The article below was published in the daily newspaper L'Humanité, Paris, France, page 8, on September 30, 1954.
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With all these stories of flying saucers and cigars, we will soon no longer know where to turn. Collective hallucination? From Isère to Brittany, people will strive to prove to you that among the (numerous) witnesses, this or that person is trustworthy, not at all hallucinating apparently, and whose uniform or title sometimes enhances their credibility.
We will therefore limit ourselves to recording them.
The Rhône, Isère, Drôme and Savoie have seen them. In the Arbre region [sic], a Parisian music-hall director is even said to have filmed a flying craft at 700 meters altitude. Let us wait for the film...
A young woman from Valence, who was walking near Chabeuil, reportedly encountered a sort of "cellophane scarecrow" whose vehicle - a disc - flew off with a whistling sound.
Near Lake Bourget, about fifteen motorists watched a disc for four minutes. One of the witnesses, a doctor from Chambéry, is a former artillery observer.
Mr. Gérard, a mechanic, and Mr. Paroux, a driver, who were driving a light engine from Nantes, saw on Tuesday evening, as they passed a place called "La Butte du Rouge," in the commune of Saint-Nicolas-de-Redon (Ille-et-Vilaine), a craft rising from the nearby marshes.
Finally, the captain of the Dutch cargo ship Groote-Beer and his five officers observed, using all the ship's optical equipment, a circular, luminous disc "the size of a half-moon" and in no way resembling a weather balloon...
...Nor a sea serpent.
Top left: an optical phenomenon artificially reconstructed in a laboratory; below: a weather balloon; right: a model of one of the countless oddly shaped flying devices designed in American research offices.
