A farmer in Meral saw an orange spherical object land. As he approached, he saw it was a dome-shaped disc with a flat bottom. For ten minutes, it gave a blinding light for two hundred yards around. The color then changed to red, and the object took off at a great speed. The man’s clothes were covered with a white, sticky residue, which soon disappeared.102
Dr. Henri Robert in his village of Baillolet saw four objects flying at one thousand feet, each above the other. One floated down like a leaf, landing about 350 feet in front of his car. The doctor felt an electric shock while his engine and headlights died. Paralyzed, he saw a four-foot figure moving in the light of the object, then everything went dark. Some time later, his car was normal and he saw the object take off. He then reported this to the police. That day in Cier-de-Riviere, a young man returning with a mare from the fields noticed the animal become restless. He saw a small gray object, perhaps five feet wide, rise and hover above them. The mare then rose ten feet in the air, forcing him to release the bridle. After the animal fell, it could not move for about ten minutes and stumbled about for some time after. By then, the object was long gone. The man himself felt nothing.103
GLOBAL SIGHTINGS
Something odd was happening in France. But strange activity was going on everywhere. A hovering disc was photographed in Nelson, New Zealand, on September 9. The CIA noted a seven-second, multiple-witness sighting in Helsinki on September 14 of an intensely bright circular object that left a trail of reddish smoke. On the fifteenth, in Bihar, India, a disc-shaped UFO set off a panic, as it descended to five hundred feet and hovered over an American AEC mine. Eight hundred people fled to their homes. After apparent close-range observation, the craft swiftly ascended vertically. On September 17, thousands of people in Rome, Italy, watched a disc-like object that was tracked by Italian air force radar. On the eighteenth, green fireballs made another appearance in the American Southwest (Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas), and were again investigated by Lincoln La Paz. The next day, in the French West Africa town of Danane, officials saw an oval UFO with a dome and searchlights. Apparently there was activity of UFOs in Eastern Europe. On October 1, Romanian newspapers blamed the U.S. for launching a drive to induce a “flying saucer psychosis” in their country. In Yugoslavia, an especially dense wave of UFO sightings occurred between October 15 and 25. In the words of two investigators, flying saucers were seen “all over that country.” Thousands of witnesses near Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Lubljana described low-flying discs as well as large cigar-shaped objects at high altitudes. All this activity hardly reached the press in the land of Tito; the little that did was ridiculed.104
Worldwide, UFO sightings occurred briskly through October. Many were reported in the Middle East and North Africa. On October 5, hundreds of people in Mehalla-el Kobra, Egypt, saw a “spindle-like” object for twenty minutes. In Behnay, Egypt, cylinders in the sky emitted a thick smoke. One exploded, and the debris killed and burned two cows. A military officer photographed a “rotating saucer” that gave off smoke near the Suez Canal and sent it to the Egyptian army public relations office and the Helouan Observatory. Adm. Youssef Hammad, director of ports and lighthouses, alerted pilots and astronomers to watch for UFOs over Cairo.105
Late on October 9, a German man in Beirut, Lebanon, saw a strange object land, then ascend vertically with a spinning motion. On the tenth, in Alexandria, Egypt, observatories saw a red and green cylindrical flying object. In Teheran, at 2:30 A.M. on October 12, a man on the second floor of his house saw a luminous, white object hover about fifty feet from his window. Lights shone from various parts of the craft, and the witness clearly saw a small figure inside the craft, dressed in black, and wearing a mask with a hose. The man screamed and woke his neighbors, and the object shot straight up, emitted sparks, and vanished. Later that day in Morocco, a French engineer saw a small being in silver clothing enter an object which quickly took off.106
