
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Mrs. Fourneret, who did not believe in "flying saucers", cannot explain what she saw.
But she hasn't changed her mind.
Mr. and Mrs. Guainet, on the other hand, who did not believe in saucers either, are now convinced of their existence.
Each his own truth!
