Pons, FR being encounter — October 18, 1954

A resident of Pons, Charente-Maritime, reportedly saw a brief roadside landing during the French 1954 wave. October 18 is inferred from a reproduced Sud-Ouest article saying Monday morning; Vallée and many later summaries instead used October 21, apparently the dateline of a France-Soir dispatch printed on October 22. The exact date remains tied to that press chronology. The man said an oval or egg-shaped object, roughly five to six metres across, hovered and came down near the road several kilometres outside Pons. Two small men, estimated at about 1.25 metres tall, emerged and quickly returned inside. The object then rose vertically with a red trail. The account gives an observation of around a minute, but no reliable faces, clothes, equipment or conversation. The witness remains unidentified in the retrieved press-derived record. A claimed missed opportunity to use a camera is not photographic evidence, and no independent physical finding has been recovered here. The plate brings the representative roadside observer, egg-shaped craft and two low-detail figures together. The rising red trace is treated as a sequence element, not a second simultaneous craft; precise coloring, surface construction and likenesses remain illustrative.