The 1954 French flap:

SAUCERS (Continued)

In Coulommiers, a road worker saw a flying mushroom

COULOMMIERS, October 2 (dispatch "France-soir")

BERNARD GOUJON did not believe in flying saucers. Today he does. He saw one at the same time as his colleague, Armand Pichet, a road worker for the Bridges and Roads Department of Coulommiers.

Bernard Goujon is a sturdy fellow of thirty, healthy, rosy-cheeked, and certainly not prone to hallucinations. He lives in Faremoutiers.

- It was Thursday evening, he said, it was raining. Pichet and I were digging on the road from Maisoncelles to Meaux, near the Quincy-Voisins airfield. Suddenly, at 5:10 p.m., 500 meters away in the fields, I saw a kind of enormous mushroom shining like aluminum and I said to Pichet: "That looks just like a flying saucer!"

"Pichet was speechless. He had no desire to learn more about these machines, he hid in the ditch, but he said to me: 'Run to it.' I ran across the fields and could see the saucer more and more clearly. It really looked like a big mushroom, about three meters in diameter. On the upper part was a cabin with three portholes, and the machine rested on three struts arranged in a triangle. I approached, but when I got about a hundred and fifty meters from the saucer, I was suddenly stopped. I couldn't move forward or backward. I felt tingling all over as if I were electrified. At the same time, my vision blurred and... I had the biggest fright of my life.

"It lasted 30 or 40 seconds. Then I saw the machine rise slowly, spinning on itself like a falling leaf, up to twenty or twenty-five meters in height, and then it suddenly disappeared as if sucked up by the clouds."

Bernard Goujon claims he heard no engine noise and saw no flames or smoke. On the ground, only three marks remained, left by the struts, which the gendarmes of Coulommiers came to record.

Bernard Goujon's account was, moreover, confirmed by Pichet, as well as by statements from several cyclists who, passing along the road, also saw the extraordinary machine.

Whistling cigar in the Saône-et-Loire

LYON, October 2 (dispatch "France-soir"). -- Two young workers from Blanzy (Saône-et-Loire), Romain Bastiani, 20, and Bruno Buratto, claim to have seen, in a freshly plowed field, a craft shaped like a cigar.

"It was a slight whistling that caught our attention," they declared. "The craft was about two meters long and as thick as a tree. The pointed end was yellow, the rest of the cigar brown. At the front of the craft, two legs (sic) were resting directly on the ground. As we were about to approach the device, the cigar rose vertically at great speed, disappearing with a very soft whistle."

• A SHINING BALL was seen moving across the sky followed by a trail of gray smoke by Mr. Sabouraud, café owner in Belesta (Ariège).
• A GLOWING CIGAR was sighted by ten people, including a grocer and a police officer in Agen.
• A FLYING SAUCER astonished the entire crew of the cargo ship "Port-Lyautey" and especially the chief mate, who saw the machine land on the sea between Royan and Brest and take off vertically, emitting a red glow.
• A BLOWTORCH emitting a white glow was seen by three workers from Saint-Hilaire-les-Cambrai yesterday at 6 a.m.
• TWO LUMINOUS SPHERES, one white, the other greenish, astonished a ferryman from Grand-Couronne, near Rouen, Mr. Jean Andrieux. Another witness also saw the strange spheres disappear at full speed.
• A SMALL HELMETED MAN, booted and armed with a "ray gun with paralyzing beams," climbed back into his saucer-helicopter, which rose vertically with a shrill whistle and emitted a thick cloud, according to Mr. Georges Gatay, site foreman at Marcilly-sur-Vienne. His testimony was confirmed by six other quarry workers.
• A FLYING CIGAR was observed in the sky above the Garonne Valley, at Marmande, by Mr. Gay, a former butcher. Flying at high altitude, the cigar seemed to be following the river as a terrestrial landmark.