Lumières Dans La Nuit

History

Raymond Veillith founded Lumières Dans La Nuit in February 1958 from Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small town in the Haute-Loire département of central France. The publication started as a modest bulletin circulated among a handful of correspondents interested in what the French called "Mystérieux Objets Célestes" (Mysterious Celestial Objects). Within a decade it had become the most widely read French-language UFO research journal in the world.

Veillith ran LDLN for over three decades with the help of a small editorial team that included Fernand Lagarde, Charles Gueudelot, and Gilbert Cornu. The publication operated under the banner of a "Groupement International de Recherches" (International Research Group), but it was in practice a labour of love funded by subscriptions and run from Veillith's home. The mailing address, the CCP postal account number, and Veillith's name appeared on every issue.

The journal's core content was the "Observations de Nos Lecteurs" (Observations from Our Readers) section, which ran in nearly every issue. Readers across France, Belgium, Switzerland, and French-speaking Africa submitted sighting reports, which LDLN's network of regional correspondents then investigated. The result was a continuous stream of field-investigated sighting data from across the francophone world, documented in a level of detail that rivalled the best American organisations.

LDLN published in French throughout its existence. This kept it largely invisible to English-speaking researchers, despite its containing thousands of European sighting reports that never appeared in APRO, NICAP, or MUFON publications. Jacques Vallée, who was a regular contributor and whose name appears in 94 of the 282 issues in the archive, used LDLN data extensively in his own research on French sighting waves.

The publication attracted contributions from nearly every significant figure in French ufology. Aimé Michel, whose "orthoteny" hypothesis (that French sightings aligned along straight lines) generated intense debate in the late 1950s, appeared in 118 of the 282 archived issues. Pierre Guérin, an astrophysicist at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, contributed scientific commentary. Jean Sider, whose archival research methods anticipated much modern historical ufology, published extensively in LDLN from the 1980s onward. Claude Poher of the French space agency CNES, who went on to found the government's GEPAN investigation programme in 1977, was a regular contributor during the 1970s.