10/17 & 10/27/1952 - Hundreds of Witnesses, Oloron and Gaillac, France

On Friday, October 17, 1952, the weather at Oloron was superb, with a sky of cloudless blue. About 12:50 p.m., M. Yves Prigent, the general superintendent of the Oloron high school, was preparing to sit down to lunch in his apartment on the second floor of the school. With him were Mme. Prigent, a schoolmistress, and their three chiIdren. The windows of the apartment opened on a wide panorama to the north of the town. Jean Yves Prigent was at the window and was just being called to the table, when he cried out: "Oh papa, come look, it's fantastic!"

The whole family joined him at the window, and this is M. Prigent's account of what they saw:

"In the north, a cottony cloud of strange shape was floating against the blue sky. Above it, a long narrow cylinder, apparently inclined at a 45 degree angle, was slowly moving in a straight line toward the southwest. I estimated its altitude as 2 or 3 kilometers. The object was whitish, non-luminous, and very distinctly defined. A sort of plume of white smoke was escaping from its upper end. At some distance in front of the cylinder, about thirty other objects were following the same trajectory. To the naked eye, they appeared as featureless balls resembling puffs of smoke. But with the help of opera glasses it was possible to make out a central red sphere, surrounded by a sort of yellowish ring inclined at an angle. The angle", according to M. Prigent, "was such as to conceal almost entirely the lower part of the central sphere, while revealing its upper surface. These 'saucers' moved in pairs, following a broken path characterized in general by rapid and short zigzags. When two saucers drew away from one another, a whitish streak, like an electric are, was produced between them.

"All these strange objects left an abundant trail behind them, which slowly fell to the ground as it dispersed. For several hours, clumps of it hung in the trees, on the telephone wires, and on the roofs of the houses."

Such is the extraordinary history of the "gossamer" (fils de la Vierge) scattered over the countryside of Oloron by a flight of unknown machines.

These fibres resembled wool or nylon. When rolled up into a ball, they rapidly became gelatinous, then sublimed in the air and disappeared. Innumerable witnesses were able to collect some and observe this phenomenon of rapid sublimation. The school's gymnastic teacher gathered a large bunch from the playing field. The teachers, much interested, found that the fibres burned like cellophane when ignited. The science teacher, M. Poulet, examined the fibres closely, but did not have time to carry out a chemical analysis.

However, he was able to witness the sublimation and complete disappearance of a thread about a dozen meters long, which he had wound on a stick. ,

The flying objects and the "gossamer" were observed not only by the abovementioned witnesses and by numerous other residents of Oloron, but also in the countryside round about: in the village of Geronce (notably by the mayor, M. Bordes), by hunters in the Josbaigt valley, etc.

The onl explanation of the phenomena of Oloron that has ever been proposed is the following: the witnesses who describe a cylinder and saucers never saw any such thing; and those who collected the fibres were unable to recognize it for authentic gossamer, "produced by myriads of migrating spiders."

This explanation, which appeared in the newspapers of Oct. 22 and 23, was attributed to "entomologists." I have vainly attempted to discover what entomologists. But according to these anonymous authorities, spiders in autumn spin vast skeins which, inflated by the wind, carry them "in myriads" over plain and mountain. A far fetched explanation, and worse than false absurd; for it forgets one point: the fibres disintegrated in several hours at most. I have never observed that gossamer disintegrates in such a manner. If it did, the spiders would not be able to spin their alleged skeins: like new Penelopes, they would never have time to finish their work, constantly spinning at one end while the other evaporated in the air. What, then, are we to think? The mystery remains impenetrable: clouds of strange form, plumed cylinder, yoked saucers advancing by zigzags, gossamer evaporating on the ground it is all a phantasmagoria that defies good sense. Might the words "good sense" furnish the key? Must we invoke the notorious "collective hallucination"? But what an incredible prodigy would be a hallucination which, for no apparent reason, imposed on a whole region a unanimous, precise, simultaneous, and incomprehensible vision! Would we not, in this, be faced with a mystery even more inexplicable than if we adopted the naive interpretation that the vision was real?

But never mind all that. Let us invoke hallucination, error, psychosis, whatever you please. Remember that this took place on the 17th of October. Ten days passed time enough for entomologists, psychiatrists and yam spinners to recover and then on October 27th, at 5 p.m., the whole thing started up all over again in the sky of Tam, at Gaillac.

Return Over Gaillac

At about 5 p.m. on that day, Mine. Daures, living on Toulouse Road in Gaillac, was induced to go out into her farmyard by a noisy commotion among the chickens. Thinking her flock threatened by a hawk, she raised her eyes to the sky and saw there exactly what the Oloronese had seen ten days before.

Mme. Daures called her son, then two neighbors, then a third. But already many residents of Gaillac were scanning the skies, among them two under officers of the police brigade in all, about a hundred known witnesses. All give the same description, which is rigorously identical to that of Oloron: long plumed cylinder inclined at 45 degrees, progressing slowly to the southeast in the midst of a score of 'saucers', which shone in the sun and flew two by two in a rapid zigzag. The only difference is that here some pairs of saucers occasionally descended quite low, to an altitude estimated by the observers as 300-400 meters. The spectacle lasted for about 20 minutes before the cigar and its saucers disappeared over the horizon.

By this time masses of white threads were beginning to fall, just as at Oloron. They continued to fall for a long time after the disappearance of the objects.

The Gaillac observers compared the fibres to glass wool. As at Oloron, many people gathered them up. As at Oloron, they became gelatinous, then sublimed and disappeared. Neither here nor at Oloron was there anyone to ound who thought of putting some into a sealed container, or of collecting the gas given off for later analysis.

The Truth About Flying Saucers, Aime Michel, Pyramid paperback, ISBN 0-515-03435-5, 1956

Two of the most spectacular Type II events; though common in the 1950s, these cases seem to have largely ceased to occur.

The combination of multiple independent witnesses, some technically qualified, with long duration, physical remains, and a repeat 10 days apart makes this one of the most important events.