Sighting record / 1954
Upper Austria. Late September 1954. Two gendarmes from neighbouring villages near Efferding watched two luminous discs pass by and followed their movements across the sky. What came next was stranger. On the ground near the town, leaflets were found. They were printed in Czech. They urged Czechoslovak peasants to abandon the collective farms, and they were signed by the Czechoslovak Opposition. Vienna's Bild-Telegraf broke the story, and AFP carried it to France, where Libération joked that if these were Martians, they followed world politics very closely. The Austrian paper had its own answer. Remote-controlled machines, dropping propaganda over Czechoslovakia. The likeliest culprits were Free Europe Press balloons drifting out of Bavaria. Nobody ever proved it.
Autumn 1954. Flying saucers were front-page news across Western Europe. France was in the middle of its great wave. Discs were reported over Bonn, the West German capital. And in Austria, according to one Vienna tabloid, "saucers" had been reported regularly for some time.