Neuilly L'eveque, FR being encounter — October 16, 1954

At about 6 a.m. on October 16, 1954, a 61-year-old Polish-born mason identified as Mr. César was cycling from Neuilly-l’Évêque toward work in Chalindrey. Thick fog covered the valley and the road toward Andilly. Near a railway crossing, he said he saw a small human figure in a pasture approximately 150 metres away. The contemporary newspaper gave its apparent height as roughly 1.5 metres. César reported that the figure approached an object resembling an inverted bowl, approximately 2.5 metres wide and one metre high. After the figure got inside, the object seemed to glide across the field for 20–30 metres before rising silently. César was frightened and hurried away. The newspaper described him as a respected, hardworking resident; that character testimony does not determine what the distant scene actually was. The explanation is a substantial part of the source history. Another newspaper reportedly identified the scene as a Renault 4 CV and a man collecting mushrooms in the fog. Jean Sider later rejected that account, while Patrick Gross reported independent local recollections in 2004 supporting the car-and-mushroom-picker explanation. Gross regarded the episode as a sincere misidentification, rather than a deliberate fabrication. The surviving documentation does not require an extraterrestrial visitor. The plate illustrates the proposed ordinary scene through heavy fog, with the cyclist and a distant human figure beside a low rounded vehicle. It labels that interpretation explicitly instead of inventing alien features absent from César’s description.