Route 115 Northeast / Ceret, FR being encounter — August 22, 1956

On August 22, 1956, at about 11:50 a.m., a woman identified as Mme Porta was travelling by moped on Route 115 between Le Boulou and Céret. She reported being overtaken by two unusually large motorcycles, each carrying two riders. The machines looked highly polished or nickel-plated and, despite their size and close passage, reportedly made no sound. All four riders wore fawn-coloured, satin-like outfits, boots and closely fitting helmets. Large dark or smoked visors concealed their faces. After passing her, the motorcycles stopped across the road. Mme Porta squeezed through the remaining gap while the helmeted figures looked toward her. Once she had travelled roughly ten yards farther, she turned around and found the riders and machines gone, again without hearing them depart. Marcel Vidal's account appeared in Flying Saucer Review in 1969 and was subsequently collected in discussions of anomalous road vehicles. The story does not contain an airborne saucer, an observed transformation or visible nonhuman anatomy. The four riders are the reported subjects of the encounter, not four additional witnesses. Nor does the described sequence establish an electrical failure of the moped. The illustration therefore shows the witness, the four fully helmeted riders and their two motorcycles, explicitly preserving the absence of a reported spacecraft.