UFOs in the daily Press:

The note by Master Picatal

Saucers, rockets and cigars

WE NEED MYTHS

We live, it appears, in the century of lights. Science (with a capital S please) must provide for all and replace the old fetishes. I, I would agree. But what did I read in the "Nouvelle République" of Bordeaux for October 6? This, that I report to you while shortening it (and that is a shame for the subject is "rounded with relish"):

• On October 1, Mr. Jean Defiz, 26 years old, assembler in central heating in Bergerac, was going back home around 11 p.m.. Black night, thick, without a light at the horizon. Suddenly, just above his head, at high altitude, an intense light goes down at a vertiginous speed towards the ground. It is not a shooting star, ensures Mr. Defiz, but a craft having the shape of a rocket which is coloured with three resumptions of a greenish colour. The eyes rivetted on the apparatus, Mr. Defiz sees under the half-spherical black cupola three crutches which slowly folded up while the apparatus, in a whistle of air, reaches height again and is soon lost in the clouds.

That is not bad already, but there is better. The following day, a neighbor retired of S.N.C.F. [national railway co], Mr. Jean Labonne, 63 years old, discovers in his garden, at 10 p.m., a luminous craft having the shape of a mushroom and built out of plexiglass (sic).

Let's hear Mr. Labonne:

• "Suddenly, in front of me, within three meters hardly, appearing to block the alley of my garden to me, a shadow.
• "Who is there? I shouted. Who are you? What do you want from me? I did not dare to take a step. At the sound of my voice, the black form made a half-turn, slipped to the machine and, in a few seconds, the craft rose towards the sky followed by a trail of light. I very clearly saw, under the cupola, three crutches which folded up. At dawn, I returned in my garden, close to the place where I had seen the craft. On the fatty ground, I discovered three light prints; but what upset me more, was unknown mushrooms, long of stem, of black colour, flowering in the area, which had suddenly grown. I did not dare to touch and besides they dissipated like dew with the first rays of the sun."

I remember that during a session at the House, around 1906, the unfortunate Rene Viviani (dead insane) declared in a beautiful manner (1) [1]: "We have extinguished in the sky lights which shall not be relight".

Viviani was wrong: something is re-ignited in the sky, but oh derision, they are... flying saucers!

Please don't tell me that in Bergerac like elsewhere where people of perfect good faith believe to have seen something in the sky, do not tell me, that these are simple phenomena of hallucination. The "thing" undoubtedly does not exist per se: it exists for the visionaries who need to believe in the fantastic.

Because, come on, what does one offer to Mr. Defiz or Labonne? A materialist civilization where the top of the top consists in having a car (myth of the mechanical power), or a fridge, or a television set (myths of the false comfort and false culture).

Very sorry, but that has nothing to do with the true civilization which, on the contrary, is founded on individual poverty and renouncement.

The only great highly civilized eras, I'm not telling anything new here, were thes Magdaledian, Egyptian, Greek and medieval eras. Why? Because men of these times, animated of a profound faith, had powerful reasons to hope.

What can we hope today when, according to the famous word of Nietzsche, "God is dead?"A car, and to sing:

At last I have a car (bis)
It's super how it's fast...

... or a democratic Vespa [2], unless it is a washing machine or a coffee grinder...

Very well, but satiety comes quickly from what one owns and which one can inventory, but the spirit remains dissatisfied.

This is why, in the absence of true miracles in a faithless century, we see the flying saucers thriving, the "Christ of Montfavet" [3], innumerable small churches ejusdem farinae [4], while waiting for a new blaze of catharism [5].

Man needs valuable myths and the sky is empty. Give us something else than flying saucers...

PICATAL
aka Léo MAGNE

(1) Editors note. -- Voici la péroraison de René Viviani, ministre du Travail du Cabinet Clemenceau (discours prononcé le 8 novembre [...] Here the peroration of Rene Viviani, Minister for Labour of the Clemenceau Cabinet (speech given on November 8 [...]