The Marignane Airport Landing (Gabriel Gachignard)

Autumn 1952. Strange reports were coming in from across southern France. In October, witnesses at Oloron-Sainte-Marie and Gaillac spoke of "angel hair" drifting down from the sky. The great French wave of 1954 was still two years away.

At Marignane airport, near Marseille, Gabriel Gachignard was on night duty. He was a customs officer, a douanier. The night of Monday 27 October was about to give France one of its first landing reports.

It was 02:03. Gachignard saw something like a shooting star. It was a craft, and it was landing.

It came down outside the cement runway, on the grilles slightly to the right of his position. About 100 m away. It settled with a muffled sound.

A dark cigar. In his letter he put it at about 5 m long and 1 m high. Along it were portholes, lit pale, turning on and off.

Gachignard walked toward it. At about 50 m, "some kind of sparks" appeared at the rear. The craft took off at high speed, much faster than it had landed. Two seconds. It left with a sound he compared to a small July 14th rocket.

Le Provençal reported the story two days later. The ufologist and novelist Jimmy Guieu wrote to Gachignard, who replied with a written statement and a sketch dated 1 November 1952. Guieu published the account in the bulletin Ouranos in January 1953 as "Le cigare de Marignane".

No official inquiry has ever been found. No gendarmerie file, no Air Force report, nothing from GEIPAN. The work was private. Aimé Michel took up the case in 1958, and his version adds detail: four windows, 20 to 30 cm long, grouped in two pairs on top of the craft, and "a peculiar milky white throbbing light." Michel also recorded that the two Beloeuvre children saw a disc shaped object heading toward the airport at about the same time. The size shifts from telling to telling, 3 m, 5 m, 6 m. It is the same report.

In Nostra no. 77, on 9 March 1977, a former airport controller identified only as "R.G." confirmed the event. He added one more fact. There were no radars on site at the time.

In 1979 Michel Figuet and Jean-Louis Ruchon wrote that a counter-investigation was said to have established "without the slightest doubt" that the testimony was a hoax. Yet they admitted they had received no information about this counter-investigation. No investigator, no date and no document has ever been named.

No prosaic explanation, such as a meteor or an aircraft, has been published. On 4 January 1954 a second "landing" was reported at the same airport. Its metal debris turned out to be static dischargers from Lockheed Constellations. That answer does not reach back to 1952. Loren Gross asked what made Marignane "so different" that it would attract two alleged landings. He gave no answer.

The case passed into the catalogues. Jacques Vallée cited it in Challenge to Science. In 1977 Le Provençal returned to it in an anniversary feature. Gachignard's sketch and statement survive as scans. They record one customs officer, one airfield at night, and two seconds of sparks.