Case description
Marcel Sénéchal, a 20-year-old steelworker, reported an unusual sight while cycling home toward Saint-Amand-les-Eaux along the Scarpe towpath at Nivelle. Nord-Matin's contemporary account places it around 1 a.m. after a Saturday evening visit to his fiancée, corresponding to early 3 October 1954. Later catalogue times range around 12:15–12:20 a.m., and the locality is frequently misspelled Nivelles.
Near the Vandeville pasture, Sénéchal said he heard speech in an unfamiliar language. Looking down from the path, he saw a luminous, haystack-shaped mass emitting a ray of light, with two humanlike figures about 1.2 metres tall in shiny garments nearby. Frightened, he cycled away and told his family and neighbors. Police commissioner Gravet and two air-police inspectors later searched but found no traces. The newspaper says his bicycle lighting had already failed; it does not establish that the object caused that fault.
Later books changed the shape to a roughly three-metre sphere and added larger heads and smaller stature. Barthel and Brucker subsequently asserted that the story was invented, but the underlying official documentation for that conclusion was not recovered here. The reconstruction follows the early press version while noting the later allegation and absence of physical evidence.
