The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Est Républicain, France, page 1, on October 15, 1954.
There was a curious atmosphere, the other Monday, at the weekly meeting of the Academy of Science... Indeed, the profane was mistaken: the scholars read their notes and communications in the midst of the ordinary hubbub of particular preservation: they spoke of no sensational discovery, and only a specialist could have been interested in scholarly commentaries on a point of transcendent mathematics, molecular chemistry or entomology. However, it is precisely in these particular conservations, in those whisperings of word-of-mouth that was a great part of the interest of the meeting; would you think it was only about flying saucers?
Let us say it without blushing: the most skilled and open-minded scientists in the modern world, while they oppose in public an incredulity without nuance to the stories of flying saucers, in the private and when conversation does not risk falling into the ear of indiscreet are much less sure.
It is because with the appearances of disks and cigars that multiply, the stories of landing, Which proliferate in chain and perplexity, even anxiety, which spread in the public, it is no longer possible to believe in a hoax of audacious mystifiers or a journalistic sea serpent that would have prodigiously grown and embellished. Two deputies, M. de Léotard and M. Jean Nocher, officially submitted the case to the Secretary of State for the Air. They are only translating the impatience and emotion of the public, which in haste to know if the saucers are the official truth, or if they announce an upcoming "War of the World" in the "science fiction" fashion.
A certain fact: there are "objects" in the sky every day, of which the dailies bring a abundant provender of new apparitions. In this all-coming, the waste is naturally considerable. When a single witness assures that he has chatted with a Martian, it is just strictly scientific to consider his story to be nothing. And it is no less certain that most of the brave people who imagine having seen a saucer simply saw a meteor, a plane at high altitude or... the planet Venus.
That a rigorous sorting is necessary, is what the American and Britishmilitary authorities thought. They conducted a careful investigation and concluded that, of all the observations submitted to them, 10 to 15 per cent only remained unresponsive to any "natural" explanation. This small percentage does not require us to think that there are no unusual objects in the sky, often luminous, generally maneuvering in silence and seemingly guided by intelligent thinking, maneuverability and acceleration capacity exceeding anything else we can imagine. As early as the 18th century astronomers had spotted discs and cigars. It remains to be wondered what these craft could be.
Although this assumption presupposes a major advance in our current aeronautical conceptions, it would be most plausible if the apparitions dated, indeed, from 1947. Well, long before 1900, long before one talked of atomic energy, jet engines and even aviation, observers had noted the existence of unidentifiable flying objects.
- French astronomer Messier signaled, on 17 June 1777, "a large number of dark disks";
- On 27 April 1863, at the Zurich Observatory, Wolf, an eminent specialist in solar studies, perceived, on the contrary, brilliant discs;
- On 1 August 1871, astronomer Coggia, from the Marseille Observatory, saw a meteor evolving and hovering so extraordinarily and for so long that the great Le Verrier reported it to the Academy of Sciences;
- At the end of the same month, on the 29th, it was Trouvelot who discovered other objects moving in the firmament abnormally;
- July 20, 1880, Trecul, of the Académie des Sciences, distinguished a luminous cigar;
- Another cigar appeared on November 17, 1882, in the eyes of the English astronomer Maunder;
- On July 21, 1896, Brooks, a famous discoverer of comets, revealed that a round black body was passing slowly before the disc of the moon etc ...
These irrefutable testimonies, all of which appear as in the records of the Academy of Science in the major English magazines "Nature" and "Observatory", prove one thing: observations of objects such as flying saucers, if they have multiplied since a few years, do not date from yesterday.
This truth, perhaps, will soon be known to us. It should be noted that today the Americans, who are considered realistic people, have nevertheless created, at White Sands, an Institute in charge of detecting whether the Earth possesses no other satellites than the Moon: that it already has, apparently, discovered two small ones gravitating a thousand kilometers from our globe at most; and that it is not absolutely sure that these two micro-satellites are natural.
