What happened
Getting up to calm his barking dogs, Perrin saw a luminous craft shaped like a big cigar leaving a shower of sparks. The same night, witnesses at Contrexéville and Vittel described a cigar-shaped object moving horizontally. One said it looked "like a cigar, or if you will, a disc seen in perspective." The local paper itself called it a "meteor," and Patrick Gross's case file links the reports to an August 8, 1954 meteor.