This article was published in the daily newspaper The Newark Star-Ledger, New York, USA, on September 24, 1954.
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THE RAGE IN FRANCE
To be anybody at all in France these days you practically have to have seen a flying saucer, preferably one of the iridescent ones that change color like a juke box.
Being able to down gallons of champagne, or owning a slightly rundown château or even attending an opening at a theater hardly counts.
Flying saucers, and now flying cigars, are "sighted" practically daily by witnesses who are upstanding citizens, model of probity and sobriety and pillars of the community.
Latest to report the phenomena was movie star Michèle Morgan who said she sighted a luminous disc hovering over the dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried.
"An old man near me also saw it," Miss Morgan said. "But he ran away."
Rainbow flying saucers are the rage in central France where draughtsman Jean Besse said he watched one Friday night through powerful binoculars. He said it changed color three times in a few seconds.
At Le Puy, west of here, hotel owner Marcel Maillet said he saw an iridescent saucer changing color like a juke box.
Louis Moll, a railway crossing guard at Oberdorff said he saw a saucer "land" last Sunday.
"It was about 7:15 P.M.," he said. "My eyes were blinded by a great luminous mass which seemed to touch the ground near the village of Tromborn. As it neared the earth, the color changed in what looked to me like Neon tubes. It was the shape of a small bus.
"IT TOUCHED the ground for about 40 seconds ...
Finally it flew off, straight up in the air, lighted by an orange glow which changed to red. I heard nothing."
At Origny - en Tierache, Robert Chovet, his wife and brother-in-law were driving along tuesday night when, he said, they practically ran down a flying saucer.
"It hovered several meters in front of us," he said. "An enormous orange disc at just about tree level. It was immobile for several seconds and then awooshed straight upward with dizzy speed."
