Have you heard about the 2018 study that showed half of prenatal vitamins tested had unacceptable levels of heavy metals? No. Well, now you have. I'm Kat, mother of three and founder of Ritual, the company making traceability the new standard in the supplement industry. I remember staring at my prenatal vitamins and finding all these things I was trying to avoid - high amounts of heavy metals, synthetic colorants, and unnecessary ingredients. So, at four months pregnant I quit my job and started ritual. Because I believe that all women deserve to know what they're putting in their bodies and why. I'm so proud of our prenatal vitamin. The ingredients are 100% traceable, it's third party tested for microbes and heavy metals, and recently received the purity award from the Clean Label Project. You see, we trace like a mother because, let's be honest, no one cares quite like a mother. But don't just take my word for it. Just for yourself, with 25% off at ritual.com/preanetal. You slept through your alarm, missed the train, and your breakfast sandwich. Cool. Sounds like you could use some luck. I'm Victoria Cash, and Lucky Land is where people go every day to get lucky. At Lucky Land, you can play over 100 casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Go to LuckyLandslots.com and get lucky today. This is an Alien UFO podcast-extra episode, and I'm your host Simon Bowne. One mission here at the Alien UFO podcast is to investigate all things that are part of the wider UFO phenomena. I'm looking at UFO sightings, alien abduction, historic cases and other related events. And you can enjoy the extended Alien UFO podcast episodes at free, along with over 120 hours of extended episodes on Patreon. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review and be sure to subscribe. So in this episode, I'm talking to Graham Rendell about his book, the French UFO Wave of 1954. Graham is a full-time author and commentator on the unidentified aerial phenomenon issue. He is a contributor to the news website, DeBreath, and has authored six books on UFOs. Hi Graham, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast again. Hello Simon, thanks for the invitation, it's good to talk to you again. So we're going to talk about your book that's all about the French UFO Wave of 1954. And coincidentally, that's the name of the book. So that's sort of an obscure thing in a way, I suppose, a UFO Wave of 1954 in France. So how did you hear about it? I really first read about it back in the 1970s when I first started reading UFO books myself, and there was always these little references to cases which had happened back in the 1950s anyway. But then, as I read more and more, it seems that there was, as you say, a wave of sightings during that particular year. And actually during the last six months or so of that year as well, and they were quite concentrated, and there were several hundred of them. So it wasn't just a couple of dozen or something that constituted a wave. I think the numbers are something like five or six hundred, there's a lot of them. It might even be more than that, it might be getting on for about a thousand, depending on what sources you listen, you read, where you get your information from. And of course, that includes a lot of hoaxes as well, a lot of copycats, kind of things which were happening at that time as well. So were there lots of shapes and sizes, because it's almost if there's a wave, it might suggest there's one, I don't know, race of aliens that have decided to investigate that area. Yeah. Well, you'd like to think so, Simon. I mean, obviously if that had happened, if it had been one particular shape, or let's say you thought, you know, all UFO sightings throughout history had been one particular shape. It would be a lot easier to try and work out what's going on. But like a lot of other waves in successive decades, and if you just take the whole thing as a phenomenon, then the French UFO wave in 1954 was no different in so much as there was different shapes, different sizes, there was cigar-shaped objects, but there were other things which were described as being looked like haystacks and other things like that. So yeah, there was lots of different things. I suppose you could go mad in that sort of science fiction vein of thinking up some reason that suddenly all the aliens wanted to know what's happening in this part of France. Well, yeah, you could go off into all sorts of theories and, you know, entertain all kinds of reasons as to why it might happen. The short answer is we simply don't know, but there certainly was a concentration of sightings and cases from that particular period. When you're going through all the accounts, and there's a lot of them, isn't there? Yeah. Did you see anything that you might have looked at and thought, you know, this seems unique to France, or I've only ever really heard this happening in France? I don't think it was anything that was actually unique because the things that happened seem to sort of occur elsewhere. I guess one thing that might maybe sort of qualify as that, although there have been, I think there have been cases elsewhere afterwards, but this so-called angel hair phenomenon, where there's this kind of residue that was found adorning telephone wires or power cables and things like that. It was quite ephemeral, and it's almost like the description itself. It was quite wispy, a material that was supposedly tested at the time, but they couldn't find out what it was. And it's one of those things that, you know, to this day we don't really know what it is and how it was produced and exactly where it came from, you know, if it did indeed come from these mysteries of subject. And that phenomenon of angel hair was only around those years, even around the world. Yeah. It's not like people see it these days or in the last few decades. No, they don't. I mean, it was almost peculiar to that particular point in history. I think there have been some other cases, I can't recall one of the top of my head now, whether it's being a kind of residue left, but yes, you're right, and when this particular description certainly seems to be particular to France in that particular period. But there were other things that occurred, which we almost take for granted now as being part and parcel of certain UFO cases, your vehicle stops, for instance. So people driving, you know, going along their business about their business and driving a car or a motorbike, and all of a sudden the light steam and the engine fades and cuts out completely. And these were cases which there hadn't really been any of these beforehand, or if they had they were very underreported, whereas there was a concentration of these particular types of cases as well in 1954 and particularly in France. So you can see where certain things almost begin as well. And did the French press treat this the same way that we might see in the USA or the UK where it's kind of like, it's all a big joke and just ridiculing it all? Second sections did, yes, Simon, though there were certainly newspapers which trapped the stories as a bit of a joke, and the style of reporting kind of reflected that equally other provincial newspapers, national newspapers, tried to get the bottom of things, and they were treating it quite seriously, and there were interview witnesses, and there were kind of copying the beta into the reports, what they were saying, what they were seeing. But also there was the French police, the Jean-Darmoury, they were taking details down as well, and they were treating some of these particular sightings seriously, and they were coming out with voluminous reports on what was happening. So not only the press, but the police were taking some of these sightings very, very, very seriously. Were there any kind of standout military sightings, did they launch fighter jets after them? There are a few cases where aircraft were sent out, but like a lot of cases at this time across the world, the jets at the time were just completely outmaneuvered, there's a case that happened near Déjour at that particular time where something had been seen by civilians near the city, and the French Air Force had sent to fighter jets, but they had not been able to intercept whatever these things were, and this happened a few times. There are actually very few cases of pilots in France seeing these objects in mid-air, but there are certainly cases where aircraft were scrambled, but nothing of any account happened afterwards. So is there one sighting in the book that really stands out for you as being, I don't know if you'd call it the best one, or perhaps France's Roswell, or something like that? I don't think there's any Roswells in so much as things crash. There's certainly a lot of landings. There's a couple of interesting cases, there's one where a railway worker, he's called Marius De Wild, and he's basically going about his business with a cottage on the side of this particular branch line, and he comes across an object on the tracks with three very, very small beings, and that's a particular noted sighting, which happened, but there's also another case of two men who are basically going to work one morning, and very earlier there were stone masons, and they come off to one side of the road, and this is actually a kind of thing which happened a lot, people were travelling to work and they see things at the side of the road, and in a field nearby, they saw what they thought was a haystack, except it was a haystack that was slightly oscillating, but then when they stopped their bikes and looked at this across the field to this object, it wasn't a haystack at all. They said it was a grey cylindrical object and it was moving, and one of them was brave enough to walk well, they both ended up walking across the field, but one was ahead, and he was walking this 150 metres or so to this object to see what it was, and he was very curious, and as he drew near it, it took off and flew into the sky and disappeared, so that story, a lot of the newspapers picked it up and it was published with artists' impressions of the men and the cells looking at this object in French language news paper, sorry, magazines at the time, there was pictures on the front, very stylised pictures of two people looking in horror, an object rising off the ground kind of thing, so yes, there are some fairly famous cases, and Marius De Wilde, who I mentioned before, he had a second encounter as well, thereby near where he lived, you know, next to this railway line, so yeah, there are kind of stories like that that keep cropping up. And are there any good photos from that time or films? Well, one of the French magazines that was a magazine called Radar actually set up a competition to give money to the person who could find the best or come up with the best photograph of a flying saucer or something for a lot as the French call them at the time, and of course that set people trying to make hoaxed photographs, so there were a lot of things which were, you know, sent to the newspapers to try, or through this magazine to try and get this reward money or this common, this prize money or other, but a lot of them turned out to be just things that were people were making up to try and photograph, et cetera, but there were some like genuine pictures sent, but they were all inconclusive. They were quite fuzzy blobs, you're just fuzzy blobs basically, you know, very little else. So yes, photographs were taken at the time, but nothing of any particular consequence. There are some noted hoaxers as well, there's a particular picture that somebody claimed was something you came across of a landed kind of object with them with beings around it, but it turned out it was nothing more than a model that he'd made, and he had these little kind of little figures placed around it, and then taken a photograph of it. He tried to claim that somebody else had done the forgery, I think I believe, but then it was a kind of he said, she said kind of thing between himself and a technician working in a photo lab where he had his film developed. So nobody actually won the competition for surprisingly, or not surprising enough even because nothing was ever produced that, you know, was any of any any note in terms of the photograph of the UFO. People reported seeing ETs around these craft, but did they have anything like what you might call the contactees who claim to meet our space brothers from Venus or something? There were certainly, I mean, there were certainly stories of contact in terms of conversations with some of these strange beings who were met next to landed objects. In one particular case, the being got quite annoyed. He was asking where he was, and when the French, the witness told him, he got rather through furious for a little while saying, I'm not there, I want to be somewhere else kind of thing, but then there was other people who were invited to step inside some of these particular landed craft. And one particular chap went inside and he came up with a fairly sort of long description of what he'd seen inside in terms of the way that the instrumentation was laid out and there was certain beings sitting in what looked like chairs inside, but also another being who looks slightly different, who apparently appeared to be the leader or the captain, if you like. And he was in there as well, but he didn't go off with them and he didn't really impart any kind of great knowledge to him or anything like that. They just invited him aboard to have a look round and then he went out the craft again and it took off. So there was no sort of great kind of thing, like the sort of things that happened in America where you have the Daniel Fries and the sort of contactees who claimed that they were given great information or that they were told the things were going to happen or this kind of stuff that happened elsewhere. But yes, there was certainly interaction if the stories are to be believed between the witnesses and various strange beings. There were also lots of stories where just strange beings were seen. And a lot of them were described as being hairy from top to toe. But also they were described as being very short. So you're looking at kind of child sized beings as well. So yeah, they're very, very strange. Were these descriptions of these ETs the same as you've seen coming from other countries or are they unique to from? Well, I suppose they're you're nuking so much as how many of them were. But you'll see we know of stories of other kind of small beings from other countries that certainly stories from Italy and there are stories from Britain and stories from America which have sort of tall, not tiny, but kind of much smaller types of, I guess you'd call them aliens and the hairy beings have been seen elsewhere. So I guess it's nothing entirely unique to France, but there were certainly quite a lot of them. So these were, you know, lots of landings and lots of fightings or whether it was in the end people saying that they'd seen similar things because they read it elsewhere, which is one of the piece of the action, if you like. It's completely unknown. But if you take the cases that face value, then there's definitely a lot of them. And did they see anything that looked the same as ETs that people claim to see today? Such as grays. I mean, yeah, nothing like that. Nothing that I suppose that we would do is class as a classic ET nowadays. And so they did they say that when they communicated with them it was speech they didn't say it was telepathy? In some cases they were speaking French. In other cases they were speaking what might have been some kind of Eastern European language and other times it was gibberish, it was, you know, it was just sound, unintelligible sounds. So you have all sorts of things. But yes, some of them weren't shy about coming forward and having conversations with the witnesses. So yeah, it was all very, very strange. And wasn't there one that was kind of from Luxembourg or something? No, that rings a bell. I can't remember offhand. But it was certainly one that was near but like in a different country, but nearby where it was Luxembourg or Germany, I would have to actually have a look at that and I'm afraid I'm just trying to remember which where that was one or the not. I can't really, off the top of my head Simon, I can't actually recall that, just ring a bell. Yeah. That's, I'm not surprised. You can't remember. There's so many cases in the book. Yeah, there are hundreds in there, aren't there? Yeah. It was. Yeah, it is no one where I'm just, I'm just trying to call it. It's no one where the witness reckon that he spoke in a Luxembourg or dialect. I think that that's the bit, isn't it? Yeah. And it's from October that year, I know that much and it, you know, I think what happened was that this, whatever it was landed or had landed and somebody was, was looking for it. And when they came across it, one of these beings supposedly spoken in this Luxembourg accident. And then there was a whole, it was almost like a posse when we're trying to search the fields looking for them, but then like a lot of these stories, when people went looking for them afterwards, they couldn't find any trace of them. Did you find that it's almost like this wave sprung up is like one day it was the normal amount of sightings and the next day there was tons of them and then there was a sudden cut off? Yeah. I mean, sightings earlier in 1554 during in France that there'd been not maybe a wave of such, but there'd certainly been plenty of them probably getting on for a par with how many were in America at the time. But there was a kind of explosion in sort of mid to late August, 1954, and it reached a peak in October of that year where there were several hundred and then it tailed off towards the end of November and by the time you were in December, there were very few. It was getting back to what was effectively normal for France, that's in the other numbers. But that particular sort of earlier, like late summer and throughout the autumn, and almost the early winter of 54, there were hundreds and hundreds of sightings. Did you get the impression at all that this would bleed over the borders into other countries? Like the UFOs, they don't care about our borders between different countries. Yeah. Yes. I mean, to be fair, I didn't look at other countries and maybe I should have because that's actually quite interesting to see whether I guess along the periphery of maybe Northern Spain, maybe sort of Western Germany and North Western Italy, maybe there were kind of spike of cases there. There's nothing I can actually recall, however, from those countries, bear in mind, you know, the French wave of 54 is fairly well known in so much as a thing, if not the actual details too much of it, whereas you would have thought that if it had bled over into neighboring countries, there might have been some kind of indication that yes, we've had a wave of wet as well. There were waves in other countries in different years. I think there was a wave in Wars of 73, 74 in America and there's been other ones in other countries. But I can't recall anything offhand in certain years I've looked at this that's happened in 6th, Spain or Germany or Belgium, at the time this one particularly occurred in France. I mean, Belgian have its own wave in what's it, 89 with the black triangles or 1990 with the black triangles, but that was obviously decades afterwards. And there was that wave of the ghost rockets as well, wasn't there? Yeah, 1946 in Sweden, but I'll see that again, that happened before so then eight years before this one. With the Lucky Land Sluts, you can get Lucky just about anywhere. Daily Beloved, we're gathered here today, has anyone seen the bride and groom? Sorry, sorry, we're here. We were getting Lucky in the limo when we lost track of time. No, Lucky Land Casino, with cash prizes that add up quicker than a guest registry. In that case, I pronounce you Lucky. Play for free at LuckyLand Sluts dot com. No purchase necessary. Talking about stuff that was not really reported much elsewhere up until that point. And one of them was the temporary paralysis of witnesses. Yeah. And did that come up often? Well, it came up like several times, there were a few dozen cases, I believe, where people said that they were temporarily paralyzed. Now, where that was down to fear, and there was simply rooted to the spot because they were so frightened about what they were seeing, or whether it was some kind of physical effect, which had been produced by whoever they were in contact with. That's unclear. But, yes, there's definitely documented cases when the witnesses say that they couldn't move. It's rather strange, just because, again, I suppose that's one of the first times when we see these cases appear in the legend, I suppose I can just go through one of them. And it's about the time when Marcus DeWild had his first sighting in September, 1954. There's a case about two or three days after that particular sighting where he meets these three things on the railway track. And somebody said that they saw something which was like a disc fitted with a cupola, which is like a little kind of leantry on top of a machine. And he reckons he saw beings of human appearance and standing next to it, which is quite common for some of these sightings. And then when this witness got within the vicinity of the craft, he said he was paralyzed when a green ray was emitted by the operators. Obviously, that's quite clear-cut, but in some of the cases, it's unclear as to whether they were just simply rooted to the spot-by with fear. And then when these objects move away, then the paralysis disappears. And there's that thing, it's kind of time anomalies in a way, or some people call it the "Oz" factor. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I suppose they go hand-in-hand sometimes because it's weird, isn't it? Because I guess if you're paralyzed, maybe it does kind of follow that you might lose time as well. So you write these books, you've written books about other years, like just after the Second World War and in the '50s, do you think it's something that we should really be paying attention to? There's something really important about seeing what was happening then? I think just the volume of sightings back then and the way they were documented is just so interesting for me, I mean, that's why I live to write about these things. But also, if you look nowadays, then a lot of things that people see could well be drones, especially if they're not exhibiting too much out in the way of extraordinary maneuvers and behavior. It's much more difficult now that because drone technology is advanced to the point where they are quite capable of doing things that maybe years ago you might think it was something well out of the ordinary. Whereas back then, drones were full-size aeroplanes, they were radio controlled, but they weren't what we call a drone nowadays. Therefore, you can't easily write off sightings of strange objects back in the late '40s and mid-'50s as being something which has started mundane without sort of dancing around on the head of a pin, like a lot of skeptics and debunkers did back then. Whereas nowadays, technology in certain areas has improved the point of where it's possibly going to become within maybe a short space a year is very difficult to distinguish what is and what isn't something that the humans have built and flown around themselves. Whereas back then, it was much more clear-cut. So I think writing, researching, reading about things from back then is a lot more, not more interesting, but just very fascinating to read about the descriptions, about how they moved, and how they interacted with aircraft, let's say, that would send up to intercept them or when they were on the ground and people's interaction with them. It's just been something that's really, really intrigued me over the decades that I've read about them. Did people back then, like in the French Wave report, the craft doing these incredible maneuvers like we talk about today? They did in certain respects, but a lot of the time, they were almost like helicopter-like, I guess, in some respects, they would take off and they would fly to a certain height and then they would go off sideways, sometimes at fairly high speeds. So you could tell that there weren't helicopters, but they had some sort of manifestations of things that helicopters could almost do. So I guess the ordinary, yes, they certainly would undertake maneuvers which were extraordinary for the time. But some were almost like helicopter-like in appearance, without the rotors, I guess, and also the speed of which they flew wasn't anything where you thought, "Oh, that's something completely strange." But then again, when the descriptions are given in full, you can tell they're simply not helicopters. And actually, there weren't that many helicopters around in 1954 anyway. It was still reasonably new technology, air forces still didn't have them big numbers, and there certainly weren't a lot in the French Air Force inventory either. So some of the cases have been written off as being, "Well, nothing more than helicopters." But when you read the witness accounts, then it's clear that there weren't anything but. So it's almost like they were showing maneuvers that were much better than human technology, in those days. Oh, yeah. But when they do those maneuvers now, they've got to up their game because we were catching up with what they were doing in the '50s. Yeah, I think so. It certainly was some kind of drones and missile technology we're getting. I don't think we're anywhere near what some of these things are exhibiting, but I think it's a lot harder for people now to discriminate between drones and UFOs in certain cases. And that's not a right completely across the board. But yeah, drones aren't becoming much more capable now. So if you see something in the sky, and it looks unusual, and it's flying around, then you have to, I think you have to look twice nowadays. And did the people in France kind of respond to witnesses in what they might do these days or over the decades when they kind of go, "Well, you saw a UFO," and then they start instantly doubting them and almost saying like, "That guy's a loonie thinks he's seen a UFO." Well, there was certainly some of that. So there was definitely a ridicule, stigma, you name it. But there was also quite a, not an acceptance, but there was certainly a curiosity because a lot of people were maybe waiting to see one themselves. And some of the reporting of some of the very, very local newspapers, you'll get this kind of opening bit where it's such a village or that the mayor of such a village, why are we being left out because we haven't seen one yet? And then actually they do, and it's almost like they've joined a club, if you like. And they're quite pleased about it because our village is now among the ranks of places in France where we've seen one of these things or they've chosen to visit us. And so it was very curious and so much it wasn't kind of out and out, "Oh yeah, everybody's just seeing things" and they're just being stupid and they're telling tall tales. There was quite a lot of acceptance that people were seeing things that they couldn't understand. Whereas, yes, okay, there were other people who were just dismissing it, but the police took a lot of cases seriously that did proper investigations, the reports were issued. And your questions were asked of government ministers and the air ministry, et cetera, but nothing which came of it then. There will be official reports later on in France, but questions were still asked. But yes, there was a lot of kind of head scratching going on as to what was really happening. Did the government and the military kind of try and sweep it under the carpet, you know, maybe like a project blue book or something? Well, if they did, it wasn't really kind of manifesting itself in the press because they were acknowledging that things were being seen, but then they weren't really giving much else away. So there wasn't any real dismissal, if you like, in so much as there wasn't America where they were just saying, "Oh yeah, you're just seeing Venus or weather balloons." There was possibly a little bit of that, but it wasn't kind of a blanket, "Yeah, we're going to find dampen this kind of all this enthusiasm down." They seemed much more kind of, I think, genuinely kind of curious and trying to work out what these things were. So yeah, you didn't get much of that. And are there any mass sightings, I don't know, maybe hundreds of people or even thousands? Yeah, there were certainly towns where there were 10s, sometimes maybe getting into a hundred or so people across an area who had reported seeing objects overheads, towns and cities, et cetera. But there was certainly multiple sightings where maybe a dozen people or more had seen a strange object. But there were also cases where there'd been meteor showers, et cetera, as well, which was what they turned out to be, and a lot of those cases generated lots of reports across wide areas. So if you include those particular cases, then, yeah, there were quite a lot of witnesses who came forward to see, "Yeah, I saw lights in the sky," et cetera. But in terms of cases of properly unidentified objects, then there are a few multiple sightings. And this thing of car engines stalling when the objects are close by, was that something that was well known by then? It happened a lot in America or something. No, no, not at all. It was still something that really hadn't happened until then. There would be obviously cases throughout the world afterwards, particularly in America as well, but no, this was one of the first instances when this kind of thing happened. So it's not like it's hoaxers, or they'd heard of that somewhere else. No. Definitely not. I mean, if you talk about hoaxers, there were certainly hoaxers, and not just the kind of mock-up photographs I was talking before. And actually, some of the famous ones that happened in France at the time were perpetuated by a couple of journalists, believe it or not. There was a newspaper called Samadee Swar, who, a couple of their journalists, decided to dress up, or one would dress up as a kind of a mock alien. And he would stand near a road with one of his colleagues nearby, just like seeing what would happen. And they would try and frighten or banboozle, passing motorists or people walking along the country roads and this kind of thing, or people cycling out on the countryside and have a good laugh about it. And you can trace these people's movements around the country almost, because they would tell, they would say about the places they visited and these kinds of hoaxers that sprung on people to the point of where they were dressed up in kind of diversuits and all this kind of thing to try and sort of pretend to be being some of the planets. So witnesses had that to contend with as well, and I mentioned a lot of those in the book where these people, these characters, cropped up, but also other people had made things up as well. There was one particular case where it's not actually clear whether it happened or not, because after a few days of this particular gentleman seeing something apparently on his way to work, then he then claimed that he'd made it up because he was late for work. And then it transpired some time later, maybe years or even decades later that he'd said he'd just made that particular bit up so that you get the police office back and the press attention off his back because he was sick of it. So in the end, you don't know what's true at all, because he changed his story once and then he changed his story again. So yeah, there's a lot of that goes on. But did you find there are any French UFO researchers, you know, like Amateurs who did a really good job and that they really stand out? Yes. I mean, there were certainly French sort of, you know, researchers back then. There were people who were writing books, they had the likes of Amy Bichael, there's Jimmy New as well, there were two fairly famous authors, or would become fairly famous authors in France. But then you've also got the brilliant, I believe it's called death Iranus. That was the start of one of the first newsletters and I think it had kicked off like a sometime slightly before this wave of sightings took place. And then you've got a chap who's part of that as well, who he actually doesn't investigate sightings right around the country himself. But the newsletter has effectively a network of people who feed stories to it. And they are asked, you know, when something happens in their particular area, they are then asked to go and do the research themselves. So there's this whole network of people who are actively going out and basically quizzing locals and finding witnesses and getting more information. So yeah, there was a, it was definitely a kind of grassroots investigation or investigations going on back then. It was, it was fantastic to read about some of the, you know, some of these in depth and local research that was going on. It's almost like a French move on. Yeah. And beforehand as well. I mean, obviously, APRO had started in America about this time. And so the worse, you know, different places around the world, there were these kind of fledgling and very, very early UFO, either newsletters or groups or investigation bodies. But yeah, that's when they were really kicking off in France because they had so much material to work from. So it definitely kind of kick started, you know, the kind of interest in France. And you talked about Amy Michelle there. Yeah. Did he have a theory about sightings being spread along straight lines? He did. He even wrote a book which was translated into English as flying sources in the straight line mystery, which I think came out in, what was it, 1954, 1956, I remember exactly when, but it was about the same time as the sightings. And yes, he tried to link and he claimed that you could link like five or six sightings in a straight line, depending on which line he used across the country. And he came up with dozens of these particular lines where there were numerous sightings, you know, sort of located along them, and you talk about lines that went right across the country. I guess with my kind of, you know, not a skeptics head, but just a kind of like, you know, let's step back a second here. If you have enough sightings in one particular country, sort of fairly reasonably small area, then you could draw a straight line and you're more likely to hit quite a few, you know, on that line. So I'm not entirely convinced about it, but then again, I haven't really got any justification to completely throw it out the window either. The book sold well at the time. A lot of people ended up, you know, sort of like taking it with, you know, quite seriously. But you know, it's not, it's something that people don't really read and sort of read about much nowadays. And it doesn't really get discussed. But yes, I mean, he was a certainly famous author back then. And that book, you know, sort of suggested that there was a kind of, some kind of plan to it all. Yeah, it's like it's a surveillance pattern. Yeah, like a way of mapping out kind of, you know, an area in which they've got an interest in. Yeah. So he wasn't saying it was like they were following lay lines or something. No, I don't think so, but, you know, you can tell. Is there a sighting that stands out to you as being really strange and really weird? But you look at it and think, well, it could be a hoax, but at the same time. Yeah, I mean, there's a case that's happened near a quarry. And it was in a place called Massey, Sue Vian. And this happened in, when was this, I think it was some of that end of September. And you've got a quarry form and you've got these, he's got other workers and they're working in this sand and gravel quarry. And there's a thing that basically ends up sitting right next to the entrance of the quarry. But he's only one that could see it start to start with because he was like higher up in the quarry rim and it was circular, it was, it had a dome on top and it had blades, which obviously you'd think it might be a helicopter. And these blades were turning around quite rapidly. So yeah, you'd think it was, but there was a very, very small man next to it and he was wearing this kind of strange contraption, which looked like a kind of state, well, the strike was being stained glass. So that's definitely not, you can't really reconcile that with a helicopter crewman, if you like. And the witnesses, because the quarryman actually looked at this thing as well. And the wreck and he had either what looked like a big revolver, like a gun or some kind of pipe or audience chest. And there was a disc sitting on each check, which was emitting a beam of light as well, which again, doesn't sound like somebody who just stepped out of a helicopter. Now it turned up and nobody had heard it. So helicopters back then were quite noisy things, they're still our nowadays. But why hadn't anybody heard it land? And it sat there for about 30 seconds or so, and then it took off. But the quarry foreman wanted to actually dash back to his his hut and get a pencil and paper. So you could actually, you know, sketch this thing for, you know, so you could actually have a record of what he'd seen. But this is where your paralysis comes in, because apparently this luminous ray of light that came out of this box or this disc that was on the front of this man, or this being basically paralyzed him and he couldn't move. So, you know, there's that kind of phenomenon there. And at the same time, a truck was up here coming down the road to the quarry to pick up a load of sand. And he'd seen it as well, or rather, he saw the object. He saw the quarry mayor, he saw his colleagues looking at this object. And it was just something gray, that's all he described it, and he saw it just shoot off and the air had disappeared. Now, unlike a helicopter, they reckon it rose vertically in what they described as jerk, which you would have thought a helicopter would just rise quite smoothly rather than kind of in this kind of jerky fashion. And then it was a kind of sound as if jet engines had started up, and of course, helicopters weren't fitted with jet engines. And then there was a fog that appeared around the object where they got to about 200 meters. So, and then it disappeared. So, a lot of these elements in this particular story don't seem to have anything to do. Don't seem quite normal. It was all very, very strange. It is Ryan here, and I have a question for you. What do you do when you win? Like, are you a fist-pumper, a woohoo, a hand clap or a high-fiver? If you want to hone in on those winning moves, check out Chumba Casino. Choose from hundreds of social casino-style games for your chance to redeem serious cash prizes. Make game releases weekly plus free daily bonuses, so don't wait. Start having the most fun ever at Chumba Casino.com. Sponsored by Chumba Casino, no purchase necessary, VGW Group, void were prohibited by law, 18 plus terms and conditions apply. Do you think that the French nowadays, they must have sort of come into world UFO viewpoint, I suppose, with the how easy communications are these days? I don't suppose they have a different attitude or viewpoint to UFOs than the rest of the world, do they? I don't think they do overall, but they certainly have an interesting focus on it, that everything I read, I'm not conversant with the French language, but you can use Google Translate nowadays. And I do have kind of copies of luminese dollar and new wheat, the lights of the night, which is the long running French language UFO newsletter or magazine, and it's actually fascinating the depth of detail that they go into in some of these case reports. Their investigators are extremely thorough, and they come up with this mountains and mountains of material. And if you've got the time and the space and the energy to actually look through a lot of this stuff, not just from '54, but from all the successive years, it's a fascinating look into how good you can be as an investigator, and how much detail you can get out of a particular case and put it forward. Now, that doesn't mean to say that you're necessarily any further forward, knowing about what's actually happening, because all these cases are different, you know, the different as you would go back to what was said at the start, about different shapes, different sizes of object, and all the different types of beings that are occasionally seen with some of these things, but the actual, the way that the French seem to go about gathering information and putting it down, it's absolutely fascinating to me, and somebody who's read about the other subject for decades now, just how thorough they are, and just how interested a lot of them have turned out to be. And did you have any sightings from civilian pilots? There is one, yes, there's a guy who's flying a Nordlite aircraft, and he filed an official report about something he'd seen, so yes, there are ones like that, and I'm just trying to recall the report, I'll probably get in a minute, but yes, there was definitely one like that, where he saw something so, so strange that he had to actually report it. This happened right in the beginning of October, 1954, and he's over the Hotservoy area, and he's just flying on a kind of pleasure flight, if you like, and he sees a circuit, you know, this kind of classic circuit of craft, it's a little bit higher than him, it's some kilometers away it called to him, and it's in a curve, it's on this kind of curving flight, he reckoned it was maybe several meters across, he's already sought for barely 10 seconds or so, he was a fairly experienced pilot, but yes, he actually launched this official report, but nothing actually came of it, or at least he had no comeback, you know, he never heard anything more about it once he'd launched the report. So you're working on another book now? I am working on the sequel to the Foo Fighters book that I wrote three years ago, UFOs before Roswell, so after I finished that book, I knew there was still a whole load of information that I still hadn't, you know, like a squad reports I hadn't looked at, and I had an idea there'd be a lot more detail that I still hadn't found yet, and lo and behold, when I've looked at some of these reports afterwards, yes, there are more and more sightings of a very, very strange thing, and I'm also still waiting for some documents coming over from America from the Historic Records Agency of the United States Air Force, so hopefully when I get those, there'll be some new stuff in those that nobody's ever come across before, so yes, that's going to be put into a book hopefully maybe to be released by Christmas this year or early next year. And as I remember it, Foo Fighters were specifically, most of the time they were just a ball of light weren't they? They weren't actually a craft. Yeah, that's right. I mean, a lot of the times they were described as being just like lights in the sky, if you like, that were examining strange maneuvers and couldn't be shaken off the aircraft's tail, but there were other things seen in World War II, you know, things that looked like structured craft, like torpedo-shaped objects and other things like that, and there are kind of, they are found more cases of that as well in some of these reports, which I've looked at since I published, that book was published. So yeah, there'll be a whole kind of range of things to read about in this forthcoming book. Did you come across anything in the French sightings where you'd think, oh, that sounds just like a Foo Fighter, or was the Foo Fighters what they looked like? It kind of disappeared after the Second World War. They did, yeah. Although I guess a lot of the lights in the sky, kind of when you have ones which are seen by pilots, some of them do actually resemble some of the reports from the war. And some of the Korean war cases are fairly similar as well, and so much as strange objects which are seen by pilots and can't be understood. There were French reports coming up from the war and some from, you know, civilians, witnesses as well which were reported afterwards because you wouldn't go reporting these kinds of things to legitimate military authorities at the time. But yes, there are definitely things like that which appear in this book or this new book I'm writing. And do you think there are other flaps that have happened around the world historically, but we just don't hear about them because we're in the English-speaking world and they've happened in another language, and so we don't really get to hear it? I think that's the, you know, a lot of people say, well, this is just an Anglo or American centric kind of phenomenon because that's where the vast majority of the reports come from. And a lot of them do come from the English language speaking parts of the world. But I think that is simply down to that. And, you know, if people trawl through foreign language newspapers, particularly, you know, Spanish language and Portuguese language, ones from South America and maybe ones from Africa and from the Far East, then actually you do start hearing about other things. There have been waves of sightings in the likes of Brazil, you know, another part of South America back in the 1950s, and about the same time, you know, there were quite a lot of sightings in Brazil, not on the scale necessary of what happened in France, but certainly to, you know, make it unusual. So, yeah, that happened in other countries where things have happened and they're just not as well known because they don't happen to be published in English. Thanks a lot for coming back to the podcast. It's been really interesting talking about this book. No, thanks Simon, I appreciate the invitation to come and talk about it. It's called the French UFO wave of 1954. People can get that on Amazon and other places. Just Amazon, yeah, as usual. Can you tell us about your website? My website is reavercountryboop.com, so yes, it's basically just early. It's description of all my books that I've written, and a few little bits of information about the food fight is in general in some of the bits and pieces, so yeah, have a look at that if you want to see the titles I've written. Amazon is also the place where you can just give my name into a search engine on Amazon and you'll find all the books listed there. Great. I'll put a link to this book in the show notes, and again, thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, cheers, Simon. Thanks. And that was an interview with Graham Rendell about his book, the French UFO wave of 1954. A group aide to support the podcast is to sign up to Patreon where you can get exclusive access to the extended episodes. Just go to patreon.com/alienufopodcast. When you sign up, you get access to the episodes in the back catalogue, and they are ad-free and are released two days before the free versions, and if you want to try out the extended episodes, you can now get a seven-day free trial. And please check out my other podcast. It's called The R Paranormal Afterlife, and there are over 300 episodes. My website is parsliveshypnosis.co.uk and the link is in the show notes. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review, and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or via your favourite podcast app to make sure that you don't miss out on any episodes. And thanks for listening. [Music] Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too. And now, I can tell you about my favourite place to have fun. Shumba Casino. They have hundreds of social casino-style games to choose from, with new games released each week. You can play for free, and each day brings a new chance to collect daily bonuses. So join me and the fun. Sign up now at shumbaughassino.com. Sponsored by Shumba Casino, no purchase necessary, vgw group. where prohibited by law, 18-plus terms and conditions apply.
In this extra episode I'm talking to Graeme Rendall about his book 'The French UFO Wave of 1954'.In the second half of 1954, France was the location of numerous UFO sightings, some of which involved encounters with or observations of strange beings. It was the first large-scale "wave" of reports that occurred outside the United States since the start of the modern-day UFO phenomenon at the end of June 1947. A somewhat sceptical public found themselves bombarded with almost daily stories of strange lights, spherical craft or disc-shaped objects in their local newspapers, the press faithfully reporting on the hundreds of incidents that came to their attention. A few were hoaxes but the vast majority involved ordinary French citizens faced with the complete unknown. This new book lists most of the cases where at least some detail beyond a simple "light in the sky" is mentioned, culled from contemporary newspaper accounts. It tells the story of a perplexed nation, one that found it difficult to make sense of what was happening. Witnesses being paralysed, vehicle engines stalling and small hairy beings - the cases here provide a fascinating look at the French UFO "wave" of 1954.BioGraeme Rendall is a full time author and a commentator on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) issue. He is also a contributor to the "The Debrief", an American news website dealing with cutting edge science, tech and defence news, and a frequent guest on various podcasts looking at UAP. He also writes articles on the subject for UAP Media UK. Between 1990 and 1992, he was the Editor of an amateur aviation magazine. Graeme has written a critically-acclaimed work looking at the "Foo-Fighters" witnessed during World War Two and the numerous wartime cases that occurred before the term was coined in November 1944. He has been an aviation and World War Two history enthusiast from an early age, when he was given Airfix model aircraft kits "to keep him quiet". Married to Jo, he lives in rural Northumberland, between the beach and the hills.https://www.reivercountrybooks.com/Amazon link https://tinyurl.com/4n5p9usehttps://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/https://www.patreon.com/alienufopodcastBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/alien-ufo-podcast--5270801/support.
