The 1954 French flap:

"Flying saucers exist and carry animals as passengers"

says an expert in aeronautics

MARSEILLE, August 28 (dispatch "France-Soir").

Mr. HENRI COANDA, a scientist of international renown currently conducting experiments on solar energy in La Londe, a village in Provence between Toulon and Le Lavandou, believes in the existence of flying saucers. To a journalist from Marseille who came to interview him, he even specified that such craft had been built and tested by means of remote control.

"These craft," he told the newspaper, "carried animals as passengers. The first saucers brought them back dead, but later others returned alive."

When asked, "Are you aware of experiments with human passengers?" Mr. Henri Coanda replied: "No, but some nations may have succeeded in putting pilots in these craft. If not yet, it will be achievable within a year or two."

No mystery

Here is the core of Mr. Coanda's statement.

- There is nothing mysterious about the appearance of flying saucers, which do not come from any other planet than ours. They are simply lenticular aerodynes, the scientific name for what you call flying saucers. Take a five-franc coin between your thumb and index finger, placed two or three centimeters above a piece of paper. If you blow on the coin, you'll see the paper rise. So, if by any means a strong airflow is created under a disk, the disk will lift and remain motionless in the air. The displaced air flows left and right. Direct it using suitable tubing (there are 180 tubes on my saucer model) to one side of the disk and prevent it from escaping from that side. The saucer will move at a speed that can reach 1,000 meters per second. For now, we have not exceeded this prodigious speed of about 3,600 kilometers per hour.

Let us add that Mr. Henri Coanda, a Romanian-born scientist settled in France, is a specialist in aeronautical matters.

A flying saucer in the sky of Noirmoutier

LA ROCHELLE, August 28 (dispatch "France-Soir"). While he was at sea the other night, a sailor from the port of Barbâtre, on the island of Noirmoutier, Mr. Léon Tessier, claims to have seen a glow in the sky coming from the marsh, heading southwest. According to him, it was a flying saucer. Visible for several minutes, the object was also seen by three vacationers.

The Martian in Norway:
"We really saw a saucer," say the two blueberry pickers

OSLO, August 28 (dispatch "France-Soir"). The two young Norwegian women who claimed to have seen a flying saucer piloted by a... Martian while picking blueberries stand by their story. Their claim is gaining credibility because U.S. helicopter pilot Bailly Paurot denies landing in the area where the girls were.

"No helicopter," said a police officer after examining the clearing, "could have landed there."