The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Est Républicain, France, page 9, on October 15, 1954.
Paris. -- The record of flying saucers was further increased by several testimonies, one from a mechanic from Léguevin (the Haute-Garonne), let the gendarmes and the military authorities think for a few hours that they were in presence neither more nor less of a case of espionage!
Jean Marty, 42, rushed Wednesday morning to the gendarmerie brigade to inform the representatives of the law of his strange discovery.
"I was working last night in my studio, on the roadside of Toulouse, when I noticed near Léguevin a kind of luminous disk that seemed to float in the air. It Was not more than 5 meters from the ground, but as soon as I approached, it rose noiselessly to the vertical and disappeared."
"Intrigued, I approached the place where it had to land and my attention was suddenly drawn to the middle of the field by two sheets of white glossy paper covered with printed letters, and I picked them up carefully."
The gendarmes leaned over, intrigued, onto the pieces of evidence. The sheets, commercial-type, were neither stained, nor damp, nor wrinkled, but of absolute clarity, as if they had just been torn from a new brochure.
"But it's Chinese!" exclaimed one of the gendarmes. Fortunately Léguevin counts among its residents a brave soldier in retirement and polyglot, Mr. Maggy. It was a text written in an Annamese dialect, the Kuoc-Nn. The sheets are numbered 9-10 and 59-60, they come from a brochure reproducing an off-set, A typewritten document, but be careful, Mr. Maggy concludes gravely, "I do not understand everything, it's about Vietminh and Vietnam."
This peremptory statement was enough to trigger a genuine investigation, the gendarmerie handing the two sheets revealing no doubt of an important espionage affair between the Martians, the Indochinese and the French, to military authorities.
It was air safety that took the matter into its own hands and did it fast. A duly qualified translator was summoned, who, after a few moments of examination, made it difficult to find an irresistible desire to laugh. "These leaves come from a brochure published by the services of Prince Buu-Loc, they were undoubtedly left in Leguevin by Vietnamese who came... to picnic!" The Vietnamese students are particularly numerous in Toulouse, and Léguevin, located about twenty kilometers away and close to the wooded areas of the Gers, offers to Toulouse a sought after walking area during their weekends. As for the ultra secret text, it deals with fish arrivals in the Indochinese harbors! Morality: do not let your papers around!
The region of Toulouse seems, moreover, to be a ground of predilection for the saucers pilots, because this "case of espionage" was scarcely classified that Mr. Olivier, industrialist in Toulouse, put again the authorities on the move. Wednesday, at 7:35 p.m., in a suburb of the city, Mr. Olivier saw a diaphragm of about 1m20, with a big head and two enormous eyes, which descended from a spherical gear posed in a vacant lot. The character came to him and his diving suit shone like glass. After a minute, he returned to his apparatus and had to bend to climb into it. He disappeared into the sky at a prodigious speed, leaving a trail of fire. "This is quite a shock," concluded Mr. Olivier, still under the thrill of emotion.
M. Laugere, a railwayman at the station of Montlucon, waited several days to tell his adventure, for he was afraid that his comrades would laugh at him. But as he saw in the newspapers that an ecnounter with a Martian was not so exceptional, he decided to speak. His story dates back to Sunday evening, Mr. Laugère crossed the tracks near the bridge of the S.N.C.F. on the river "Le Cher", when he saw a metal machine placed at a short distance from a reservoir of gas oil intended for the feeding of railcars. By the side of the apparatus, which had the form of a torpedo, and might have measured four meters, stood a man entirely covered with hair, unless he were dressed in a coat with long hair! Mr. Laugere, surprised, asked him what he was doing. The unknown replied in unintelligible terms, but the railwayman seemed to distinguish the words "diesel". The railwayman wished to return to the station to give the alarm, but scarcely had he made a hundred yards when he saw the apparatus rise vertically without noise.
