From 188 Contes à régler (1988 edition)
A bank employee of the European type - that's what any inhabitant of the planet Syrge, although very far from ours, would look like to us. The Syrgians could therefore have walked around the Earth with complete impunity, without being noticed. They had the same morals as us, the same mentality, the same complexes. All the conditions were met for them to remain anonymous.
And, curiously, their landing in broad daylight in an urban center also went unnoticed - even though it was the first landing on Earth of creatures from elsewhere.
But it must be said that their spacecraft was a very common model in the 90s, and we really had the feeling of having always seen it take off or land, especially since these images came back at least once a day on every television screen in the world. And, as in a significant coincidence, quite by chance, the Syrgians landed near Hollywood in front of a hundred jaded onlookers who, even though they did not see any cameras, were convinced that they were watching the filming of the inevitable sci-fi movie of the week.
And the sight of the Syrgians getting out of their craft wouldn’t have intrigued them either. They had anodyne and clumsy appearances, dressed half like astronauts, half like windsurfers. On the contrary, the witnesses must have thought that the screenwriter of this film must have been particularly lacking in imagination.
This is why one of the biggest events of the century was not even entitled to a brief article in the press nor, of course, to a TV news spotlight.