[BLANK] reported cigar cylinder observation — April 24, 1949

Looking at the sky, he saw a huge, silent, motionless luminous mass, apparently suspended above the north bank of the river some 300 yards away. "It looked," he said, "like a gigantic cigar standing on end. For a very short time I could see the disk full-face; it was surrounded by a halo of brilliant light." A few minutes after it had disappeared behind him, going southwest at prodigious speed, a similar object came from the cigar and went through the same maneuvers. Two policemen making their rounds at 1:00 a.m. also observed the phenomenon, as had an army engineer southwest of the town of Vernon. Speaking of policemen: if those same two policemen had reported that they had seen two things beat up a victim and take to the woods, their testimony might be sufficient to send someone to the chair; but when something violently unusual comes up, like this, or if they had seen the angel Gabriel riding along on a nine-legged octopus, no one would, of course, believe them. I remember back in 1947, a policeman in Oregon who was feeding pigeons in back of the station house, observed some flying disks. It was 1:00 p.m. on the Fourth of July, just two weeks after Kenneth Arnold had reported the first real newspaper case in the U.S.S.on June 24, 1947-the classic case from whence sprang the name "flying saucer." He reported having seen "saucer-like objects" flying over Mt. Three weeks later, September 14, there was a repetition--In broad daylight, and observed by hundreds of witnesses in a half dozen villages in the general area 250 miles S.W. of Paris. One witness reported: "It was about five in the afternoon. Emerging from the thick layer of clouds that looked like a storm coming up, we saw a sort of luminous blue violet mist, of a regular shape something like a cigar or a carrot. Whenever it moved, its movements had no connection with the movement of the clouds, and it moved all of a piece, as if it were actually some gigantic machine surrounded by mists. Then it stopped, and the point rose quickly until the object was in a vertical position, where it became motionless. "During this time the dark clouds went on scudding across the sky, dimly lighted from underneath by the violet luminosity of the object. At first it pointed to the ground but finally rose up to describe around the vertical object an ascending spiral.