Pournoy-la-Chétive landing: the children's "Martian in a cassock"

Autumn 1954. France was in the middle of a great wave of saucer reports. On 5 October the papers carried a story from Loctudy, in Brittany, about a "hairy Martian". Three days later, the story came to Pournoy-la-Chétive, a small village near Verny in the Moselle, about 20 km south of Metz.

Friday evening, 8 October. Gilbert Calba, 12, was near the village cemetery with Daniel Hirsch, 9, and his little brother Jean-Pierre Hirsch, 5. "In the sky, we saw something luminous," they told Le Républicain Lorrain. "It was a round machine of 2 m 50 of diameter approximately, which landed a little in front of us." It rested on three feet and was striped black, yellow and white.

A being came towards them. "Very small, 1 m 20 perhaps." "He had large eyes, a hairy face." He was dressed in a black cassock, like a priest.

In one hand he held a lit lamp, "a lamp which emitted rays". It dazzled them. The local paper added a luminous object in the shape of a cross in his other hand. "He said something in a language that we did not understand."

Then the light went out. "When he extinguished his lamp, we run away." Behind them, something in the sky was flying away, "very high, very fast, and very bright." Robert Maguin, 16, further off, saw the mysterious machine in the sky.

By 12 October the story was in France-Soir, Nord-Matin and papers across the country. The town, one paper wrote, was divided into two camps. The mayor, M. Delacour, chose his words with care: "I tell you frankly, I do not believe too much in flying saucers… But after all, there could have been something." For Calba, telling it earned a beating from his father.

Then, on 15 October, Le Républicain Lorrain ran a new headline: the saucer of Pournoy was only a vision. A discreet investigation had identified the "Martian" as an inhabitant of the locality. Kept at work all day, he could only collect grass for his rabbits after dark and had to use his flashlight several times near the cemetery. The children fled "in spite of the vain words of the 'Martian', who tried to make himself be recognized." The saucer, the paper concluded, was "pure imagination."

In 1979 Barthel and Brucker spoke with Calba and his playmates and reported that they had seen only a large shooting star. In April 1989 Jean Sider went back for Lumières dans la Nuit. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, now an adult, remembered a structured object with antenna and porthole, very bright, and said the grass did not grow back for 10 years at the landing site. Robert Maguin confirmed a red, orange and blue luminous ball. Calba admitted a luminous phenomenon but denied the humanoid, saying journalists had invented details.

Aimé Michel and Jacques Vallée treated it as a genuine close encounter. Others were less convinced. Peter Rogerson suggested it was "possibly based on the bolide of that night and seeing a local resident." Dominique Caudron called it a textbook case: a meteor, an inhabitant with a lamp, and journalists who embellished.

The embellishment is easy to trace. By 17 October the Baltimore Sun had the Martian at 5 feet, with a bearlike beard and a pointed glass helmet. None of it appears in the French papers.