The article below was published in the daily newspaper La Croix, Paris, France, page 6, on October 14, 1954.
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A 13-year-old boy, the little Gilbert Le Lay, claims to have seen, Tuesday evening, a mysterious craft in a meadow, some 600 meters from his parents' home, in the village of Sainte-Marie en Erbray, near Châteaubriand.
The child wreportedly stayed for ten minutes to observe this craft which had the shape of a phosphorescent cigar. A passenger, but this time dressed in a suit and a gray hat, shod in boots, reportedly told him in French: "Look, but don't touch." This character put a hand on his shoulder, while, with the other, he held a ball throwing purple lights. On what could be the device's dashboard were several multicolored buttons.
Still according to the child, the craft slowly rose vertically, launching fires in all directions, made two turns in the air, and suddenly disappeared.
A motorist from Briatexte (Tarn), Mr. Jean-Pierre Mitto, technical agent in a company currently exhibiting at the "Arts Ménagers" in Toulouse, declared to have met, at nightfall, on the national road nr 631, the passengers of a flying saucer.
"Returning from Toulouse with two parents, he said, I suddenly made out in the beam of my headlights, two small figures who crossed the road, just a few meters from my car. I stopped immediately and, to our great astonishment, we then saw a large red disc with a diameter of about six meters flying away from a neighboring meadow, rising vertically. The craft disappeared in the sky in a few seconds."
Two residents of the Toulouse suburbs, Mssrs. Pierre Vidal and his nephew, Angel Hurle, were able to see, Tuesday morning, at dawn, barely a hundred meters from their house, a giant rocket which, starting from a field, quickly disappeared into the sky by creating a clarity of rare intensity.
The two men then went to the place where they located the starting point of the mysterious craft. There, they found that the grass had been packed onto a circular surface 5 meters in diameter. In the center of this area, they discovered four footprints in the ground that appeared to have been left by the feet of a heavy apparatuse.
The grass was covered with droplets from oily vapor condensation, which smelled like petroleum.
Police attended the scene.
A craftsman and his apprentice claimed to have seen around 3 a.m., on the Evreux-Louviers railway line, while they were driving on a motorcycle, a 2.50 meters to 3 meters high bell-shaped, which was one meter above the ground. The lower part of the craft was shaped like a ring. The craft emitted sparks with greenish and reddish reflections. It first did a 10 to 12 meter jump, while an orange glow shot from its base.
A farm worker joined the two men to observe the phenomenon. All three state that the "bell" remained visible for nearly an hour. Then the orange glow became brighter, and the craft rose very quickly vertically, heading east.
