The article below was published in the daily newspaper Paris-Presse, Paris, France, page 5, on September 24, 1954.
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Cigars, orange balls, green discs, phosphorescent globes: since Sunday, it's been a continuous parade of flying saucers of all models. You can see them everywhere: in the East, in the West, in Lorraine, in the Parisian suburbs, in England. Actress Michèle Morgan believes she saw two of them the other night above the Invalides.
Do they take off from Mars or do they come out fully armed with the imagination of spectators obsessed with tales of anticipation and the revelations of "skeptical" journalists? We still don't know. But we hesitate to qualify as jokers those who report these "apparitions" when among them are - this is the case near Châteauroux - two gendarmes in uniform and in the exercise of their functions.
The two gendarmes, MM. Courtaud and Peninon, were on patrol the other night in Montierchaume, when they saw a luminous machine immobilized in the sky, then two others of greenish color, at an altitude of about 1,500 meters.
A country keeper, M. Louis Moll, from Obersdorf [sic] (Moselle) also assures us that he saw Sunday in the sky "a weird thing" that arose near the village of Tromborn.
- The craft, he said, looked a bit like a small bus. It then took on the appearance of an orange ball.
It is also a phosphorescent ball, but red this times and followed by a luminous trail, that a butcher of Saint-Fargeau, Mr. Rabot, saw yesterday evening around 8 a.m. near Ponthierry, a few kilometers from Melun.
Mr. Rabot thought he was seeing things and fled to find his neighbor, Mr. Binet, who came out with his wife. Both saw the saucer like him, as it continued to move for a few minutes.
In the Hérault, it is a flying cigar "towing" a fiery red gobe, that three residents of Lodève saw the other evening.
It was also seen yesterday, in the Vendée, by about thirty people, in Sigournais and Saint-Prouant. It was purple blue and shaped like a carrot... "topped of a sort of disc".
An industrialist of Origny-en-Tiérache (Aisne), Mr. Chovel, said today that he also saw, the other night, an orange disc which moved a hundred meters above the trees, at a dizzying pace.
There will soon be a cigars and saucers traffic jam in the sky. Meanwhile, traffic was interrupted yesterday for an hour in Blackpool (England) by onlookers who contemplated a "round white object" swaying in the sky... and which, according to the authorities of the nearby aerodrome, may just be a simple weather balloon.
