The article below was published in the daily newspaper Libération, Paris, France, pages 1 and 5, on October 14, 1954.
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Among the overabundant harvest of flying household object sightings that, for several days now, Agence France-Presse (unofficial) has been tossing our way all day long - and which the so-called sensationalist press eagerly amplifies (as if a mystery were better than the truth) - we came across the following dispatch yesterday:
Châteaubriant, October 13 (A.F.P.)
A 13-year-old boy, young Gilbert Lelay, claims to have seen a mysterious craft last night around 10:30 p.m. in a field about 600 meters from his parents' home in the village of Sainte-Marie-en-Erbray, near Châteaubriant. The child says he observed the craft for ten minutes from about ten meters away. It had the shape of a glowing cigar. A passenger - an individual dressed in a suit and gray hat, wearing boots - reportedly told him in French: "Look, but don't touch." He placed a hand on the boy's shoulder while holding in the other hand a ball emitting purple lights. He then entered the craft through a door that he slammed shut. On what seemed to be a dashboard were several multicolored buttons. Still according to the child, the craft slowly rose vertically, shooting lights in all directions, circled twice in the air, and suddenly disappeared.
This story is no nastier or more original than the others. But is A.F.P. now going to publish every story children tell, on any subject whatsoever? Surely not - there soon won't be room left to print actual “information,” which is supposed to be the role of a news agency.
So why this rush to broadcast all these dispatches from correspondents, indiscriminately, without
Jacques DEROGY
Continued on page 5 – Col. 7
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Continued from P.1–Col. 7
...verification, without control, without investigation into the authenticity of the "testimonies" or the good faith of the "witnesses"? Is it really informing the public to scatter in all directions, indiscriminately, village gossip, pranks by well-meaning jokers, and the anxieties of crowds facing one phenomenon or another? Isn't it more likely contributing to the spread of a collective psychosis?
We believe it's time to break free from this cascade of descriptions, from this epidemic that is reaching implausible proportions and may lead us to a general case of stiff neck - or worse, to the brink of collective madness.
We've made enough jokes about the "Martians" and other little, hairy, good-natured "Uranids" who visit a few lucky country folk, mistake orchards for landing strips, come to warm themselves at the local bakery, lose their bearings near Limoges, and pose in ultra-flexible suspenders for the amateur photographers of a certain weekly. It could become tiresome for our readers to keep listing the more or less wacky testimonies we receive daily - sometimes hourly. Yesterday, it was two fairground workers in Clamecy who, seeing a cylindrical object 50 meters away, said they felt an electric shock, while the engine of their truck stalled; a local councilor, a café owner, a rugby player, and a swimming champion reported a fireball above the chapel of Brouilly in Belleville-sur-Saône; a milk transporter from Saint-Etienne saw his headlights go out under the effect of a mysterious green ray streaking across the sky; a math teacher from Lisieux said he tracked the jerky movements of a silver disc, between 200 and 300 meters in altitude... There's no reason to believe this flying dish carousel will stop spinning our contemporaries' heads. But at least, we could stop the avalanche of false testimonies, fabrications, hoaxes, and descriptions made in bad faith, which undoubtedly represent the vast majority of recent reports - simply by questioning the witnesses, as we did last week with the gendarmes from Coulommiers, to unmask the hoax of a local road worker.
What would remain is to conduct a rigorous investigation into the credible sightings - such as the one launched by the military authorities into the phenomenon reported by numerous visitors to the Metz trade fair and by army spotlight operators who, on Sunday evening, were sweeping the Metz sky with their searchlight beam. For several hours, both groups saw a luminous circle motionless at high altitude, caught in the spotlight's beam. The radar service, also set up at the army stand, tried in vain to "contact" the strange circle. Based on preliminary information, the phenomenon might be explained by the presence of a stabilized cumulus cloud illuminated by the full moon, which at that time was hidden behind a curtain of clouds.
There is no doubt that there are things in the sky we do not understand. But this we does not uniformly include all individuals. For a shepherd in the Massif Central who has never seen a helicopter, such a craft might appear to be a "flying saucer" - especially when that's all people talk about. For city dwellers unfamiliar with certain natural phenomena - perhaps better known to shepherds - such as halos, sundogs and mock moons (parhelia), the rising of Venus, or the Brocken spectre (a person's shadow projected onto mist and surrounded by an iridescent halo, usually observed in the mountains), such things are enough to fuel "unidentified flying object" reports. Who can confidently say they've seen ball lightning or recognized the dazzling brightness - brighter than the moon - of a weather balloon lit by the rays of the setting sun beyond the lower cloud layer? Who can guess the speed of the iridescent blotch created by car headlights hitting a cloud ceiling on an incline? Who has truly followed a meteor's fall?
There would thus not be one type of flying saucer, but 10 or 20 types. For if flying saucers exist, why would they come in so many colors and shapes? The truth is, we do not yet understand all the anomalies of the sky.
Yesterday, we met with scientists and highly qualified technicians. Some display a form of indifference - perhaps scientifically justified, but contemptuous toward public opinion. Others, though equally skeptical, admit - without concern - that while they are familiar with weather balloons, jet planes, new experimental devices, fireballs, parhelia, and high-altitude mirages, they may never have seen some rarer phenomena, which are becoming more frequent today.
"Who's to say that the radioactive clouds drifting through the sky in recent years aren't producing new electrostatic phenomena, for example? We are far from understanding all meteorological and atmospheric phenomena."
In any case, one thing is certain: publishing, indiscriminately, every dispatch from every town in France will not help us detect a genuinely new phenomenon - if such a phenomenon exists. Nor will we get anywhere by asking an array of technicians - if not outright scientists - to analyze vague and incomplete "testimonies."
Some have called for the creation of an investigative committee to review reported sightings. The role of such a committee should be, first and foremost, to dismiss and expose hoaxers, those who encourage them, and those who exploit them - and to retain only those statements that are truly usable and objectively meaningful.
And we do not hesitate to call for sanctions against charlatans and bad-faith witnesses.
Only then - only then - will science maintain its dignity by addressing a problem that is finally being framed in clear terms.
J. DEROGY.
