JANUARY ISSUE
NOW OUT
SEE BELOW
Issues 187 to 199
archived afterwards
NOW OUT
SEE BELOW
Issues 187 to 199
archived afterwards
ISSUE 200 NORTHERN UFO NEWS
EDITOR: Jenny Randles
10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
nufonnews@gmail.com
THE COVER ABOVE IS ONE OF MY FAVOURITES FROM THE 200 EDITIONS OF NORTHERN UFO NEWS
IT WAS CREATED IN OCTOBER 1981 BY ONE OF OUR REGULAR ILLUSTRATORS IN EARLY YEARS
JOHN WATSON WORKED WITH THE NORTH EAST GROUP CHRYSIS AND THIS BRILLIANT IDEA WILL NEED SOME EXPLAINING 38 YEARS LATER
IT IS BASED ON A THEN POPULAR TV SERIES CALLED WORZEL GUMMIDGE PLAYED BY EX DOCTOR WHO JON PERTWEE AS A SCARECROW WHO COULD WEAR DIFFERENT HEADS
THE HEADS HERE WAITING TO BE SELECTED REPRESENT THE VARIOUS TYPES OF UFO RESEARCHER FROM SOCIOLOGIST TO CYNIC AND THE SANE BALANCED UFOLOGIST HEAD....WHICH HERE IS AN EMPTY SPACE WITH DESIGN PENDING!
JOHN WATSON ALWAYS USED TO PLACE A TINY LITTLE ALIEN SOMEWHERE IN HIS COVERS. SEE IF YOU CAN FIND THIS ONE FROM ISSUE 89.
ANOTHER OF JOHN'S COVERS WILL APPEAR LATER IN THE ISSUE AND YOU CAN PLAY AGAIN
JR Comments….
APOLOGIES FOR THE DELAY IN PUBLISHING THIS SPECIAL EDITION - BEING NUMBER 200 I WANTED IT TO BE A BIT OF A CELEBRATION AND RETROSPECTIVE OF NEARLY HALF A CENTURY.
HOPEFULLY FROM ISSUE 201 WE WILL BE BACK TO A MORE REGULAR SCHEDULE, THOUGH POSSIBLY Bi-MONTHLY FOR A WHILE AS I AM INVOLVED IN SOME BOOK PROJECTS AND FOR NOW THAT HAS PRIORITY. I WILL SAY MORE HERE SOON.
I DO INTEND TO FEATURE RETROSPECTIVE LOOKS AT OUR HISTORY IN COMING ISSUES ALONGSIDE MORE UP TO DATE NEWS. SO JUST STAY TUNED.
NEWS: PROJECT BLUE BOOK THE TV SERIES
The history channel in the USA launched on 8 January 2019 a new drama series - Project Blue Book. This venture plans to tell the true story of the US Air Force UFO investigation programme from the 1940s/50s/60s
From celebrated movie producer Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) it stars Irish Actor Aiden Gillen (Peaky Blinders, Game of Thrones) as real life UFO researcher and supporter of this magazine - Professor J Allen Hynek.
His wife Mimi is played by Canadian actress Laura Merrell, who has starred in Haven and The Man in the High Castle.
Each episode in the initial 10 part run tells the story around one major real life case from the early years of Blue Book, such as the Flatwoods Monster. But with an underlying drama as the clash between military and science develops and UFO evidence mounts.
As yet no UK air date is known but it seems very likely it will appear on History here too. And it is getting about 2 million viewers which is very good for a cable channel so odds of a second series look good.
Having been privileged to know Allen and Mimi and go on a road trip across America with them and house sit their home in Evanston, Illinois for a time in 1983, I am looking forward to seeing how this tells that couple’s extraordinary but true story.
From the trailer on You Tube it looks really intriguing. And it is fascinating to note that Aiden, who plays the professor, got his big break in the city of Manchester - where this magazine and your editor started investigating UFOs too - as he was appearing in the Canal Street Manchester set TV series Queer as Folk, from Russell T Davies - the man who later brought back Doctor Who to international success.
Will post any news of UK air dates soon.
NORTHERN UFO NEWS: The Story
Why was a magazine called Northern UFO News ever created? Well for a start this was not the original name. When it first appeared in 1974 it was curiously called UNO News.
UNO stood for the Union of Northern Observers. This was the original title given to an initiative set up by a couple of local UFO groups in North West England 46 years ago, who in 1973 decided to work together in an informal liaison.
This idea for cooperation was ground breaking at the time and very unusual in an era when all over the world major towns and cities had their own UFO investigation teams each researching cases with their own agenda and often competing for members and resources.
This alliance was an attempt to break that pattern.
As some of those involved in the short lived West Pennine Research Group were rather active in the labour rights field the idea of a Union seems to have taken root.
At that stage I was not involved in the organisation having my hands full with other things in life at just 21 and going through middle school teacher training, where I was specialising in Geology.
But I do recall a few months later when I had got involved in the plans and we decided to reconsider the name that I suggested using a shout line that used the title and said: “U NO - it makes sense”.
But that was a tad too daft for the rather austere 1970s! So instead a competition was held and that led to a vote on a whole new identity.
Sale based UFO researcher, David Rees, ran a small group - MAPIT - Manchester Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team - which was the other founder of UNO who came alongside the West Pennine Research Group.
MAPIT still exists but has been a very different group for the past 30 years when it was taken over by Stephen Mera, whose presence on line as an active researcher has been well known for some years. It expanded into a Paranormal Research Team and the name changed to take this into account whilst cleverly retaining the MAPIT initials.
When, MAPIT moved on from UNO soon after the UNO name was dropped and the geographical spread was broadened, MUFORA, the Manchester UFO Research Association, of which I was then a member, being run by Peter Warrington, became a founder of the newly restructured ‘union’.
The early newsletters of UNO starting in May 1974 were just duplicated pieces of paper covering admin matters not UFOs as such. They were not really the magazine that followed, but took the first half dozen slots in the number sequence.
By Summer 1974 UNO had expanded to include the Wirral UFO Society - WUFOS - lasting several years - and the Scunthorpe UFO Research Society, that involved a then young researcher still around today - Nigel Watson.
Nigel has gone on to write several important UFO books. This includes the 2013 UFO entry in the Haynes manual series - something that decades earlier when UNO was newly formed would have been very improbable for that car technology mechanics specialist to even contemplate.
Nigel actually wrote the first ever article to appear in this magazine (still then called UNO News). It appeared in June 1974 - titled ‘The Dogma of UFOlogy’. He refers to a definition by Peter Rogerson of MAGONIA, who sadly died just last year, describing three types of UFOlogist. A theme continued by the cover I selected to use for this 200th special.
The three types that Nigel discussed were UFO researchers, UFO buffs and Cultists. Nigel noted that the ETH (extra-terrestrial hypothesis) for origin of the UFO mystery was the most supported by the latter two groups, but changes were occurring via then popular American writer John Keel (on whose work and books the 2002 movie ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney is based - with Gere playing a fictionalised version of Keel himself).
Keel’s views were having increasing influence and led to the popularity of the concept of an ‘ultraterrestrial’ (not ET) origin of the phenomenon.
Nigel also pointed out that nearly all of British UFO research at that point was entirely amateur in nature and our lack of scientific focus or participants was part of the reason why we had dogma rather than research. Though Peter Warrington, at MUFORA soon brought in some of that as he was a keen astronomer approaching interest in the subject objectively from that perspective.
Over in the USA several professional scientists such as astronomer Dr J Allen Hynek and computer specialist Dr Jacques Vallee were already prominent. MUFORA would soon invite Hynek over for a dinner party and discussions on how to make British research more scientific too and he was a good ally to the alliance up to his death in 1986.
That first article by Nigel was significant in that it helped guide the future of the group and the magazine to try to become more of a chronicle of rather more objective documentation rather than the then common writing style (Nigel cited specifically Gordon Creighton of Flying Saucer Review magazine). That style mixed fact with often extreme speculation about myths regarding ethereal magical djinn (spirit beings from which the pantomime/fairy tale ‘genie’ is derived).
There was a £1 membership fee (or 75 p per member if you wanted to join individually not as just a group). This basically covered the duplicated newsletter - which was by now set up as a way to also cover reports on the cases investigated by the involved independent local groups.
The first ever case published (in issue 2) was dated 2 July 1973 at 8.45 pm on that Summer evening at Lostock Gralam in Cheshire.
It was a bright fluorescent light seen by David Rees’s own mother from a car parked in a lay by and fascinating in that it included what was still a decade away from being recognized and named as ‘the Oz Factor’. After which, of course, this site is also named.
The witness described how - whilst the UFO was visible ‘all sound around her seemed to be blotted out’. She also found herself unable to call for help during the estimated 5 minutes whilst this ‘long jewel’ shaped object hovered there. Others in the family were away from the car and on return had seen nothing. They examined the fields but nothing untoward was discovered.
By Issue 5 the magazine was now in a form of two or three tone colour and spirit duplicator printed which allowed simple drawings but was still very basic. I recall using that messy ink machine - purchased cheaply from the hellishly hot Red Bank Manchester iron foundry - Henry Wallwork - where my dad was the bookkeeper and I had my first paid holiday job in secretarial work making up wages.
Back then cheap commercial printing was not possible on a tiny budget and computers were still the size of rooms costing six figure sums and the internet still an idea in science fiction novels. Indeed my second working job (thanks to my science A Levels) was a year before college transferring hundreds of thousands of file records of car registration numbers onto a then massive million pound computer that was less powerful than most mobile phones are these days and yet several thousand times larger.
That issue - number 5 of UNO News - did include the first analysis of 82 cases that had by then been reported from the now five groups - a Cheshire based team called NAPRA having been added.
Nothing dramatic was noted from those first analyses other than sightings in daylight hours were massively outnumbered by those at night - which peaked around 22.00 hrs but with a more surprising secondary peak around 2/3 am.
By the end of 1974 and issue 8 UNO News was finally becoming more like an actual magazine now people were paying to receive it across half a dozen independent groups run as a kind of federation, which had to some extent been modelled on the idea of this from the then relatively recent (and ongoing) TV series Star Trek!
Issues now usually had multiple case reports, news and articles. But there here had been big changes in recent weeks. The West Pennine group had disappeared along with MAPIT- meaning both original founders had gone within the first year - although an echo of their influence from the WPRG union ethos would resurface mysteriously not long afterwards.
This was found in the socialist political aspirations of a mystery UFO wrecking crew called APEN - Aerial Phenomena Enquiry Network - that sent mischievous missives to the UNO groups in Scunthorpe, Manchester and the Wirral between late 1974 and 1977.
They later even got involved in the Rendlesham Forest case. Many of the 1975 issues of the magazine gave updates on their latest bizarre activities which at times were very strange but suspiciously hoax like.
Anyone curious can read my discussion of their links with us in The Strange Affair of APEN an article I wrote for Magonia in 1976 and which is archived on line by them:
magonia.haaan.com/2009/apen/
This Magonia archive is freely available on line and has many articles from over 30 years of this marvellous publication that thrived on critical British UFO thinking. Many NUFON contributors published in there if wanting to writer longer pieces that NUN was never designed to be able to include.
Magonia also featured some cases - another NUFON incident I wrote up in there and I recall fondly from the 1970s being ‘A Vendetta With Venus’ that was one of the most telling early IFO cases I managed to get involved with and which even made Granada TV.
If you have never checked Magonia’s archives out on line it is well worthy of your time. Indeed John Rimmer, who has been involved as long as I have in this field, over on Merseyside, recently invited me to be a book reviewer for the on line version of Magonia. So you will find some new writings there as well.
Even today the origin and motives of APEN have never been revealed but their use of Nazi like command structures was both puzzling and rather comical.
Given that it is 45 years old and produced on that old and crude printing concept, Issue 8, the first I was involved with helping to produce, has survived readably intact.
The groups in the alliance now numbered 8 and by the end of 1975 had reached 24 as the idea of a cooperating federation of local teams really took hold. They went as far north as Rossendale (and ultimately north east England with Chrysis and Scotland) and as far south as Kettering. It had also added the first link with national group BUFORA (which I had been a member of since 1968).
I was invited to join its council as Northern Coordinator in late 1975 - building on the links with this growing local group alliance. Membership of the council of the main national UFO group with about 1000 members was an association I retained for the next 20 years, leaving over a dispute about BUFORAs handling of the infamous ‘alien autopsy’ footage.
This bizarre case was later made into a comedy movie starring Ant and Dec (again something nobody in their right mind could have foreseen to be possible way back in 1974).
Despite quitting any official role with BUFORA from 1994 I continued to operate the ‘UFO Call’ phone line information service which I set up and ran for them across hundreds of weekly updated messages until it ended around the turn of the Millennium. I also remain a life member and the only lecture I gave on the UFO subject between 2003 and 2018 was by video link from North Wales in 2012 as part of the 50th anniversary BUFORA conference in London - where I could not literally go whilst being a full time carer - but was delighted to participate in via the then high tech of Skype.
I talked at that conference about some of the key cases that were investigated during my time as Director of Investigations for BUFORA - between 1982 and 1994. During which the team created an investigator training course and a code of practice for the protection of witnesses, both things that I am pleased to note that Heather Dixon, who was one of our investigators from the north east team in those days, has taken on and developed after I left as she has expertly run the BUFORA investigation team into the present day.
Many of the NUFON groups were involved in the creation of both these ground breaking concepts alongside BUFORA and my partner, Paul, and I travelled far and wide on his Triumph Bonneville to local group meetings as far apart as Nottingham and Swindon planning the rules within the code to govern interaction with witnesses. Most local groups accepted these alongside BUFORA nationally.
This was the starting point for the world’s first ‘ban’ on the use of regression hypnosis in the investigation of close encounter cases owing to fears over how it compromised the data that emerged from that state and where protection of the well-being of the witness was put as paramount by the code of practice.
This is one of the things I am most proud about us seeing the need for and doing within this BUFORA/NUFON alliance.
BUFORA these days is mostly an online presence but it still investigates and is publishing all of its data on line, which I am delighted to see. As the first UFO group I ever joined 50 years ago whilst as school (eek!) my heart is still very much with them. So here's to the next half century.
Back in 1974 the BUFORA Yorkshire branch - then run by experienced UFO investigator Trevor Whittaker - became part of the UNO family late that year.
That final 1974 issue also cited the appearance of the first mystery letters from APEN about the little explored incident (by then thought to be resolved as a meteor sighting coincident with an earth tremor) that happened early in 1974 in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales.
This case was something Andy Roberts, of the West Yorkshire group would much later write a book about. Though Paul and I had some involvement, unexpectedly, in the late 70s/early 80s.
Paul’s family owned a caravan in the small village of Llandrillo below those mountains right in the middle of the activity on that winter’s night. We visited here often for weekends and summer stays and in local pubs met people who had witnessed the events and the search for evidence on the slopes that involved the military afterwards. They talked to us almost as ‘locals’ because of our semi residency unaware that we had any direct connection with UFOs as this was before I published my first book.
APENs secrecy over this ‘solved case’ in their eyes (they claimed) being an ‘alien contact’ led me to argue the whole APEN affair was probably an ‘elaborate hoax’ in that first issue. I have not changed my mind 44 years later.
I noted how the APEN letters and tapes were full of Nazi marches, references to supreme commanders and secret funds buying top range equipment and aliens handing out phone numbers to witnesses to call only APEN - but they never gave any contact address for anyone to return communication.
From the start it looked like a bit of a silly game being played within and at the expense of the UFO community - notably the new federation - but quickly developed darker undertones as some groups in the Midlands ended up having unwelcome interactions with the police after APEN had acted very oddly around a local case.
Aside from my Magonia article cited above anyone interested in more detail will find a summary of the APEN story on pages 154 - 161 of my book ‘Investigating the truth behind the Men In Black’ (Piatkus 1997).
This book tells the story of some real British cases associated with this odd side to the UFO mystery and was released to coincide with the first of what became a franchise of ‘Men in Black’ movies starring Will Smith. I had been asked to help promote the film in British cinemas. So I wrote a serious book in return for aiding that fictional comic book franchise - which in turn was based on actual UFO lore dating back to the early 1950s.
The fourth movie in this rebooted series (Men in Black International) is, incidentally, set to appear on 14 June 2019.
With issue 9 in January 1975 UNO was finally renamed NUFON - Northern UFO Network - as the agreed choice of those who voted in the competition - and the magazine became Northern UFO News (NUN) instead of UNO News.
I also took over as full time editor and produced most of the issues (bar one in January 1977 when I was in hospital and Kate Preston edited that month in my stead).
Kate, too, from those pioneer days is still involved as a member of the LAPIS paranormal research group based on the Fylde coast. It was here in October 2018 I gave my first talk ‘live’ since 2003 (and quite possibly my last!)
NUN appeared right up until 2002 when its life as a printed magazine available on subscription ended after 27 years owing to my having to take time off from UFO research for family responsibilities.
Northern UFO News returned in 2017 as a regular free on line publication here continuing numerically where we had left off (hence now reaching number 200 after number 100 had appeared back in January 1983).
All of the past online issues from 2017 are archived on this site for free. And many of the earlier print editions up to number 186 have been scanned and saved by Robert Moore and Isaac Koi for the wonderful on line pdf data base of UFO magazine history that has been stored online for free by the remarkably dedicated team in Sweden of the excellent research group AFU.
What that group are doing to preserve UFO history is incalculable.
See http://files.afu.se
Just search under United Kingdom in the index of downloaded magazines where most back issues of Northern UFO News up to the last print edition 17 years ago are available to read completely free by clicking on issue number and date of choice.
I have given them permission to add archived copies from here onto the data base so all can be accessible in one place - though the archive copies that you can read on here will also remain as long as there is space for me to do so.
This is a brief history of how this magazine came to be. It has remained much the same since my first issue 44 years ago but went through some changes in appearance and started coming out less frequently (bi-monthly, then 3 or 4 times per year) as commercial print costs rose so as to never have to charge a large annual subscription. Even in 2002 it was just £5 for a year.
Easy access remained the aim throughout - NUN has never been a money making operation and has never made any money! So making it free to access here is in the ultimate point on a path that began simply nearly half a century ago.
At the end of this special issue I will include some more of the cover designs and superb artwork voluntarily created for this magazine by a number of excellent artists - including Roy Sandbach, from MUFORA, who trained with LS Lowry and Bill Callaghan.
Another of John Watson's is there too - so you can play spot the alien!
Their covers were a delight to choose each issue and match with content as so many were willing to send them in on speculation that I built up a store to include as appropriate and I have used some of those still left in my store when the last print edition came out 17 years ago to continue that trend.
Northern UFO News really was a cooperative effort and built on the desire to show that we could always do things better if we work together. That was the whole principle of what was really the only such network of local groups - fully independent but sharing resources - that was very much a product of its time when, of course, on line access to everything instantly was a distant fantasy and sharing like this was necessary.
There were central files - too - thousands of them. For many years they were stored in a building in Meadow Lane, Nottingham, owned by the city's research group when part of the network. On their departure MUFORA took them over and housed them for many years at the city university where anyone could access them on request for research.
Before the group network around the UK dissipated with the rise of the internet these were relocated to a building in the Manchester City Centre conveniently opposite the Central Library.
The files, of course still exist but what to do with them now is a matter for discussion. Your ideas would be welcome.
THE CASE FILES BY DECADE: 1970s:
In this section of the review of our 200 issues I plan to highlight some of the cases that stand out from their appearance in the magazine decade by decade. I will continue this review over the next few issues of Northern UFO News to see if we can put the past in context with the present.
We might find that we can solve cases with modern knowledge that was not possible back then given our more limited technology or understanding. Or a case that looked insignificant decades ago has new meaning based on events that have occurred since and knowledge gained.
By all means please submit any thoughts you have to:
nufonews@gmail.com
MUFORA had started to organise annual conferences at UMIST (the University of Science and Technology between Oxford Road and Piccadilly station in Manchester City Centre). The summer 1974 event attracted 300 people and for 1975 Norman Oliver of BUFORA (who had investigated major cases in the 60s) appeared.
These were early ways we used to try to gather in local area sightings to be investigated by the associated groups because we quickly realised that the public rarely know who to call if they see ‘something strange in the neighbourhood’. There was no UFO busters then!
In the audience of that event was an interested participant who was then (and 44 years later still is) on TV - in the role of Ken Barlow in Coronation Street. Bill Roache, whose interest in the paranormal was not then well known in those pre mass publicity days, was present and that probably signalled that as a concept NUFON had arrived.
For that 1975 conference we created a special one off professional printed issue (the only one for some years) - Issue 15 - which sold at a cover price of 18 p. We got extra stock in because in October 1975 we had another major publicity opportunity to attract new cases.
We persuaded the BBC to allow us to write our own script and present a short documentary feature on UFOs for television. This was my first writing venture (although Peter Warrington and I were in the early stages of planning UFOs: A British Viewpoint - that book was still 4 years away). And we had been doing semi regular programmes on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester soon after I started editing this magazine. That station then being one of the first commercial radio networks in the newly liberated media environment allowed to challenge the BBC monopoly.
On the TV feature Peter Warrington and myself were joined by Mike Dean of the original UNO group from the Wirral, Trevor Whitaker of the BUFORA Yorkshire branch that opened up the cooperation between us and national group and Roger Stanway - Roger being a lawyer who was then BUFORA chairman and a hugely respected UFO investigator, but who sadly quit the field suddenly months after that TV appearance. He was missed.
That TV appearance was the first time in the UK that UFOlogists had written and presented their own national television programme on the subject - sadly only a quarter of an hour as we had to share the slot with a campaign to liberate chickens! That campaign must have been successful as they roamed free around the London studio and half demolished the set.
That early TV appearance was to bring in a large flood of cases and in the last months of 1975 the NUFON groups were chasing up about over 100 split geographically between them - with BUFORA taking on others from outside the north and midlands as the BBC 2 show was watched across the country and with the repeat seen by nearly a million viewers.
The special issue we had printed helped to showcase our work to newcomers. It featured a promising landing case investigated by NAPRA, one of the founder groups, on 18 May 1975 at Rainhill Merseyside - location of the famous railway trials in 1829 where Stephenson’s Rocket out performed other locomotives and became the class used on the Liverpool to Manchester railway route then being built and which would become the first inter-city passenger line in the world.
The witness to this 1975 sighting was looking south east at 10 pm across open fields from her window and called her husband and father to watch with her as three white balls in a triangle sat above it pulsating.
It then moved slowly over a barn and appeared to land behind a tree. Her husband bravely headed into the gloom in case it was a helicopter in trouble (though there was no noise). Beyond the trees he saw a throbbing white glow emerging from a hollow meaning that the cause was out of immediate view.
Convinced now some aircraft was in trouble he returned to the house and called the others to follow. But when they reached the field nothing was there. However, a faint humming noise was emerging from the hollow!
Waiting until her father returned to the house and brought a flashlight the three now edged together towards the hollow. Nothing was there.
NAPRA arrived in daylight and examined the area (a small pond was in the dell with a muddy bank not safe to descend in the dark). Here they found four strange pad or footprint marks in the mud. These were measured and filmed and were 13/14 inches by 6 inches and 45 inches apart. They were unusually square. Inset into one print was a stone that appeared to have been scuffed by metal.
No explanation was ever found for this case after looking for evidence of air traffic or weather phenomena. But the metal was tested and found to likely be aluminium that had been subject to heat.
That specially printed issue also carried my first article outside case reports on the theme of different kinds of humming sounds reported in UFO cases with a focus on a series of independent witnesses to an event on 24 November 1974 over Haslingden in Lancashire.
This incident presaged many similar events over the area in subsequent years that created the media story of a ‘Rossendale Anomaly’ (more about that is featured in The Pennine UFO Mystery - my 1983 book on this wave of events).
One of the interesting cases that arrived from the Open Door TV appearance occurred in July 1973 and was in a field close to Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire.
The witness was just one of many people who stopped as several cars ahead had done beside a field and occupants were watching something in the field. This witness then did the same.
It was a warm, sunny, still day and over the field was a black fuzzy mass hovering several hundred feet in the air, sucking up from the ground a column of what seemed to be straw or loose hay from the field. This column was entering (or more likely creating) the dark mass floating above.
As the witness watched in amazement one man jumped over the hedge and entered the field and stood inside the rising column of hay staring up into the vortex as it swirled around him like some weird special effect.
He later claimed to feel nothing unusual whilst stood there. The incident lasted 15 minutes and the object did not move during that time.
Meteorologists later suggested this was a whirlwind caused by rising hot air - a fair weather stationary whirlwind, in fact.
Only a few years later, when crop circles started to grab the attention of the public and UFO researchers from 1980 onward, did cases like this get noticed and assist those physicists, such as Dr Terence Meaden, of the tornado research group TORRO, who saw they might suggest how atmospheric phenomena might trigger UFO reports and leave behind some of the simpler patterns in fields.
But in 1975 that was yet to be realised. With BUFORAs Paul Fuller and via them I produced a book called Controversy of the Circles in 1986 (expanding on a smaller booklet we wrote in 1983). It was created in a similar format to this magazine by the same professional printer that by then we used as prices had fallen over the past decade. And our own regular cover artist, Roy Sandbach, drew the amusing cover.
I have added that cover too at the end of this issue so you can see it. The book itself - along with all of BUFORAs publications over the years (including UFO World - an annual global review I wrote that was similarly produced for three years in the 1980s) are on a very useful DVD that you can get from BUFORA on line. Well worthwhile.
UFOLOGY THROUGH THE DECADES: 1970s
In this section I want to look at some of the ideas about UFO research and thinking across the five decades that Northern UFO News has been published. How have our ideas and theories altered about the subject as reflected in the magazine?
Again I will look at a decade a time in upcoming editions of Northern UFO News to leave some space for ongoing new cases and activity we may need to discuss in 2019 NUNs.
In the 1970s Britain was starting to adopt the idea of ‘New UFOlogy’ championed by the aforementioned Magonia magazine and with the name derived from Jacques and Janine Vallee’s book - A Passport to Magonia - which looked at the possibility that modern UFO sightings are really just a space age continuation of events that have happened to certain human being throughout history.
In the past when society was scattered and living in isolated rural communities many people often had a much closer relationship with nature - something we celebrate centuries later in a number of our festivals built around the seasons.
Encounters with spirits and ethereal beings have been a part of cultures all over the world where the equivalent of fairies or elves or goblins are not just part of stories but manifest in slight variations in diverse societies - even remote islands.
Is this because they are actual denizens of another dimension? Or do they emerge from within the collective consciousness of humanity representing a common ideology that we just dress up slightly differently depending on local circumstances?
And are the small beings and the other menagerie of alien entities reported by someone today in context of the UFO mystery just a space age take on the old farmer in the field far from home and long ago?
In issue 24 in May 1976 I wrote about a study of seasonal differences between cases based on the first 2 years of NUFON data that we were publishing separately as a catalogue in a special edition. We were starting to notice how well publicised UFO events in the press or on TV were ‘creating’ a flood of new and old cases as people used that publicity as a way to get the courage to speak out on things they might otherwise not.
Sometimes these triggers were major IFO events - such as the satellite burn ups that were starting to create a new wave of UFO events. During the 1960s the USA and USSR had put rockets and satellites into orbit and some of them were starting to decay in orbit and burn up spectacularly in the upper atmosphere. The resulting slow moving train of debris was an amazing lightshow and something totally new to someone in the right place at the right time then seeing one of these for the first time.
We were becoming aware that every few years new technology was creating the latest ‘strange thing’ in the sky that would trigger multiple reports but that would be unidentified to most witnesses then seeing it for the first time in their lives. As a result this was reported widely by them as a UFO. With all of the ‘alien’ connotation that implied. Until, of course, it became common knowledge and misperceived less often.
As UFO investigators we had to figure out as we went along how to recognise these novel events until we could then spot them when the sightings came in. And before, after several years, witnesses would gradually get used to what they were.
So whilst satellite burn ups still cause misperceptions even in the 21st century as they are rare events most of us will never get to see, there is much more familiarity with them than in the 1970s when they first started happening.
Usually there would be multiple witnesses to such a space spectacular, spread over large areas, proving it was something in the upper atmosphere in order to be visible across a wide area. However, witnesses viewing these things unaware of their actual cause and often believing them to be UFOs would tend to ‘see’ features that were partly defined by their own inner interpretation based on what to them a UFO was - as in a strange craft.
So what in truth was just a disconnected trail of blazing debris burning up with friction was perceived as lights or windows on the side of a long object. The structure connecting them was implicit because we are used to seeing lights as part of something whole.
In this way we had to gradually unravel how to identify when satellite re-entries were being witnessed. This was given its most dramatic illustration on New Years Eve 1978 when hundreds of people across the UK witnessed the death throes of Cosmos 1068 - a Russian rocket. We were able to collate and document over 100 reports across the UK and I wrote up an analysis of the data that later would appear in my book UFO Reality in 1983. This helped us to learn a lot about witness perception that we could apply to future cases.
One of these sightings was by then new comedy double act, the Toughs, who went by the name of the Krankies (and still perform today). They witnessed the event from mid air aboard a light aircraft taking them from pantomime in Newcastle to do a live New Year's Eve TV show in their native Scotland.
Of course, every few years a new kind of novel IFO would again appear and go through the same process as these re-entries first did in the 70s. It is a never ending process and we constantly have to be on the alert for the latest one first spotted via satellite burn ups in those early days of NUFON over 40 years ago.
So in coming decades we would see the appearance of laser light displays in the 1980s bouncing off low cloud in moving dramas, military drones in the 1990s - real hgh tech - but of secret Earth origin not alien - and fire lanterns in the 2000s that were literal ‘fire in the sky’ but puzzling from a distance.
These were amongst other illustrations of the same pattern and once we had identified it with those 1970s satellite re-entries we were prepared to resolve UFO sightings more rapidly when new waves came along that were equally challenging.
We have already seen the first signs in recent NUN editions of the possible latest in this long line of IFOs with the prevalence of stunt aircraft being flown with pyrotechnics attached to their wings and obvious if you right underneath them but quite puzzling in the dark when these are flown if you happen to be too far away to hear or recognise the source.
As a result by 1979 NUFON was quickly aware that 90 - 95% of all reported UFO sightings were really IFOs - identified - often recognisable by this pattern of reporting - and we could focus our attention more on the cases that offered hope of being really interesting.
In this way we were able to use the NUFON alliance and Northern UFO News to head towards the end of its first decade with new insights.
APOLOGIES FOR THE DELAY IN PUBLISHING THIS SPECIAL EDITION - BEING NUMBER 200 I WANTED IT TO BE A BIT OF A CELEBRATION AND RETROSPECTIVE OF NEARLY HALF A CENTURY.
HOPEFULLY FROM ISSUE 201 WE WILL BE BACK TO A MORE REGULAR SCHEDULE, THOUGH POSSIBLY Bi-MONTHLY FOR A WHILE AS I AM INVOLVED IN SOME BOOK PROJECTS AND FOR NOW THAT HAS PRIORITY. I WILL SAY MORE HERE SOON.
I DO INTEND TO FEATURE RETROSPECTIVE LOOKS AT OUR HISTORY IN COMING ISSUES ALONGSIDE MORE UP TO DATE NEWS. SO JUST STAY TUNED.
NEWS: PROJECT BLUE BOOK THE TV SERIES
The history channel in the USA launched on 8 January 2019 a new drama series - Project Blue Book. This venture plans to tell the true story of the US Air Force UFO investigation programme from the 1940s/50s/60s
From celebrated movie producer Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) it stars Irish Actor Aiden Gillen (Peaky Blinders, Game of Thrones) as real life UFO researcher and supporter of this magazine - Professor J Allen Hynek.
His wife Mimi is played by Canadian actress Laura Merrell, who has starred in Haven and The Man in the High Castle.
Each episode in the initial 10 part run tells the story around one major real life case from the early years of Blue Book, such as the Flatwoods Monster. But with an underlying drama as the clash between military and science develops and UFO evidence mounts.
As yet no UK air date is known but it seems very likely it will appear on History here too. And it is getting about 2 million viewers which is very good for a cable channel so odds of a second series look good.
Having been privileged to know Allen and Mimi and go on a road trip across America with them and house sit their home in Evanston, Illinois for a time in 1983, I am looking forward to seeing how this tells that couple’s extraordinary but true story.
From the trailer on You Tube it looks really intriguing. And it is fascinating to note that Aiden, who plays the professor, got his big break in the city of Manchester - where this magazine and your editor started investigating UFOs too - as he was appearing in the Canal Street Manchester set TV series Queer as Folk, from Russell T Davies - the man who later brought back Doctor Who to international success.
Will post any news of UK air dates soon.
NORTHERN UFO NEWS: The Story
Why was a magazine called Northern UFO News ever created? Well for a start this was not the original name. When it first appeared in 1974 it was curiously called UNO News.
UNO stood for the Union of Northern Observers. This was the original title given to an initiative set up by a couple of local UFO groups in North West England 46 years ago, who in 1973 decided to work together in an informal liaison.
This idea for cooperation was ground breaking at the time and very unusual in an era when all over the world major towns and cities had their own UFO investigation teams each researching cases with their own agenda and often competing for members and resources.
This alliance was an attempt to break that pattern.
As some of those involved in the short lived West Pennine Research Group were rather active in the labour rights field the idea of a Union seems to have taken root.
At that stage I was not involved in the organisation having my hands full with other things in life at just 21 and going through middle school teacher training, where I was specialising in Geology.
But I do recall a few months later when I had got involved in the plans and we decided to reconsider the name that I suggested using a shout line that used the title and said: “U NO - it makes sense”.
But that was a tad too daft for the rather austere 1970s! So instead a competition was held and that led to a vote on a whole new identity.
Sale based UFO researcher, David Rees, ran a small group - MAPIT - Manchester Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team - which was the other founder of UNO who came alongside the West Pennine Research Group.
MAPIT still exists but has been a very different group for the past 30 years when it was taken over by Stephen Mera, whose presence on line as an active researcher has been well known for some years. It expanded into a Paranormal Research Team and the name changed to take this into account whilst cleverly retaining the MAPIT initials.
When, MAPIT moved on from UNO soon after the UNO name was dropped and the geographical spread was broadened, MUFORA, the Manchester UFO Research Association, of which I was then a member, being run by Peter Warrington, became a founder of the newly restructured ‘union’.
The early newsletters of UNO starting in May 1974 were just duplicated pieces of paper covering admin matters not UFOs as such. They were not really the magazine that followed, but took the first half dozen slots in the number sequence.
By Summer 1974 UNO had expanded to include the Wirral UFO Society - WUFOS - lasting several years - and the Scunthorpe UFO Research Society, that involved a then young researcher still around today - Nigel Watson.
Nigel has gone on to write several important UFO books. This includes the 2013 UFO entry in the Haynes manual series - something that decades earlier when UNO was newly formed would have been very improbable for that car technology mechanics specialist to even contemplate.
Nigel actually wrote the first ever article to appear in this magazine (still then called UNO News). It appeared in June 1974 - titled ‘The Dogma of UFOlogy’. He refers to a definition by Peter Rogerson of MAGONIA, who sadly died just last year, describing three types of UFOlogist. A theme continued by the cover I selected to use for this 200th special.
The three types that Nigel discussed were UFO researchers, UFO buffs and Cultists. Nigel noted that the ETH (extra-terrestrial hypothesis) for origin of the UFO mystery was the most supported by the latter two groups, but changes were occurring via then popular American writer John Keel (on whose work and books the 2002 movie ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney is based - with Gere playing a fictionalised version of Keel himself).
Keel’s views were having increasing influence and led to the popularity of the concept of an ‘ultraterrestrial’ (not ET) origin of the phenomenon.
Nigel also pointed out that nearly all of British UFO research at that point was entirely amateur in nature and our lack of scientific focus or participants was part of the reason why we had dogma rather than research. Though Peter Warrington, at MUFORA soon brought in some of that as he was a keen astronomer approaching interest in the subject objectively from that perspective.
Over in the USA several professional scientists such as astronomer Dr J Allen Hynek and computer specialist Dr Jacques Vallee were already prominent. MUFORA would soon invite Hynek over for a dinner party and discussions on how to make British research more scientific too and he was a good ally to the alliance up to his death in 1986.
That first article by Nigel was significant in that it helped guide the future of the group and the magazine to try to become more of a chronicle of rather more objective documentation rather than the then common writing style (Nigel cited specifically Gordon Creighton of Flying Saucer Review magazine). That style mixed fact with often extreme speculation about myths regarding ethereal magical djinn (spirit beings from which the pantomime/fairy tale ‘genie’ is derived).
There was a £1 membership fee (or 75 p per member if you wanted to join individually not as just a group). This basically covered the duplicated newsletter - which was by now set up as a way to also cover reports on the cases investigated by the involved independent local groups.
The first ever case published (in issue 2) was dated 2 July 1973 at 8.45 pm on that Summer evening at Lostock Gralam in Cheshire.
It was a bright fluorescent light seen by David Rees’s own mother from a car parked in a lay by and fascinating in that it included what was still a decade away from being recognized and named as ‘the Oz Factor’. After which, of course, this site is also named.
The witness described how - whilst the UFO was visible ‘all sound around her seemed to be blotted out’. She also found herself unable to call for help during the estimated 5 minutes whilst this ‘long jewel’ shaped object hovered there. Others in the family were away from the car and on return had seen nothing. They examined the fields but nothing untoward was discovered.
By Issue 5 the magazine was now in a form of two or three tone colour and spirit duplicator printed which allowed simple drawings but was still very basic. I recall using that messy ink machine - purchased cheaply from the hellishly hot Red Bank Manchester iron foundry - Henry Wallwork - where my dad was the bookkeeper and I had my first paid holiday job in secretarial work making up wages.
Back then cheap commercial printing was not possible on a tiny budget and computers were still the size of rooms costing six figure sums and the internet still an idea in science fiction novels. Indeed my second working job (thanks to my science A Levels) was a year before college transferring hundreds of thousands of file records of car registration numbers onto a then massive million pound computer that was less powerful than most mobile phones are these days and yet several thousand times larger.
That issue - number 5 of UNO News - did include the first analysis of 82 cases that had by then been reported from the now five groups - a Cheshire based team called NAPRA having been added.
Nothing dramatic was noted from those first analyses other than sightings in daylight hours were massively outnumbered by those at night - which peaked around 22.00 hrs but with a more surprising secondary peak around 2/3 am.
By the end of 1974 and issue 8 UNO News was finally becoming more like an actual magazine now people were paying to receive it across half a dozen independent groups run as a kind of federation, which had to some extent been modelled on the idea of this from the then relatively recent (and ongoing) TV series Star Trek!
Issues now usually had multiple case reports, news and articles. But there here had been big changes in recent weeks. The West Pennine group had disappeared along with MAPIT- meaning both original founders had gone within the first year - although an echo of their influence from the WPRG union ethos would resurface mysteriously not long afterwards.
This was found in the socialist political aspirations of a mystery UFO wrecking crew called APEN - Aerial Phenomena Enquiry Network - that sent mischievous missives to the UNO groups in Scunthorpe, Manchester and the Wirral between late 1974 and 1977.
They later even got involved in the Rendlesham Forest case. Many of the 1975 issues of the magazine gave updates on their latest bizarre activities which at times were very strange but suspiciously hoax like.
Anyone curious can read my discussion of their links with us in The Strange Affair of APEN an article I wrote for Magonia in 1976 and which is archived on line by them:
magonia.haaan.com/2009/apen/
This Magonia archive is freely available on line and has many articles from over 30 years of this marvellous publication that thrived on critical British UFO thinking. Many NUFON contributors published in there if wanting to writer longer pieces that NUN was never designed to be able to include.
Magonia also featured some cases - another NUFON incident I wrote up in there and I recall fondly from the 1970s being ‘A Vendetta With Venus’ that was one of the most telling early IFO cases I managed to get involved with and which even made Granada TV.
If you have never checked Magonia’s archives out on line it is well worthy of your time. Indeed John Rimmer, who has been involved as long as I have in this field, over on Merseyside, recently invited me to be a book reviewer for the on line version of Magonia. So you will find some new writings there as well.
Even today the origin and motives of APEN have never been revealed but their use of Nazi like command structures was both puzzling and rather comical.
Given that it is 45 years old and produced on that old and crude printing concept, Issue 8, the first I was involved with helping to produce, has survived readably intact.
The groups in the alliance now numbered 8 and by the end of 1975 had reached 24 as the idea of a cooperating federation of local teams really took hold. They went as far north as Rossendale (and ultimately north east England with Chrysis and Scotland) and as far south as Kettering. It had also added the first link with national group BUFORA (which I had been a member of since 1968).
I was invited to join its council as Northern Coordinator in late 1975 - building on the links with this growing local group alliance. Membership of the council of the main national UFO group with about 1000 members was an association I retained for the next 20 years, leaving over a dispute about BUFORAs handling of the infamous ‘alien autopsy’ footage.
This bizarre case was later made into a comedy movie starring Ant and Dec (again something nobody in their right mind could have foreseen to be possible way back in 1974).
Despite quitting any official role with BUFORA from 1994 I continued to operate the ‘UFO Call’ phone line information service which I set up and ran for them across hundreds of weekly updated messages until it ended around the turn of the Millennium. I also remain a life member and the only lecture I gave on the UFO subject between 2003 and 2018 was by video link from North Wales in 2012 as part of the 50th anniversary BUFORA conference in London - where I could not literally go whilst being a full time carer - but was delighted to participate in via the then high tech of Skype.
I talked at that conference about some of the key cases that were investigated during my time as Director of Investigations for BUFORA - between 1982 and 1994. During which the team created an investigator training course and a code of practice for the protection of witnesses, both things that I am pleased to note that Heather Dixon, who was one of our investigators from the north east team in those days, has taken on and developed after I left as she has expertly run the BUFORA investigation team into the present day.
Many of the NUFON groups were involved in the creation of both these ground breaking concepts alongside BUFORA and my partner, Paul, and I travelled far and wide on his Triumph Bonneville to local group meetings as far apart as Nottingham and Swindon planning the rules within the code to govern interaction with witnesses. Most local groups accepted these alongside BUFORA nationally.
This was the starting point for the world’s first ‘ban’ on the use of regression hypnosis in the investigation of close encounter cases owing to fears over how it compromised the data that emerged from that state and where protection of the well-being of the witness was put as paramount by the code of practice.
This is one of the things I am most proud about us seeing the need for and doing within this BUFORA/NUFON alliance.
BUFORA these days is mostly an online presence but it still investigates and is publishing all of its data on line, which I am delighted to see. As the first UFO group I ever joined 50 years ago whilst as school (eek!) my heart is still very much with them. So here's to the next half century.
Back in 1974 the BUFORA Yorkshire branch - then run by experienced UFO investigator Trevor Whittaker - became part of the UNO family late that year.
That final 1974 issue also cited the appearance of the first mystery letters from APEN about the little explored incident (by then thought to be resolved as a meteor sighting coincident with an earth tremor) that happened early in 1974 in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales.
This case was something Andy Roberts, of the West Yorkshire group would much later write a book about. Though Paul and I had some involvement, unexpectedly, in the late 70s/early 80s.
Paul’s family owned a caravan in the small village of Llandrillo below those mountains right in the middle of the activity on that winter’s night. We visited here often for weekends and summer stays and in local pubs met people who had witnessed the events and the search for evidence on the slopes that involved the military afterwards. They talked to us almost as ‘locals’ because of our semi residency unaware that we had any direct connection with UFOs as this was before I published my first book.
APENs secrecy over this ‘solved case’ in their eyes (they claimed) being an ‘alien contact’ led me to argue the whole APEN affair was probably an ‘elaborate hoax’ in that first issue. I have not changed my mind 44 years later.
I noted how the APEN letters and tapes were full of Nazi marches, references to supreme commanders and secret funds buying top range equipment and aliens handing out phone numbers to witnesses to call only APEN - but they never gave any contact address for anyone to return communication.
From the start it looked like a bit of a silly game being played within and at the expense of the UFO community - notably the new federation - but quickly developed darker undertones as some groups in the Midlands ended up having unwelcome interactions with the police after APEN had acted very oddly around a local case.
Aside from my Magonia article cited above anyone interested in more detail will find a summary of the APEN story on pages 154 - 161 of my book ‘Investigating the truth behind the Men In Black’ (Piatkus 1997).
This book tells the story of some real British cases associated with this odd side to the UFO mystery and was released to coincide with the first of what became a franchise of ‘Men in Black’ movies starring Will Smith. I had been asked to help promote the film in British cinemas. So I wrote a serious book in return for aiding that fictional comic book franchise - which in turn was based on actual UFO lore dating back to the early 1950s.
The fourth movie in this rebooted series (Men in Black International) is, incidentally, set to appear on 14 June 2019.
With issue 9 in January 1975 UNO was finally renamed NUFON - Northern UFO Network - as the agreed choice of those who voted in the competition - and the magazine became Northern UFO News (NUN) instead of UNO News.
I also took over as full time editor and produced most of the issues (bar one in January 1977 when I was in hospital and Kate Preston edited that month in my stead).
Kate, too, from those pioneer days is still involved as a member of the LAPIS paranormal research group based on the Fylde coast. It was here in October 2018 I gave my first talk ‘live’ since 2003 (and quite possibly my last!)
NUN appeared right up until 2002 when its life as a printed magazine available on subscription ended after 27 years owing to my having to take time off from UFO research for family responsibilities.
Northern UFO News returned in 2017 as a regular free on line publication here continuing numerically where we had left off (hence now reaching number 200 after number 100 had appeared back in January 1983).
All of the past online issues from 2017 are archived on this site for free. And many of the earlier print editions up to number 186 have been scanned and saved by Robert Moore and Isaac Koi for the wonderful on line pdf data base of UFO magazine history that has been stored online for free by the remarkably dedicated team in Sweden of the excellent research group AFU.
What that group are doing to preserve UFO history is incalculable.
See http://files.afu.se
Just search under United Kingdom in the index of downloaded magazines where most back issues of Northern UFO News up to the last print edition 17 years ago are available to read completely free by clicking on issue number and date of choice.
I have given them permission to add archived copies from here onto the data base so all can be accessible in one place - though the archive copies that you can read on here will also remain as long as there is space for me to do so.
This is a brief history of how this magazine came to be. It has remained much the same since my first issue 44 years ago but went through some changes in appearance and started coming out less frequently (bi-monthly, then 3 or 4 times per year) as commercial print costs rose so as to never have to charge a large annual subscription. Even in 2002 it was just £5 for a year.
Easy access remained the aim throughout - NUN has never been a money making operation and has never made any money! So making it free to access here is in the ultimate point on a path that began simply nearly half a century ago.
At the end of this special issue I will include some more of the cover designs and superb artwork voluntarily created for this magazine by a number of excellent artists - including Roy Sandbach, from MUFORA, who trained with LS Lowry and Bill Callaghan.
Another of John Watson's is there too - so you can play spot the alien!
Their covers were a delight to choose each issue and match with content as so many were willing to send them in on speculation that I built up a store to include as appropriate and I have used some of those still left in my store when the last print edition came out 17 years ago to continue that trend.
Northern UFO News really was a cooperative effort and built on the desire to show that we could always do things better if we work together. That was the whole principle of what was really the only such network of local groups - fully independent but sharing resources - that was very much a product of its time when, of course, on line access to everything instantly was a distant fantasy and sharing like this was necessary.
There were central files - too - thousands of them. For many years they were stored in a building in Meadow Lane, Nottingham, owned by the city's research group when part of the network. On their departure MUFORA took them over and housed them for many years at the city university where anyone could access them on request for research.
Before the group network around the UK dissipated with the rise of the internet these were relocated to a building in the Manchester City Centre conveniently opposite the Central Library.
The files, of course still exist but what to do with them now is a matter for discussion. Your ideas would be welcome.
THE CASE FILES BY DECADE: 1970s:
In this section of the review of our 200 issues I plan to highlight some of the cases that stand out from their appearance in the magazine decade by decade. I will continue this review over the next few issues of Northern UFO News to see if we can put the past in context with the present.
We might find that we can solve cases with modern knowledge that was not possible back then given our more limited technology or understanding. Or a case that looked insignificant decades ago has new meaning based on events that have occurred since and knowledge gained.
By all means please submit any thoughts you have to:
nufonews@gmail.com
MUFORA had started to organise annual conferences at UMIST (the University of Science and Technology between Oxford Road and Piccadilly station in Manchester City Centre). The summer 1974 event attracted 300 people and for 1975 Norman Oliver of BUFORA (who had investigated major cases in the 60s) appeared.
These were early ways we used to try to gather in local area sightings to be investigated by the associated groups because we quickly realised that the public rarely know who to call if they see ‘something strange in the neighbourhood’. There was no UFO busters then!
In the audience of that event was an interested participant who was then (and 44 years later still is) on TV - in the role of Ken Barlow in Coronation Street. Bill Roache, whose interest in the paranormal was not then well known in those pre mass publicity days, was present and that probably signalled that as a concept NUFON had arrived.
For that 1975 conference we created a special one off professional printed issue (the only one for some years) - Issue 15 - which sold at a cover price of 18 p. We got extra stock in because in October 1975 we had another major publicity opportunity to attract new cases.
We persuaded the BBC to allow us to write our own script and present a short documentary feature on UFOs for television. This was my first writing venture (although Peter Warrington and I were in the early stages of planning UFOs: A British Viewpoint - that book was still 4 years away). And we had been doing semi regular programmes on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester soon after I started editing this magazine. That station then being one of the first commercial radio networks in the newly liberated media environment allowed to challenge the BBC monopoly.
On the TV feature Peter Warrington and myself were joined by Mike Dean of the original UNO group from the Wirral, Trevor Whitaker of the BUFORA Yorkshire branch that opened up the cooperation between us and national group and Roger Stanway - Roger being a lawyer who was then BUFORA chairman and a hugely respected UFO investigator, but who sadly quit the field suddenly months after that TV appearance. He was missed.
That TV appearance was the first time in the UK that UFOlogists had written and presented their own national television programme on the subject - sadly only a quarter of an hour as we had to share the slot with a campaign to liberate chickens! That campaign must have been successful as they roamed free around the London studio and half demolished the set.
That early TV appearance was to bring in a large flood of cases and in the last months of 1975 the NUFON groups were chasing up about over 100 split geographically between them - with BUFORA taking on others from outside the north and midlands as the BBC 2 show was watched across the country and with the repeat seen by nearly a million viewers.
The special issue we had printed helped to showcase our work to newcomers. It featured a promising landing case investigated by NAPRA, one of the founder groups, on 18 May 1975 at Rainhill Merseyside - location of the famous railway trials in 1829 where Stephenson’s Rocket out performed other locomotives and became the class used on the Liverpool to Manchester railway route then being built and which would become the first inter-city passenger line in the world.
The witness to this 1975 sighting was looking south east at 10 pm across open fields from her window and called her husband and father to watch with her as three white balls in a triangle sat above it pulsating.
It then moved slowly over a barn and appeared to land behind a tree. Her husband bravely headed into the gloom in case it was a helicopter in trouble (though there was no noise). Beyond the trees he saw a throbbing white glow emerging from a hollow meaning that the cause was out of immediate view.
Convinced now some aircraft was in trouble he returned to the house and called the others to follow. But when they reached the field nothing was there. However, a faint humming noise was emerging from the hollow!
Waiting until her father returned to the house and brought a flashlight the three now edged together towards the hollow. Nothing was there.
NAPRA arrived in daylight and examined the area (a small pond was in the dell with a muddy bank not safe to descend in the dark). Here they found four strange pad or footprint marks in the mud. These were measured and filmed and were 13/14 inches by 6 inches and 45 inches apart. They were unusually square. Inset into one print was a stone that appeared to have been scuffed by metal.
No explanation was ever found for this case after looking for evidence of air traffic or weather phenomena. But the metal was tested and found to likely be aluminium that had been subject to heat.
That specially printed issue also carried my first article outside case reports on the theme of different kinds of humming sounds reported in UFO cases with a focus on a series of independent witnesses to an event on 24 November 1974 over Haslingden in Lancashire.
This incident presaged many similar events over the area in subsequent years that created the media story of a ‘Rossendale Anomaly’ (more about that is featured in The Pennine UFO Mystery - my 1983 book on this wave of events).
One of the interesting cases that arrived from the Open Door TV appearance occurred in July 1973 and was in a field close to Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire.
The witness was just one of many people who stopped as several cars ahead had done beside a field and occupants were watching something in the field. This witness then did the same.
It was a warm, sunny, still day and over the field was a black fuzzy mass hovering several hundred feet in the air, sucking up from the ground a column of what seemed to be straw or loose hay from the field. This column was entering (or more likely creating) the dark mass floating above.
As the witness watched in amazement one man jumped over the hedge and entered the field and stood inside the rising column of hay staring up into the vortex as it swirled around him like some weird special effect.
He later claimed to feel nothing unusual whilst stood there. The incident lasted 15 minutes and the object did not move during that time.
Meteorologists later suggested this was a whirlwind caused by rising hot air - a fair weather stationary whirlwind, in fact.
Only a few years later, when crop circles started to grab the attention of the public and UFO researchers from 1980 onward, did cases like this get noticed and assist those physicists, such as Dr Terence Meaden, of the tornado research group TORRO, who saw they might suggest how atmospheric phenomena might trigger UFO reports and leave behind some of the simpler patterns in fields.
But in 1975 that was yet to be realised. With BUFORAs Paul Fuller and via them I produced a book called Controversy of the Circles in 1986 (expanding on a smaller booklet we wrote in 1983). It was created in a similar format to this magazine by the same professional printer that by then we used as prices had fallen over the past decade. And our own regular cover artist, Roy Sandbach, drew the amusing cover.
I have added that cover too at the end of this issue so you can see it. The book itself - along with all of BUFORAs publications over the years (including UFO World - an annual global review I wrote that was similarly produced for three years in the 1980s) are on a very useful DVD that you can get from BUFORA on line. Well worthwhile.
UFOLOGY THROUGH THE DECADES: 1970s
In this section I want to look at some of the ideas about UFO research and thinking across the five decades that Northern UFO News has been published. How have our ideas and theories altered about the subject as reflected in the magazine?
Again I will look at a decade a time in upcoming editions of Northern UFO News to leave some space for ongoing new cases and activity we may need to discuss in 2019 NUNs.
In the 1970s Britain was starting to adopt the idea of ‘New UFOlogy’ championed by the aforementioned Magonia magazine and with the name derived from Jacques and Janine Vallee’s book - A Passport to Magonia - which looked at the possibility that modern UFO sightings are really just a space age continuation of events that have happened to certain human being throughout history.
In the past when society was scattered and living in isolated rural communities many people often had a much closer relationship with nature - something we celebrate centuries later in a number of our festivals built around the seasons.
Encounters with spirits and ethereal beings have been a part of cultures all over the world where the equivalent of fairies or elves or goblins are not just part of stories but manifest in slight variations in diverse societies - even remote islands.
Is this because they are actual denizens of another dimension? Or do they emerge from within the collective consciousness of humanity representing a common ideology that we just dress up slightly differently depending on local circumstances?
And are the small beings and the other menagerie of alien entities reported by someone today in context of the UFO mystery just a space age take on the old farmer in the field far from home and long ago?
In issue 24 in May 1976 I wrote about a study of seasonal differences between cases based on the first 2 years of NUFON data that we were publishing separately as a catalogue in a special edition. We were starting to notice how well publicised UFO events in the press or on TV were ‘creating’ a flood of new and old cases as people used that publicity as a way to get the courage to speak out on things they might otherwise not.
Sometimes these triggers were major IFO events - such as the satellite burn ups that were starting to create a new wave of UFO events. During the 1960s the USA and USSR had put rockets and satellites into orbit and some of them were starting to decay in orbit and burn up spectacularly in the upper atmosphere. The resulting slow moving train of debris was an amazing lightshow and something totally new to someone in the right place at the right time then seeing one of these for the first time.
We were becoming aware that every few years new technology was creating the latest ‘strange thing’ in the sky that would trigger multiple reports but that would be unidentified to most witnesses then seeing it for the first time in their lives. As a result this was reported widely by them as a UFO. With all of the ‘alien’ connotation that implied. Until, of course, it became common knowledge and misperceived less often.
As UFO investigators we had to figure out as we went along how to recognise these novel events until we could then spot them when the sightings came in. And before, after several years, witnesses would gradually get used to what they were.
So whilst satellite burn ups still cause misperceptions even in the 21st century as they are rare events most of us will never get to see, there is much more familiarity with them than in the 1970s when they first started happening.
Usually there would be multiple witnesses to such a space spectacular, spread over large areas, proving it was something in the upper atmosphere in order to be visible across a wide area. However, witnesses viewing these things unaware of their actual cause and often believing them to be UFOs would tend to ‘see’ features that were partly defined by their own inner interpretation based on what to them a UFO was - as in a strange craft.
So what in truth was just a disconnected trail of blazing debris burning up with friction was perceived as lights or windows on the side of a long object. The structure connecting them was implicit because we are used to seeing lights as part of something whole.
In this way we had to gradually unravel how to identify when satellite re-entries were being witnessed. This was given its most dramatic illustration on New Years Eve 1978 when hundreds of people across the UK witnessed the death throes of Cosmos 1068 - a Russian rocket. We were able to collate and document over 100 reports across the UK and I wrote up an analysis of the data that later would appear in my book UFO Reality in 1983. This helped us to learn a lot about witness perception that we could apply to future cases.
One of these sightings was by then new comedy double act, the Toughs, who went by the name of the Krankies (and still perform today). They witnessed the event from mid air aboard a light aircraft taking them from pantomime in Newcastle to do a live New Year's Eve TV show in their native Scotland.
Of course, every few years a new kind of novel IFO would again appear and go through the same process as these re-entries first did in the 70s. It is a never ending process and we constantly have to be on the alert for the latest one first spotted via satellite burn ups in those early days of NUFON over 40 years ago.
So in coming decades we would see the appearance of laser light displays in the 1980s bouncing off low cloud in moving dramas, military drones in the 1990s - real hgh tech - but of secret Earth origin not alien - and fire lanterns in the 2000s that were literal ‘fire in the sky’ but puzzling from a distance.
These were amongst other illustrations of the same pattern and once we had identified it with those 1970s satellite re-entries we were prepared to resolve UFO sightings more rapidly when new waves came along that were equally challenging.
We have already seen the first signs in recent NUN editions of the possible latest in this long line of IFOs with the prevalence of stunt aircraft being flown with pyrotechnics attached to their wings and obvious if you right underneath them but quite puzzling in the dark when these are flown if you happen to be too far away to hear or recognise the source.
As a result by 1979 NUFON was quickly aware that 90 - 95% of all reported UFO sightings were really IFOs - identified - often recognisable by this pattern of reporting - and we could focus our attention more on the cases that offered hope of being really interesting.
In this way we were able to use the NUFON alliance and Northern UFO News to head towards the end of its first decade with new insights.
These covers l to r show the artwork of three of our regular cover designers. On the left is John Watson (spot the alien) - Northern Ufology being the name we used every so often in the 1980s when we devoted the issue to articles on a set theme. Middle is the ubiquitous Roy Sandbach from 1996 and right is Bill Callaghan from 2001 who drew many later editions. Roy's BUFORA crop circle cover is below left!
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ISSISSUE 199 NOVEMBER 2018
The Manta Ray Sightings
Editor: Jenny Randles
10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
nufonnews@gmail.com
JR Comments….
I had a lovely time by the seaside in early October thanks to LAPIS - the Fylde group who organised the conference in St Anne’s on Sea, days before fracking started nearby resulting in several earthquakes - happily not caused by me falling off the stage again.
It was lovely catching up with people I had not seen since the 1990s when I lived in Fleetwood and I was lucky enough to be invited when the group first started to organise these events.
Sadly, Alan Godfrey was unable to present his talk. He had to go into hospital, though he is now on the road to recovery. Perhaps next year as I am sure the success of these events will continue.
What I enjoy about this kind of conference is the breadth of topics that are covered. It is not exclusively about UFOs but spans a range of paranormal investigations that reveal a great breadth of research that occurs in the UK.
Unfortunately, I was only able to be present for the talks before and after my own - as I had to depend on being driven there and back given that Northern Rail decided that this is now the age of the train (that never moves) and had their 999th strike of the Summer meaning it was that or walk the 50 miles.
However, what I did hear cheered me as there was excellent research into what we used to call ‘window areas’ - where strange phenomena concentrate - and I saw how apparitions are objectively investigated much like UFOs can be.
That there are overlaps between these things has long been evident to me. And this kind of get together helps us share with one another the ideas that we have and what we are doing and thinking.
Whilst I do not have any great aspirations to carry on giving talks into my dotage, which I suspect is long overdue, I might not find it too intimidating to attend them and feel happy that the future of research is in very good hands.
Not to mention that I managed to get through what must have been 90 minutes coping with new fangled technology such as computer controlled imagery without falling into the darkness as in Vienna.
So perhaps that dotage can go on hold a little bit longer.
NOTE:- The next Northern UFO News will be number 200. I Intend it to be a double issue covering Christmas/New Year in celebration and will take time to reflect back on how things have changed in UFO research over the years since I edited my first issue.
That was in the days when it was just begun as the local group newsletter in Manchester. It quickly morphed into this publication in December 1974 when I took over.
Issue 100 appeared 8 years later, but as a subscription magazine it then came out bi-monthly and there was a 15 year break between 2002 and 2017 caused by my becoming a full time carer, otherwise we would be well on our way to issue 300 by now!
Meantime back to issue 199…..
LOST CASES
A series of cases were rediscovered from a batch of files that went missing during a house move. They have recently been retrieved. More of these will appear in future issues, but for now here we look at :-
The Manta Ray Sightings
In 1978 there was a spate of unusual reports - many in the north Midlands - of what was often described by witnesses as resembling a ‘manta ray’ in the sky. We never resolved the cause.
This one occurred on 28 November at 4 am.
The witness was a van driver on a delivery run from Birmingham to Warrington. His vehicle - WBY 984 S was a blue Ford Transit. Approaching junction 18 near the village of Sproston Green in Cheshire he had a strange experience.
To his left (north-west) he saw a ‘shooting star’ move at speed and land in a field in open country north of the Sproston.
As he continued to look towards where it had vanished a large light rose upwards from this spot. The glow was so bright and lens shaped that the driver called it ‘halogen’ like.
Aware this was something very odd, he slowed right down to observe it carefully - it now being the size of the full moon - something investigator Martin Keatman was able to check on his visit as he got the witness to view the real full moon that night.
Now at the motorway junction the witness decided to turn off and stop on the first point after the top of the slip road outside Sproston Green village.
Here he got out of his van and moved to the front to get a perfect view of the apparently stationary object above fields to the north-west.
At this stage a car came up off the slip road and in the dark the witness tried to flag it down, but it did not stop. Then he heard something strange. His two way radio being used to communicate with base started to crackle. It was turned right down in volume as he was out of contact area but the noise was very strange even at that level.
Looking back at the object he now felt a very strange tingly feeling as if sure it was aware of his presence and was now clearly moving towards him, stood alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere at 4 am. He deliberately stepped backwards to the van door ready to jump in if necessary.
The object was now heading right for him and he watched awestruck as it came low overhead with a large oval metallic body and two beams of light like torch beams emerging from the front - one directed upwards at 45 degrees and the other towards the ground.
The witness was unable to explain as it moved in ‘slow motion’ above him why he was not illuminated by the beam below even though he said the ground around him had a shadow of the oval object.
Passing right over his head at low altitude took several seconds and allowed him to take in detail. The underside seemed ‘bevelled’ and as it moved away there was a small ‘fin’ on the rear but not like an aircraft tail fin. In any case as it passed above there was only a faint whistling noise as if it were ‘gliding’ - no sound of an engine. The car engine ran unaffected throughout the experience as he watched the object move away to the south east and disappear into the darkness.
The only physiological effect described by the witness was a fuzziness in his eyes looking up at the object on closest approach - which he blamed on the unusual lighting.
Total duration of the sighting was about 4 minutes.
The weather data that night shows that it was - 3 degrees C, clear sky and almost no wind. Manchester Airport is north-east of this location but the path of this object is not a usual one in or out of the single runway then operating at the field.
The witness travelled the M 6 often at night given his job and had seen numerous aircraft before and was adamant this was nothing like one. What it is - though - is remarkably consistent with several other cases in a flap that occurred around that time, many described in very similar fashion by independent witnesses.
I personally investigated a case near the Carrington oil refinery involving a group of witnesses at a bus stop.
This happened on 14 November 1977 and shared many features of this case - including the two bright headlamps, the huge size (witnesses estimated it was half a mile long!), the very slow motion and total silence. Given the rush hour time of this earlier sighting I was baffled as to why nobody else saw the remarkable thing reported. Half of the Manchester area ought to have done so.
We looked into the possibility of an airship gliding overhead and that remains a viable option in this case. They were relatively rare in the UK at that time but I actually saw one myself on the M 6 motorway heading south to London in May 1977. This was in daylight and easy to identify but odd because of its then unfamiliarity.
Seeing an airship at 4 am would be even more baffling in 1977/78 but would also be less likely to happen especially in the proximity of an airport.
The sighting in Cheshire a year after the one near the oil refinery was part of an extraordinary series of events that occurred in a 2/3 day window with again very consistent features.
These were spread across the whole of the UK, implying they were nothing to do with Manchester Airport. So if an airship was involved it was well travelled or more than one was involved.
26 November 1978 Encounter
The first sighting was on the south coast at Portslade near Brighton in Sussex and had remarkable similarity to the incident a year earlier near Manchester. It involved people beside a bus stop at a similar time of evening(5.20 pm) who saw a gigantic object coming from the hills heading out to sea southwards. It moved very slowly and made just a quiet humming noise and took a long time to pass.
There were two white searchlights at the front and two at the rear and small red lights studded all around the circular flat rim.
Thirty five minutes later - in Coventry - a couple independently (with no knowledge of the above sighting) saw an almost identical object - with the shape, white headlights, rim of red lights and faint rumbling moving very slowly north. If this was the same object seen on the south coast it had reversed course and moved 140 miles north in half an hour.
Five minutes later a very similar object was reported 10 miles north of the above witnesses at Nuneaton in Warwickshire.
Finally, half an hour later and 80 miles north a familiar sounding object was seen heading north by a couple on the hills at Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire.
MUFORA investigated this final episode and all of the reports on that same evening across an hour of time were independently reported in separate locations to four different UFO groups.
The Derbyshire UFO came from the south and was described in very similar fashion and the word ‘manta ray’ describing its appearance was used as in some earlier reports that month.
Like the accounts of the other sightings it was said to be huge, moving exceptionally slowly, had red lights on its side with two huge headlights on the front. Although at this location no sound at all was noted.
As you will have noted the above sightings happened less than 36 hours before the M 6 incident at Sproston Green. They appear to involve the same object observed by five sets of completely independent witnesses all unaware that anyone else had seen anything.
What was this object? We had checked into the possibility of bright stars and planets being misperceived by the witnesses as the first likely option but nothing was there at the time of any of these sightings that matched.
Other possibilities we considered were never established. An airship seems very unlikely given that it could not have travelled 200 miles in an hour, well beyond their normal speed 40 years ago.
We did speculate about a mid-air refuelling exercise in which tanker aircraft and fighters very high in the sky fly in formation.
These practice using a hose in mid-flight to refuel planes without the need to land. There were several such NATO exercises in the 1980s but they were usually described when seen from the ground as being a huge triangle formed as a result of the mind joining the dots of the individual jets moving in formation based on the false assumption they were all lights on one huge craft much lower down.
The lack of noise and very slow speed is consistent as it occurs from the fact that the witnesses assume this is a relatively large and low object that should move faster and should be more noisy. On the other hand multiple aircraft several miles high would create an unusual muted sound.
This option remains a potential explanation for the Manta Ray sightings in November 1978. But whilst there were NATO exercises that year - the ones publicly reported were in September and December, not November. So we were never able to prove this was the cause of these strange events.
The proximity to airports in all these cases (Gatwick is just north of Portslade, Manchester in two of the other cases and Birmingham airport near the Coventry/Nuneaton reports) led to the theory that this might be another example of gliding aircraft.
That extraordinary solution proved true for sightings in the middle of the night over the Pennines in 1978 - 1980 but were traced to a very specific once a week cargo flight where the crew throttled back the engines and only left the tail fin illumination lit so as to create a scary looking UFO when seen by witnesses in elevated rural terrain.
This does not fit the details of the reports in the manta ray cases. And the specific cargo operator involved in the gliding incident were reprimanded by the aviation authorities for a risky practice.
A CLOSE ENCOUNTER
One other interesting link with the 26/28 November 1978 ‘manta ray’ sightings was that 4 days before they happened - and at a similar time - around 5.30 pm during rush hour as two of the 26 November sightings had been - one of the most significant close encounters in the UK took place.
This was a case I was able to investigate after being contacted by the witnesses shortly afterwards. It was never explained.
Elsie Oakensen was head of the teachers resources centre in Daventry and experienced an odd feeling of a tightening sensation round her head during the afternoon of 22 November 1978. Like a severe migraine attack.
She left work at 5.15 pm for the six mile drive home through rush hour traffic to the village of Church Stowe, Northants.
Turning onto the A 5 at Weedon she saw ‘two very bright headlights’ ahead just above the road. She thought a very low flying aircraft or one about to crash was heading right towards her, but it seemed to be hovering above in the sky. Elsie pressed her face against the windscreen peering up to see it.
Her path took her directly underneath the object which was dumb-bell shaped with one light on each circular end. It was very low yet silent.
Despite Elsie reporting what she saw to the local paper no other witnesses on the heavily trafficked A5 came forward to say they saw what she did.
At this point she had to turn off the A 5 into her village. It was now about 5.30 pm. As she headed on the side road into Church Stowe Elsie kept looking back and noticed the object still over the main road where she had just left.
She entered third gear to drive into the village when ‘the next thing I knew my foot was hard on the accelerator pedal’. Her engine was silent and she had no power and the car was coasting to a halt - though her headlights were still on.
Elsie pressed hard on the accelerator and the car restarted. But moments later there was a jump in reality and she was stationary inside the car.
‘Everything was in absolute blackness. My engine had stopped. My lights were out. Suddenly piercing white circles of light about a yard in diameter came from nowhere, on/off, on/off starting at the left of my car, round in front of it, to the right, back again and the last one disappeared into the air.’
Then there was another jump in reality and she was driving normally - though she insisted to me ‘I did NOT switch on my ignition. I did NOT put my car into gear.’
She drove into her garage a few hundred yards ahead and nothing was now visible in the sky, the lights and car were working perfectly and never malfunctioned again.
On entering the house she was baffled to discover it was now about 15 minutes later than she expected. She drove the same route every day and this ‘missing time’ was very noticeable.
The parallels revealed here between this case and the experience of Alan Godfrey in his patrol car in Todmorden almost exactly 2 years later are obvious.
About 90 minutes later, at 7.10pm, Elsie described how the tightening band pain in her head returned briefly for one last time.
At almost exactly that point - as reported to a local UFO investigator - four young women driving in a car had another close encounter. They were driving to a meeting in Northampton from the village of Byfield and were travelling through Preston Capes at the time. This is just 4 miles south west of Church Stowe where Elseie Oakensen then was.
The four young women saw two beams of light emerge from a cloud and then a red and green light cross their path ahead on the road, at which point the car lost power and coasted to a halt. Very similar to what had occurred to Elsie 2 hours before.
As they drove south the lights paced them and the driver had to fight to retain forward motion by shifting through gears. They then coasted into the village as the lights merged into one big white light and vanished abruptly.
I later spoke to the driver of this vehicle (the other women were too scared to go public and she herself had tried hard to forget all about it and was not keen on making too much out of the matter or to connect it with Elsie’s story). I could sense there was a deeper level to what happened but sometimes witnesses just prefer to push it to the back of their mind and get on with life.
She did tell me of the car that it was nearly new and worked perfectly after that night and that: ‘I have no idea why it suddenly lost power when the lights appeared.’
Elsie Oakensen, meanwhile, like Alan Godfrey, was hypnotically regressed in August 1979 and described how the pressure in her head also occurred during the missing time and she ‘got hotter and hotter’ as she was struck full on by a beam of white light from above.
This pulsated in circles radiating out - a more complete account of what she consciously recalled on the night.
Two grey shapes - ‘people’ she called them - approached out of the light and she recalled the belief that she was ‘selected, scanned, promised a return visit, but then ultimately rejected.’
I suggested to Elsie when we later met and did a TV show together that she take the same journey at night when she was ready and use that as a way to try to trigger further memories.
She bravely did this and told me that she felt that the head tightening was a ‘scan’ on her and that the first lights outside the village put her into ‘limbo’ and she was in that state taken to a nearby location beside a farm (which she dimly recalled consciously) and where the occupants were away at the time so it was deserted.
Here she was scanned more intensely and found ‘unsuitable’ for their needs (she felt her age - close to retirement age - was a factor here and that biology was a factor).
Elsie did not suggest, but it certainly is interesting that, 90 minutes later the second experience occurred nearby involving four much younger women in their car, none of whom were keen to look too deeply into what happened. If indeed anything deeper happened to them.
If you think the links in all these cases are amazing enough there is one more coincidence that is even more fascinating.
In 1976 a young British science fiction writer whose imaginative and literary stories have tackled many extraordinary subjects decided that for his third novel he would write a book exploring the UFO mystery.
This was no junk novel from such a young writer. It was brilliantly creative and clearly had been inspired by the best of UFO research in both English and French in print at that time which he had read intently.
So this novel did not take a straight aliens have landed perspective. It looked much deeper and explored consciousness, how witnesses and their close encounter experience interact and even the nature of reality itself.
This book, set in Yorkshire, is called Miracle Visitors and was hugely influential in my then nascent research as it gelled so well with where I saw the real evidence leading my thinking.
To this day I believe that Ian Watson's Miracle Visitors - fiction that it is - has to be one of the most significant UFO books by a British writer. Without my reading it I suspect that I would never have seen the nature of the 'Oz Factor' and so there would be no Oz Factor books!
I had some correspondence with Ian at the time of these events and discovered that he wrote his book over a period when, as he told me, UFO reports seemed to home in on the locality where he lived as he was writing it.
This was indeed a wave of quite intriguing close encounters akin to the Elsie Oakensen case.
Miracle Visitors was published in 1978 - just before the sightings reported in the article above.
When I corresponded with him he had recently moved and was now living in a village that was right next to the two villages in Northamptonshire involved in the 22 November 1978 encounter above. We are talking just 2 or 3 miles from BOTH encounters involving those 5 women.
It was the point where I first took seriously the role that synchronicity has in the UFO phenomenon. It was a key for me to understand what the Oz Factor might really be all about.

ISSUE 198 SEPTEMBER 2018
The Blue Bridge Mystery
Editor: Jenny Randles
10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
nufonnews@gmail.com
The Blue Bridge Mystery
Editor: Jenny Randles
10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
nufonnews@gmail.com
My photo of the mystery plane outside my house in Abergele The Blue Bridge, Rhyl
Click here to e
J.R. Comments
In the early 1960s we often took family holidays in North Wales, driving there in my father’s mini from Manchester. This was a decade before air travel and cheap trips to Spain eroded this long traditional family vacation for many British people.
We stayed in a coastal caravan park called Golden Sands in Towyn right beside the busy railway line where a steady procession of steam express holiday trains brought new visitors to the coast. The park still exists and remains popular and looks much like my photos from over 50 years ago reveal that it was. But, of course, much else about the world has changed.
Golden Sands was just a 15 minute walk from the major seaside resort of Rhyl - reached across the landmark of the ‘Blue Bridge’ - a metal girder structure that carries the coast road over the harbour where the River Clwyd flows into the Irish Sea. It is today the county boundary between Denbighshire (where Rhyl sits) and Conwy - where the caravan park is located.
One of my most vivid memories from those holidays in the 60s dates from July 1962. I know the date because it is an historic one and happens to be when I first saw a UFO.
To be more precise it was a decidedly unidentified object to all of us who saw it - and it WAS flying - but it was not a UFO in the sense we think of that term.
The ‘apparition’ appeared as we crossed the Blue Bridge in our bright red mini with a scene that might have played out in one of the pop music laden swinging sixties musicals.
What we saw was a small oval object floating above the water and making some kind of noise like a hair drier. It was moving slowly seaward with the waters of the Clwyd being disturbed as it moved.
UFO it was so far as we were all concerned - but we soon learned the truth as to what it really was. This was a commercial hovercraft.
Whilst experiments had been carried out for decades this was in a commercial sense a then very recent British invention designed by Sir Christopher Cockerell. His SR N 1 - the first full scale test craft first ‘flew’ 35 months prior to us crossing the Blue Bridge that day.
Unbeknown to all four of us in the car that day Vickers had just introduced that week the World’s first hovercraft service using a large passenger carrying craft. It ran for just a few weeks at the height of Summer 1962 and operated six times a day each way on the 20 minute trip from Rhyl to Wallasey on the Wirral and back. By car the same trip would take over two hours so at £1 a journey it was attractive to families travelling from Merseyside to North Wales for the school holidays.
The service was fraught with problems and spent much of the Summer parked under the Blue Bridge between the actual successful flights. These were officially ‘flights’ and airlines operated them even though they never actually got more than a few inches over the sea on the cushion of air.
Whilst they never came to quite be the success they were predicted to be as a fast transatlantic vessel (the success of jet aircraft soon put paid to that) hovercraft do still operate today. In fact in 1983 I ‘flew’ in one myself across the Channel to get to Boulogne in France where I gave a lecture to a UFO conference. It was a much bigger vessel than the one I saw 21 years earlier under the bridge in Rhyl.
I recall that sighting of a genuinely new aerial craft well 56 years later as a reminder that sometimes UFOs can literally be real without being supernatural or extraterrestrial.
Also by chance this world’s first journey came to link two important places in my life. In 1983 when I flew on a hovercraft I was actually living in Wallasey, the small Wirral town where that service from Rhyl was headed. And 20 years later I had moved to Abergele - just a couple of miles beyond Golden Sands living on that very same coast road and crossing that bridge by bus every few days on my way into Rhyl.
Whilst there I was to discover that the Blue Bridge where I saw that ‘UFO’ in 1962 had a history of connections with strange flying craft.
As this issue of Northern UFO News will reveal.
THE BLUE BRIDGE ENCOUNTERS
1: The Strange Plane
A couple of years after I moved to Abergele, in October 2005 , I was on the number 12 bus heading through Rhyl back home when I saw a strange plane once again.
This was an aircraft as I knew right away but it was peculiar and flying very low just beyond the promenade over the beach.
Indeed it was so close to the water that you could clearly see the cockpit of a large transport or cargo type aircraft - rather old fashioned in appearance. It was certainly not a hovercraft, but behaving rather like one - or, I momentarily realised, was in big trouble.
Superficially it resembled a Hercules transporter and was of similar size. Yet there was no story on the news about this incident and I began to doubt my own eyes and wondered if I had ‘imagined’ what I knew I really had seen from the window of this passing bus.
Sadly the route taken by my bus had that day blocked my view after seconds. However, some months later I saw it again and this time had a much better view because the bus was crossing the Blue Bridge exactly where 44 years earlier I saw the hovercraft.
This time the large plane was heading away from me and so I saw less detail but could appreciate that it was smaller than I had thought on first appearance and not as large as a Hercules but bigger than a light aircraft or hang glider - some of which I saw over the beaches of North Wales quite often so could see this was different.
That was the last time I saw this plane for several years when on one last occasion I obtained the photo of what may/may not be the same aircraft shown on the cover. That was in 2013 – but a couple of other local people meanwhile reported seeing it to me over the North Wales coast between 2005 and 2009. They considered it strange too.
Nobody had considered it to literally be a UFO - it was to them, like me, just a plane in a very odd location and seemingly dangerously low and not of obvious origin.
From 2008 Rhyl started an annual summer air show over the beach and flights out to sea including the Red Arrow jets were common - but I never saw any similar aircraft during these displays.
I made enquiries and - whilst I never actually tracked this craft to source - it seemed probable that the aircraft we all saw over those months was some sort of survey flight taking water quality readings and photographs of the ocean.
This was a period when major construction was taking place off shore between Abergele and Rhyl building the then largest wind farm in the UK - Gwynt y Mor (Wind from the Sea) - which commenced in 2003. From my bungalow on the sea front at Abergele I watched this vast site being constructed and the ships that created it as they went out to the site. Later they came onto the beach to lay the cables right outside my window.
But after that Blue Bridge sighting I only ever caught that one glimpse of what might be the ‘strange plane’. This was on 30 July 2013 - after construction work had ended - but I snatched two or three seconds of video with my camera as it caught me unawares. It only really shows the dark mass heading out to sea from my position and reveals little as to its actual identity. But the still on the cover shows what I saw.
It was I remain sure just an ordinary aircraft of some sort - of that I have little real doubt even though I failed to trace its actual origin.
However, locally the legend of the ‘ghost plane’ lives on.
2: The Abergele Ghost Flight
On conducting research into the origin of this strange plane I soon realised that this part of Wales had real form when it came to seeing unidentified aircraft.
In October 1986 I found sightings from both Rhyl and Prestatyn of a strange aircraft coming in from the coast low enough to reveal a row of illuminated windows running along its fuselage. The witnesses were sure that this was no ordinary plane because of both the silence of passage and proximity.
Local investigator Margaret Fry had also sent me a report back in 1987. She had discovered several people in the small market town of Abergele who had observed a ‘wartime transport’ aircraft passing overhead - dark in colour and not unlike a Hercules in outline. Enquiries by her with RAF Valley - the nearest air base on Anglesey 50 miles away - could not trace an identity for the plane. Although military flights along the coast are not that unusual.
This sounds just like what I had been observing two decades later.
By quite a coincidence since Margaret sent me those sightings both of us had moved to that same small market town - she over 300 miles from Kent and me 100 miles from Derbyshire.
But by the time Margaret moved to Abergele in the 1990s more sightings of the same type of aircraft had been reported by locals - including from villages such as Llangernyw, where mothers picking up children from school one day had witnessed a very similar aerial ‘apparition’ that was moving low over the hills and just pulled up at the last moment to avoid a crash into the steep valley.
By the time I was living in Abergele the ghost plane had acquired a reputation and local media started asking for more witnesses to come forward via a BBC news blog.
However, instead of these cases now being described as unusual and out of place aircraft (like I personally observed) or being reported in the context of UFOs, as some of those earlier sightings had been, now these incidents were being sought as possible time slips or ghostly encounters with a real old time aircraft that had crashed locally long ago and whose apparition was being witnessed.
A theory I suspect to be no more likely than the others!
Meanwhile I found a witness called Andreas from the Wirral who had seen something like a ‘shiny black B 25 bomber’ from World War Two flying low and slow over the Dee Estuary between the Wirral and North Wales (the route taken by the hovercraft in 1962). But this was one of the few instances where the idea of an actual time slip/ghost plane was intimated and might even have had a degree of credibility. The idea had never crossed my mind for a second with what I witnessed.
3: THE PHANTOM HERCULES
On 13 October 2009 - a sunny afternoon - another phantom plane was seem at Rossett near Wrexham, North Wales.
The plane first appeared over the village of Dodlestone just across the English border – which I quickly recognised as the location of a famous poltergeist/time slip case from the mid-1980s fully documented by Ken Webster in his 1989 book ‘The Vertical Plane’.
This certainly piqued my attention given the time slip stories about the north wales phantom planes.
The events in the Vertical Plane (ironic title given that this story and book was not in any way about aircraft) tell of a village cottage that was at the heart of a series of messages that were detected on a then early version of the home computer. They seemed to suggest communication coming from both the past and future (via a source signing itself as 2109 - assumed to be the future year of origin).
Now, 100 years exactly before that future ‘date’, in 2009, a woman named Barbara driving from Dodleston to Rossett spotted a large transport aircraft that appeared out of nowhere and flew across her path ‘very low indeed’.
She heard no sound and likened what she saw to the by now familiar Hercules - which I had first thought was the object I saw over Rhyl. She came to that conclusion after checking out aircraft profiles on the net.
I first suspected that she might have mistaken the huge Beluga cargo plane used to fly giant Airbus wings in and out of the Broughton plant near Chester where these are manufactured. I have several times watched these whale like planes pass overhead as they land at or climb away from Chester heading for Toulouse in France where the planes are put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. A flight could easily pass low down near to Rossett.
However, I know that the Beluga is not what I saw over Rhyl and they have such a striking behemoth like design that mistaking them for a Hercules might be a stretch. The bulge on the front that gives them their name is very distinctive.
Moreover the Beluga only started operation in 1995 and so were not even airborne when some earlier ghost plane sightings occurred.
Another case that came to my attention was reported from a man in the West Midlands describing an event when on holiday as a child.
This was in August 1980 and he was then on the same beach at Rhyl over where my first sighting of the plane had been.
At the time he was hunting crabs with his sister on the sands when suddenly a huge aircraft approached from the Abergele direction so low that the pilot was visible from the beach.
The witness grabbed his young sister and threw themselves both into the sand as the aircraft passed over, climbed upwards and disappeared without sound. They were convinced it was crashing into them.
From what had been to me a trivial sighting of an unidentified plane in and around the Blue Bridge at Rhyl I had been led along this maze of evidence in unexpected directions.
Were these all just misperceived aircraft or was something else going on? If so, then what?
Well, the Blue Bridge was about to reappear and this time the UFO connections were much deeper than the events above.
4: ABDUCTED?
A man called Steve, visiting North Wales from Hampshire, is origin of the strangest case yet tied into the Rhyl Blue Bridge.
It happened in the late 1980s when the first wave of mystery aircraft sightings was occurring on this stretch of coast. But he only reported it much later.
Steve had a temporary summer job in Rhyl when the influx of tourists means short term employment is in plentiful supply. Not living locally he stayed in a caravan at the rear of a pub – then known as the Ferry – located by the south western side of the Blue Bridge. This is just a few hundred yards along the same coastal road from where Golden Sands caravan park sits and where I had my bungalow between 2002 and 2014.
On this night after a long day working Steve spent the evening in Rhyl and, being newly married, phoned his wife from a call box to say goodnight before returning to his caravan.
However, the very next thing that he recalled was walking slowly towards the Blue Bridge from the direction of Towyn without memory of how he had got there.
Six hours had disappeared and Steve was on the other side of the river and over a mile from where he had ‘just’ in his memory called home to his wife.
My first thought - as I suspect might be yours - was that here was a young man who after a night out maybe got lost in a strange town and perhaps slept off drink and a long day.
But he is adamant this is not what happened and pointed out that he was wearing shoes that were too tight and gave him blisters if he had walked any distance whilst wearing them, but there were none on his feet that morning when he ‘came to’.
As such he argued that he cannot have walked from the Rhyl through Kinmel Bay - a couple of miles. Nor he insisted had he over indulged, was taking no medication and had never had similar blackouts before or since.
This anecdote is very like many alien contact cases in my files – an intriguing story with tenuous possible links to UFOs. But there are further interesting comments by Steve.
The witness reports that as he ‘came to’ his clothing was ‘undone’ – though showing no signs of having been slept in. He was also plagued by bad dreams in the aftermath of that night. In these he found himself inside the phone box calling home and exiting to find himself in a large grey and white room with a tall figure and two small beings wearing illuminated helmets.
Throughout he felt a desperate urge to escape.
We may never know if there is a more mundane explanation - possibly a repressed recall of assault - as he was not interested in digging deeper via methods such as regression hypnosis. And, of course, as no UFO was actually seen, it would be very presumptive to go that route anyhow.
Nonetheless, UFOs did rear their head in connection with the Blue Bridge soon after this case emerged. A witness from the Midlands asked US UFO group MUFON: ‘did anyone see the UFO in the area of the (Rhyl) Blue Bridge?’
The incident was described as a ‘huge object, glowing red, sparks coming off’.
This witness observed people by the bus stop directly outside the very inn featured in Steve’s story above - adding: ‘(They) must have seen it’ because they were ‘pointing at it’.
This event happened on 3 March 2012 at 21.45 - which is very significant because on that night a huge fireball meteor crossed the British skies.
So on this occasion we can surely resolve this Blue Bridge sighting as an IFO.
But the location has certainly become a hot spot for all manner of aerial curiosities - even now reaching out across the Atlantic!
5: CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE MYSTERY PLANE
I have to thank researcher Peter McCue for pointing me toward another key report that might be connected.
This sighting was made by Colin Grethe - and is perhaps the most extraordinary of all of these Welsh mystery aircraft episodes. It was a very close encounter indeed. Though to be fair some distance from the Blue Bridge on this occasion.
His clearly expressed account was written by him on his Eden web site - www.eden-two.com - an artfully designed project combining spiritualism, music and business advice into an eclectic mix.
After I tracked him down (he now lives outside Wales) Colin kindly offered further information about the events. It proves to be a fascinating case that ties together elements from all of these North Wales aircraft incidents.
Colin was driving along a dark country road near Cwm Llinau in northern mid Wales at around 21.20 on 27 April 2007. He was heading towards Machynlleth when he observed ‘a group of bright lights’ to the side and ahead over the highway.
He quickly appreciated that this collection of lights resembled the wingspan of an otherwise invisible aircraft.
Colin observed many details such as wing tip lights, small vertical constructions in front of each tip and a glowing white dome over the wings akin to a cockpit. He could even make out the top half of two ‘figures’ within that part of the craft it was so low and close.
The ‘aircraft’ appeared to be an old type and gently rising up and down as if it was just about to land. Needless to say this was a terrifying prospect given that the mystery object was very low down and Grethe was so close to its flight path. And there was no airport - just the road he was travelling on - suggesting he was closing in on the point of potential impact by the plane right on top of his car.
Events now entered slow motion (the classic psychological response to hyper stress that is common within the Oz Factor close encounter experience).
The witness looked in his rear view mirror desperate to find an escape route away from danger in the darkness. But the aircraft just flew right over the top of him in what felt like a very narrow squeak.
Yet all of the time there was no sound of a roaring engine and he saw no tail of the craft sweeping overhead.
Moreover, in the mirror as he now look back to see what had happened, expecting to observe a fiery crash site, there was nothing there. The aircraft – estimated as 50 feet wide – had completely disappeared.
Colin stopped the car and looked around in the gloom thinking the plane must have ditched somewhere nearby. But there was only silence in the rural surrounds.
He returned to his vehicle, drove on a few hundred yards until finding a nearby village where he could contact the police and give them his exact position. His call was received by the police at 21.24.
After trying to recover his composure the local police told the shocked man that they would investigate but added that an RAF Hercules had reputedly been ‘in the area’ earlier that day. Seeming to imply this was the most likely solution.
However, subsequently the police called him back to say that their enquiries had established there was NO air traffic at the time and conditions were unsuitable for low flying as he had described so they were still looking into the matter.
Grethe’s own enquiries with RAF Cosford - and other airfields around the region - confirmed there was no plane known to be in the area that night.
But on visiting the police station in Aberystwyth next day he was now told it must have been the Hercules and to just forget about the whole thing.
Colin told me that he ‘remained convinced there were no aircraft in the area at the time’ and was ‘taken aback’ by the police response.
He was especially perturbed by how they had totally changed their line of argument overnight despite seeming to take his careful and objective report seriously.
He added to me: ‘I challenged (the officer) that if I had been reporting a murder would they take my description of the assailant and blow it out of similar proportion?’
I have looked but cannot trace any report on this incident filed with the MoD. The 2007 case files released do include some from the police to the Air Staff, but not this incident.
Grethe added perhaps sagely: ‘I appreciate that if they had some sort of secret flight then they wouldn’t tell me about it’.
Nonetheless he has many reasons to doubt this possibility – not least the total silence as the ‘plane’ passed directly over his head.
So we have a growing file of interlinked cases about some kind of mystery aircraft flying over North Wales and its identity remains unknown.
Indeed, one of the nurses who visited my mum daily in Abergele when we lived there listened as I told her about the above sighting in 2013.
She smiled at me and - whilst asking me not to go into detail in public - then told me how she had been witness to a very similar local incident.
This occurred on a country road near Abergele also in 2007 (same year as Colin Grethe's sighting). She spontaneously related how a large military cargo plane had appeared out of nowhere in the dark, flown low over her car in silence and had promptly vanished into thin air as she looked to see where it had 'landed'.
As a child in the 1950s in this part of North Wales the nurse told me with a matter of fact comment:-
‘I knew that these sort of things tend to happen round these parts as others told me about them.
But you just learn to accept it and move on.’
As such the mystery continues......
J.R. Comments
In the early 1960s we often took family holidays in North Wales, driving there in my father’s mini from Manchester. This was a decade before air travel and cheap trips to Spain eroded this long traditional family vacation for many British people.
We stayed in a coastal caravan park called Golden Sands in Towyn right beside the busy railway line where a steady procession of steam express holiday trains brought new visitors to the coast. The park still exists and remains popular and looks much like my photos from over 50 years ago reveal that it was. But, of course, much else about the world has changed.
Golden Sands was just a 15 minute walk from the major seaside resort of Rhyl - reached across the landmark of the ‘Blue Bridge’ - a metal girder structure that carries the coast road over the harbour where the River Clwyd flows into the Irish Sea. It is today the county boundary between Denbighshire (where Rhyl sits) and Conwy - where the caravan park is located.
One of my most vivid memories from those holidays in the 60s dates from July 1962. I know the date because it is an historic one and happens to be when I first saw a UFO.
To be more precise it was a decidedly unidentified object to all of us who saw it - and it WAS flying - but it was not a UFO in the sense we think of that term.
The ‘apparition’ appeared as we crossed the Blue Bridge in our bright red mini with a scene that might have played out in one of the pop music laden swinging sixties musicals.
What we saw was a small oval object floating above the water and making some kind of noise like a hair drier. It was moving slowly seaward with the waters of the Clwyd being disturbed as it moved.
UFO it was so far as we were all concerned - but we soon learned the truth as to what it really was. This was a commercial hovercraft.
Whilst experiments had been carried out for decades this was in a commercial sense a then very recent British invention designed by Sir Christopher Cockerell. His SR N 1 - the first full scale test craft first ‘flew’ 35 months prior to us crossing the Blue Bridge that day.
Unbeknown to all four of us in the car that day Vickers had just introduced that week the World’s first hovercraft service using a large passenger carrying craft. It ran for just a few weeks at the height of Summer 1962 and operated six times a day each way on the 20 minute trip from Rhyl to Wallasey on the Wirral and back. By car the same trip would take over two hours so at £1 a journey it was attractive to families travelling from Merseyside to North Wales for the school holidays.
The service was fraught with problems and spent much of the Summer parked under the Blue Bridge between the actual successful flights. These were officially ‘flights’ and airlines operated them even though they never actually got more than a few inches over the sea on the cushion of air.
Whilst they never came to quite be the success they were predicted to be as a fast transatlantic vessel (the success of jet aircraft soon put paid to that) hovercraft do still operate today. In fact in 1983 I ‘flew’ in one myself across the Channel to get to Boulogne in France where I gave a lecture to a UFO conference. It was a much bigger vessel than the one I saw 21 years earlier under the bridge in Rhyl.
I recall that sighting of a genuinely new aerial craft well 56 years later as a reminder that sometimes UFOs can literally be real without being supernatural or extraterrestrial.
Also by chance this world’s first journey came to link two important places in my life. In 1983 when I flew on a hovercraft I was actually living in Wallasey, the small Wirral town where that service from Rhyl was headed. And 20 years later I had moved to Abergele - just a couple of miles beyond Golden Sands living on that very same coast road and crossing that bridge by bus every few days on my way into Rhyl.
Whilst there I was to discover that the Blue Bridge where I saw that ‘UFO’ in 1962 had a history of connections with strange flying craft.
As this issue of Northern UFO News will reveal.
THE BLUE BRIDGE ENCOUNTERS
1: The Strange Plane
A couple of years after I moved to Abergele, in October 2005 , I was on the number 12 bus heading through Rhyl back home when I saw a strange plane once again.
This was an aircraft as I knew right away but it was peculiar and flying very low just beyond the promenade over the beach.
Indeed it was so close to the water that you could clearly see the cockpit of a large transport or cargo type aircraft - rather old fashioned in appearance. It was certainly not a hovercraft, but behaving rather like one - or, I momentarily realised, was in big trouble.
Superficially it resembled a Hercules transporter and was of similar size. Yet there was no story on the news about this incident and I began to doubt my own eyes and wondered if I had ‘imagined’ what I knew I really had seen from the window of this passing bus.
Sadly the route taken by my bus had that day blocked my view after seconds. However, some months later I saw it again and this time had a much better view because the bus was crossing the Blue Bridge exactly where 44 years earlier I saw the hovercraft.
This time the large plane was heading away from me and so I saw less detail but could appreciate that it was smaller than I had thought on first appearance and not as large as a Hercules but bigger than a light aircraft or hang glider - some of which I saw over the beaches of North Wales quite often so could see this was different.
That was the last time I saw this plane for several years when on one last occasion I obtained the photo of what may/may not be the same aircraft shown on the cover. That was in 2013 – but a couple of other local people meanwhile reported seeing it to me over the North Wales coast between 2005 and 2009. They considered it strange too.
Nobody had considered it to literally be a UFO - it was to them, like me, just a plane in a very odd location and seemingly dangerously low and not of obvious origin.
From 2008 Rhyl started an annual summer air show over the beach and flights out to sea including the Red Arrow jets were common - but I never saw any similar aircraft during these displays.
I made enquiries and - whilst I never actually tracked this craft to source - it seemed probable that the aircraft we all saw over those months was some sort of survey flight taking water quality readings and photographs of the ocean.
This was a period when major construction was taking place off shore between Abergele and Rhyl building the then largest wind farm in the UK - Gwynt y Mor (Wind from the Sea) - which commenced in 2003. From my bungalow on the sea front at Abergele I watched this vast site being constructed and the ships that created it as they went out to the site. Later they came onto the beach to lay the cables right outside my window.
But after that Blue Bridge sighting I only ever caught that one glimpse of what might be the ‘strange plane’. This was on 30 July 2013 - after construction work had ended - but I snatched two or three seconds of video with my camera as it caught me unawares. It only really shows the dark mass heading out to sea from my position and reveals little as to its actual identity. But the still on the cover shows what I saw.
It was I remain sure just an ordinary aircraft of some sort - of that I have little real doubt even though I failed to trace its actual origin.
However, locally the legend of the ‘ghost plane’ lives on.
2: The Abergele Ghost Flight
On conducting research into the origin of this strange plane I soon realised that this part of Wales had real form when it came to seeing unidentified aircraft.
In October 1986 I found sightings from both Rhyl and Prestatyn of a strange aircraft coming in from the coast low enough to reveal a row of illuminated windows running along its fuselage. The witnesses were sure that this was no ordinary plane because of both the silence of passage and proximity.
Local investigator Margaret Fry had also sent me a report back in 1987. She had discovered several people in the small market town of Abergele who had observed a ‘wartime transport’ aircraft passing overhead - dark in colour and not unlike a Hercules in outline. Enquiries by her with RAF Valley - the nearest air base on Anglesey 50 miles away - could not trace an identity for the plane. Although military flights along the coast are not that unusual.
This sounds just like what I had been observing two decades later.
By quite a coincidence since Margaret sent me those sightings both of us had moved to that same small market town - she over 300 miles from Kent and me 100 miles from Derbyshire.
But by the time Margaret moved to Abergele in the 1990s more sightings of the same type of aircraft had been reported by locals - including from villages such as Llangernyw, where mothers picking up children from school one day had witnessed a very similar aerial ‘apparition’ that was moving low over the hills and just pulled up at the last moment to avoid a crash into the steep valley.
By the time I was living in Abergele the ghost plane had acquired a reputation and local media started asking for more witnesses to come forward via a BBC news blog.
However, instead of these cases now being described as unusual and out of place aircraft (like I personally observed) or being reported in the context of UFOs, as some of those earlier sightings had been, now these incidents were being sought as possible time slips or ghostly encounters with a real old time aircraft that had crashed locally long ago and whose apparition was being witnessed.
A theory I suspect to be no more likely than the others!
Meanwhile I found a witness called Andreas from the Wirral who had seen something like a ‘shiny black B 25 bomber’ from World War Two flying low and slow over the Dee Estuary between the Wirral and North Wales (the route taken by the hovercraft in 1962). But this was one of the few instances where the idea of an actual time slip/ghost plane was intimated and might even have had a degree of credibility. The idea had never crossed my mind for a second with what I witnessed.
3: THE PHANTOM HERCULES
On 13 October 2009 - a sunny afternoon - another phantom plane was seem at Rossett near Wrexham, North Wales.
The plane first appeared over the village of Dodlestone just across the English border – which I quickly recognised as the location of a famous poltergeist/time slip case from the mid-1980s fully documented by Ken Webster in his 1989 book ‘The Vertical Plane’.
This certainly piqued my attention given the time slip stories about the north wales phantom planes.
The events in the Vertical Plane (ironic title given that this story and book was not in any way about aircraft) tell of a village cottage that was at the heart of a series of messages that were detected on a then early version of the home computer. They seemed to suggest communication coming from both the past and future (via a source signing itself as 2109 - assumed to be the future year of origin).
Now, 100 years exactly before that future ‘date’, in 2009, a woman named Barbara driving from Dodleston to Rossett spotted a large transport aircraft that appeared out of nowhere and flew across her path ‘very low indeed’.
She heard no sound and likened what she saw to the by now familiar Hercules - which I had first thought was the object I saw over Rhyl. She came to that conclusion after checking out aircraft profiles on the net.
I first suspected that she might have mistaken the huge Beluga cargo plane used to fly giant Airbus wings in and out of the Broughton plant near Chester where these are manufactured. I have several times watched these whale like planes pass overhead as they land at or climb away from Chester heading for Toulouse in France where the planes are put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. A flight could easily pass low down near to Rossett.
However, I know that the Beluga is not what I saw over Rhyl and they have such a striking behemoth like design that mistaking them for a Hercules might be a stretch. The bulge on the front that gives them their name is very distinctive.
Moreover the Beluga only started operation in 1995 and so were not even airborne when some earlier ghost plane sightings occurred.
Another case that came to my attention was reported from a man in the West Midlands describing an event when on holiday as a child.
This was in August 1980 and he was then on the same beach at Rhyl over where my first sighting of the plane had been.
At the time he was hunting crabs with his sister on the sands when suddenly a huge aircraft approached from the Abergele direction so low that the pilot was visible from the beach.
The witness grabbed his young sister and threw themselves both into the sand as the aircraft passed over, climbed upwards and disappeared without sound. They were convinced it was crashing into them.
From what had been to me a trivial sighting of an unidentified plane in and around the Blue Bridge at Rhyl I had been led along this maze of evidence in unexpected directions.
Were these all just misperceived aircraft or was something else going on? If so, then what?
Well, the Blue Bridge was about to reappear and this time the UFO connections were much deeper than the events above.
4: ABDUCTED?
A man called Steve, visiting North Wales from Hampshire, is origin of the strangest case yet tied into the Rhyl Blue Bridge.
It happened in the late 1980s when the first wave of mystery aircraft sightings was occurring on this stretch of coast. But he only reported it much later.
Steve had a temporary summer job in Rhyl when the influx of tourists means short term employment is in plentiful supply. Not living locally he stayed in a caravan at the rear of a pub – then known as the Ferry – located by the south western side of the Blue Bridge. This is just a few hundred yards along the same coastal road from where Golden Sands caravan park sits and where I had my bungalow between 2002 and 2014.
On this night after a long day working Steve spent the evening in Rhyl and, being newly married, phoned his wife from a call box to say goodnight before returning to his caravan.
However, the very next thing that he recalled was walking slowly towards the Blue Bridge from the direction of Towyn without memory of how he had got there.
Six hours had disappeared and Steve was on the other side of the river and over a mile from where he had ‘just’ in his memory called home to his wife.
My first thought - as I suspect might be yours - was that here was a young man who after a night out maybe got lost in a strange town and perhaps slept off drink and a long day.
But he is adamant this is not what happened and pointed out that he was wearing shoes that were too tight and gave him blisters if he had walked any distance whilst wearing them, but there were none on his feet that morning when he ‘came to’.
As such he argued that he cannot have walked from the Rhyl through Kinmel Bay - a couple of miles. Nor he insisted had he over indulged, was taking no medication and had never had similar blackouts before or since.
This anecdote is very like many alien contact cases in my files – an intriguing story with tenuous possible links to UFOs. But there are further interesting comments by Steve.
The witness reports that as he ‘came to’ his clothing was ‘undone’ – though showing no signs of having been slept in. He was also plagued by bad dreams in the aftermath of that night. In these he found himself inside the phone box calling home and exiting to find himself in a large grey and white room with a tall figure and two small beings wearing illuminated helmets.
Throughout he felt a desperate urge to escape.
We may never know if there is a more mundane explanation - possibly a repressed recall of assault - as he was not interested in digging deeper via methods such as regression hypnosis. And, of course, as no UFO was actually seen, it would be very presumptive to go that route anyhow.
Nonetheless, UFOs did rear their head in connection with the Blue Bridge soon after this case emerged. A witness from the Midlands asked US UFO group MUFON: ‘did anyone see the UFO in the area of the (Rhyl) Blue Bridge?’
The incident was described as a ‘huge object, glowing red, sparks coming off’.
This witness observed people by the bus stop directly outside the very inn featured in Steve’s story above - adding: ‘(They) must have seen it’ because they were ‘pointing at it’.
This event happened on 3 March 2012 at 21.45 - which is very significant because on that night a huge fireball meteor crossed the British skies.
So on this occasion we can surely resolve this Blue Bridge sighting as an IFO.
But the location has certainly become a hot spot for all manner of aerial curiosities - even now reaching out across the Atlantic!
5: CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE MYSTERY PLANE
I have to thank researcher Peter McCue for pointing me toward another key report that might be connected.
This sighting was made by Colin Grethe - and is perhaps the most extraordinary of all of these Welsh mystery aircraft episodes. It was a very close encounter indeed. Though to be fair some distance from the Blue Bridge on this occasion.
His clearly expressed account was written by him on his Eden web site - www.eden-two.com - an artfully designed project combining spiritualism, music and business advice into an eclectic mix.
After I tracked him down (he now lives outside Wales) Colin kindly offered further information about the events. It proves to be a fascinating case that ties together elements from all of these North Wales aircraft incidents.
Colin was driving along a dark country road near Cwm Llinau in northern mid Wales at around 21.20 on 27 April 2007. He was heading towards Machynlleth when he observed ‘a group of bright lights’ to the side and ahead over the highway.
He quickly appreciated that this collection of lights resembled the wingspan of an otherwise invisible aircraft.
Colin observed many details such as wing tip lights, small vertical constructions in front of each tip and a glowing white dome over the wings akin to a cockpit. He could even make out the top half of two ‘figures’ within that part of the craft it was so low and close.
The ‘aircraft’ appeared to be an old type and gently rising up and down as if it was just about to land. Needless to say this was a terrifying prospect given that the mystery object was very low down and Grethe was so close to its flight path. And there was no airport - just the road he was travelling on - suggesting he was closing in on the point of potential impact by the plane right on top of his car.
Events now entered slow motion (the classic psychological response to hyper stress that is common within the Oz Factor close encounter experience).
The witness looked in his rear view mirror desperate to find an escape route away from danger in the darkness. But the aircraft just flew right over the top of him in what felt like a very narrow squeak.
Yet all of the time there was no sound of a roaring engine and he saw no tail of the craft sweeping overhead.
Moreover, in the mirror as he now look back to see what had happened, expecting to observe a fiery crash site, there was nothing there. The aircraft – estimated as 50 feet wide – had completely disappeared.
Colin stopped the car and looked around in the gloom thinking the plane must have ditched somewhere nearby. But there was only silence in the rural surrounds.
He returned to his vehicle, drove on a few hundred yards until finding a nearby village where he could contact the police and give them his exact position. His call was received by the police at 21.24.
After trying to recover his composure the local police told the shocked man that they would investigate but added that an RAF Hercules had reputedly been ‘in the area’ earlier that day. Seeming to imply this was the most likely solution.
However, subsequently the police called him back to say that their enquiries had established there was NO air traffic at the time and conditions were unsuitable for low flying as he had described so they were still looking into the matter.
Grethe’s own enquiries with RAF Cosford - and other airfields around the region - confirmed there was no plane known to be in the area that night.
But on visiting the police station in Aberystwyth next day he was now told it must have been the Hercules and to just forget about the whole thing.
Colin told me that he ‘remained convinced there were no aircraft in the area at the time’ and was ‘taken aback’ by the police response.
He was especially perturbed by how they had totally changed their line of argument overnight despite seeming to take his careful and objective report seriously.
He added to me: ‘I challenged (the officer) that if I had been reporting a murder would they take my description of the assailant and blow it out of similar proportion?’
I have looked but cannot trace any report on this incident filed with the MoD. The 2007 case files released do include some from the police to the Air Staff, but not this incident.
Grethe added perhaps sagely: ‘I appreciate that if they had some sort of secret flight then they wouldn’t tell me about it’.
Nonetheless he has many reasons to doubt this possibility – not least the total silence as the ‘plane’ passed directly over his head.
So we have a growing file of interlinked cases about some kind of mystery aircraft flying over North Wales and its identity remains unknown.
Indeed, one of the nurses who visited my mum daily in Abergele when we lived there listened as I told her about the above sighting in 2013.
She smiled at me and - whilst asking me not to go into detail in public - then told me how she had been witness to a very similar local incident.
This occurred on a country road near Abergele also in 2007 (same year as Colin Grethe's sighting). She spontaneously related how a large military cargo plane had appeared out of nowhere in the dark, flown low over her car in silence and had promptly vanished into thin air as she looked to see where it had 'landed'.
As a child in the 1950s in this part of North Wales the nurse told me with a matter of fact comment:-
‘I knew that these sort of things tend to happen round these parts as others told me about them.
But you just learn to accept it and move on.’
As such the mystery continues......

ISSUE 197 AUGUST 2018
ISLE OF MAN SPECIAL
Editor: Jenny Randles
Address: 10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
E mail:- nufonnews@gmail.comcom
J.R Comments
Conference Calls
In a few weeks I am giving my first public talk on the subject for 15 years. This will be at:- Saturday 6th & Sunday 7th October 2018
YMCA, St Albans Rd, St Annes FY8 1XD
The details of the programme are below.
Saturday 6th October
10:00 to 10:15: Welcome and Introduction by Rob Whitehead
10:30 to 11:30 Juliette Gregson: “Weird Fylde”
Break
12:00 to 13:00 Peter McCue: “Fake News; Misreporting the Paranormal”
Lunch Break
14:00 to 15:30 Jenny Randles: “Time Storms, Near Death Falls and Lying Saucers”
Break
16:00 – 17:00 Ann Winsper: “The Rise and Fall of Ghosthunting”
17:00 to 17:15: Closing Comments from Rob Whitehead
Sunday 7th October 2018
10:00 to 10:15: Welcome and Introduction by Rob Whitehead
10:15 to 11:15 Richard Freeman: “The Nameless Dread”
Break
11:45 to 13:15 Alan Godfrey: “Who or What Were They?”
Lunch Break
14:30 to 15:30 Rob Whitehead: “Aliens Stole My Christmas Tree”
Break
16:00 to 17:00 Nathan Jackson: “Green, Unpleasant Land: An Overview of British Cryptids”
17:00 to 17:15: Closing Comments from Rob Whitehead
*All of the above is subject to change
Tickets: 1 day £25, both days £45
For online tickets & further details visit www.lapisparanormal.com
For tickets by post send a cheque to
1 Elm Avenue, Poulton-le-Fylde, FY6 7SP
Email: lapisparanormal@gmail.com
Tel. 01253 890601
As you can see there is a packed 2 day program of lectures about the paranormal.
My hope is to set out where I see the UFO mystery stands after my long period of absence from the field. During this time I have had a few years to put my ideas in context with the wider horizons of paranormal experience.
The presentation will look at the three different strands of separate but inter-related ‘types’ of encounter and how these connect via the Oz Factor. These are (as in the title) Time Storms, Near Death Falls and Lying Saucers.
I will also illustrate them with some accounts involving famous faces I have met along the way whose encounters fall into these categories.
This is the first time I have done a talk since November 2003 when I appeared at two bookshops on the Isle of Man to discuss what would prove to be my last book for 15 years - Supernatural Isle of Man. Although I am presently writing a new book of which this talk will offer a taster. Hopefully that book will appear in early 2019.
My last book (still in print on a new photo rich ‘tourist’ edition) is about the folklore and strange phenomena linked to this magical island.
Located in the middle of the Irish Sea about 3 hours by boat from England or Ireland I have visited here often since when I first went there in the late 1950s (if you don’t count my mum doing so when pregnant with me a few years before!) That first visit I remember was for a wedding at Cregneash.
I probably would retire to the island, but for two things. I doubt I can afford it - as in to either live there or to retire!
The island is quite small and can be driven around easily in a day or walked around in a couple of days. It is world famous for the Summer TT motorcycle races - some of the most dangerous in the world and in the 1960s we visited often by boat from Liverpool or Fleetwood around that time when the island is packed so tight it feels like it might sink.
Sadly these days the Fleetwood boat trains and ferries no longer run and flights in half an hour from most parts of the UK are more common. My first commercial flight ever was from Manchester to the IOM by Cambrian Airways Viscount in 1971.
The isle has horse drawn trams, steam trains and electric trams that climb Snaefell (Norse for snow mountain). On a clear day atop here is the only place where you are geographically placed close enough to witness five kingdoms from one spot - as in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland - and Mann.
Mann derives from the Manx name Ellan Vannin and Manannan - the original ruler. Manannan is also the name of the huge Catamaran ferry that heads there from Liverpool these days. My most recent journey in 2008 revealed how these boats are quite a step up in luxury and speed from the old steam ones such as Mona’s Queen and Snaefell that I used to travel on in the 50s and 60s.
The island is self-governing and not part of the United Kingdom or the EU but aligns its laws annually to UK laws, uses British currency and the Queen is head of state known as the Lord of Mann. It has one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the world set up by the Vikings 1000 years ago and still called Tynwald - its Viking name.
Norse lived here peacefully 1200 years ago and their presence remains everywhere. Norway ran the island until the 13th century but it is quite English in feel today, with many of the 90,000 inhabitants commuting regularly to Liverpool to work or shop.
Famous locals include the Brothers Gibb - (as in B G - who formed the Bee Gees) They moved from here to Manchester as children and started playing music at a cinema close to where I used to live in Chorlton when I first started editing this magazine way back when.
Many movies have been filmed on the island making the most of its spectacular diverse scenery and ability to offer non UK tax breaks.
Cregneash - where I attended that wedding 60 years ago - still looks as it was in Victorian times and is used on film often for that reason. It also has a flying saucer landed on the hills above - though it is actually a modern shipping control station that just looks spookily like one. A photo on the cover illustrates this 'landing'!
Thomas and the Magic Railroad (as in the Thomas the Tank Engine!) starring Alec Baldwin was filmed on the island which basically IS the fictional isle of Sodor in the original stories (indeed Sodor is the real name of the bishopric of the island and as recently as the 1960s had little railways all over it as in the books - though only the main line still operates with over 100 year old steam engines). Again the cover photo shows a map at Douglas railway station of the island lines as they once were.
This seemingly odd travelogue does have a purpose (truly!) because this issue of Northern UFO News will feature some of the strange cases from this magical island that I picked up on my many visits.
Another of these was featured in issue 189, involving a ship that had very strange things happen to it after encountering an object in Manx coastal waters in 1957. But it is by no means the only incident worth recording. So a selection of others will follow.
So above I wanted to set the scene for those who have never encountered this magical place before.
Case 1: THE THREE LEGS OF MAN
We know that the island has been inhabited for at least four or five thousand years.
But one of the most notable things about the Isle of Man is its folklore which is typified by the symbol for the island that appears everywhere - such as on its flag and stamps - the three legs of Man.
You can see it on the cover adorning the Laxey water wheel - one of the oldest working examples in the world.
The legs are only shown from the thigh down and forming a circle that could be moving in any direction - that is by convention said to be clockwise.
They are the basis for a near millennium old motto of the island - ‘whichever way I am thrown I will stand’.
The origin of this goes back more than 2500 years and after the time of Manannan, who was said to have cast a magical mantle around the island to protect its inhabitants from easily being invaded. It is, of course, most likely the common sea mist that often shrouds this mid water island position - but still sometimes given the name by locals when it comes in quickly.
The story of the three legs involves a group of fishermen driven onto the island by a storm that left them wrecked, but safe, on shore. Praising their escape, they used a tinder box to try to light a fire when a fierce noise from the dark stormy skies emerged above.
Exiting from the dark cloud above them was an ‘object’ shaped like three spokes on a wheel. As they stared at the UFO like apparition the wheels began to rotate. They watched as this startling object moved along the beach and the sides of the steep cliffs and disappeared into the distance.
Over time it became associated with the good fortune of the shipwrecked crew and so began the long mythical affiliation of the three legs with the island.
Of course, assuming it has any basis in a real life incident as folklore often does, then it is not hard to interpret this in a modern context as a UFO sighting. If so it has been mythologized extensively over the
centuries, of course.
Regardless of what caused it - some kind of ball lighting or rare atmospheric electrical phenomenon in a UAP sense seems likely - it nonetheless is a flying object that is unidentified.
It has obvious similarity with many modern day fireball events that are typically related to a fierce storm, as here.
Case 2: THE WIND FROM NOWHERE
November 1898 Glion Dhrink
The witness to this sighting, a man from Lonan on the east coast, quaintly described the time of the incident as around ‘middlin dark’ in a vague way not uncommon in rural surrounds of a past age.
He was walking over 10 miles home across moors around Glion Dhrink area east of Peel going home on the far side of the island after work. Something common with rural labourers of the time.
To amuse himself on the several hours journey over hilly terrain he was singing to himself when bad weather descended as it can quickly on the island. So he took shelter from the steady drizzle knowing from experience it would soon pass.
However, the intensity increased so he started to seek out better shelter and entered what in the gloom he took to be a hedgerow, but once inside he became surrounded by a swirling mass and there was no obvious exit.
This man later described what happened next - ‘Something came over me….I had to put my hand up to keep my cap on for it would not stop on itself.’
He was next caught in an upward suction that was seeking to pull him into the sky towards the unseen dark object overhead that he could sense. An effect not unlike that in the Alan Godfrey case over eight decades later.
As he phrased it ‘my legs and knees went all queer and the singing was knocked all out of me.’
His body was tingling and he could almost see but definitely sense that there was an intelligence around him watching and waiting. He naturally assumed these to be the fairy folk of whom there is a strong tradition on the island and hundreds of stories. They are still believed in by many locals and ‘Fairy Bridge’ is a place where even now locals tie notes to the trees by the stream asking ‘themselves’ - these diminutive ‘original’ inhabitants of the island - to grant them some favour based on events in their lives.
The man on the moors was now overcome by both an odd tingling and a sense of ‘tiredness’ that saw him lose consciousness.
He awoke in a totally disorientated state, collapsed on the ground, unsteady on his feet and taking several minutes to re-orientate his senses. When he did so he realized he had ‘moved’ a couple of miles and was now on Glen Mooar without any idea how he had made the journey.
When he arrived home he realized that a couple of hours had disappeared whilst he was ‘out of it’.
This is a classic case of ‘missing time’ that without any doubt today would be interpreted as a possible alien abduction. The witness would likely be hypnotized and coaxed to try to recall what happened whilst in the presence of the ‘aliens’.
Whilst extraordinary this is just one of several fascinating stories of what appear to be UAP or abduction like events long ago on the island.
There is even the story of the ‘Fenoderee’ - one of the fairy folk exiled to live amongst the locals who in the 1600’s, as close as we can estimate from the resulting folk tales, he plied his trade using ‘magic’ to plough fields in the Curraghs on the island.
The accounts of the way this was done clearly suggest it was laid down as swirled circles that we would recognize today as ‘crop circles’.
Indeed in the same area there have been modern reports of such circles which suggest that some ‘phenomenon’ - perhaps a meteorological one - has been operating here across the centuries.
And just like with the winds and lights today interpreted as aliens and UFOs but in the past put down to the fairy folk, then these circles would once have been ascribed to the ‘Fenoderee’ at work.
Interestingly he operated at night with the circles being just there in the morning. Exactly like today’s crop circles.
It would be truly fascinating to know how the man from Lonan would have related his adventure had hypnosis been an option in 1898. Would it have unraveled a ‘memory’ from that time and place where it is more likely this witness would believe he was ‘abducted’ by fairy folk not little green men?
Case 3 THE MAN WHO VANISHED
Perwick Bay, Autumn1978
Just outside of Cregneash and close to the modern day ‘flying saucer’ maritime communication station on the hill is Perwick Bay. Here something very curious occurred in 1978.
A man called Fred was collecting seaweed from the rocks in the bay when he saw an unusual figure stooped over an outcrop. Puzzled he went closer to investigate.
As he got nearer, without alerting the being to his presence, he could see that it was not human and was very small. No taller than about three and a half feet.
The figure had a tight fitting grey covering all over the body not unlike a diver’s wet suit. But this was not one of those. It did not reveal any flesh at all.
On the midriff was a belt that seemed to have some kind of box attached to it. The box had buttons and the being kept pressing these as Fred inched closer to him without drawing his attention.
Suddenly the figure seemed to become alerted to Fred’s nearby presence in the quiet location with just the sound of the waves for company. He stared at him seemingly in horror ‘as if he had never seen a human being before’ - was how the witness described it.
At this point he opened the box on his belt and took out a small piece of rock. Fred was now really close to him and the figure handed the rock over without saying a word. It had a greenish gold flecked surface.
Dumbfounded Fred took it without even thinking - upon which the entity then pressed another button on the belt and vanished into thin air!
Fred decided to give up his seaweed hunt and promptly disappeared off the beach as fast as possible and returned home to Port St Mary.
The rock on closer inspection did not seem anything strange at all.
Naturally I asked to see this geological specimen. Unfortunately, the witness told me he placed it on his mantelpiece and when he returned to take a closer look it had vanished as completely as did the figure on the rocks.
I have no idea how true this story is, of course. But it is different from any other I have heard.
Case 4 : THE FLIGHT OF THE FAIRIES
Fairy cottage, Laxey 29 May 1984
A much more traditional UFO event is next up - although its location is still at a place whose very name links to the magical beings and folklore of the island.
At about 11 pm that night an object was seen hovering above Laxey Bay and the police and coastguard were both alerted but neither had any helicopters in the location.
The married couple in the cottage were looking at insisted it was like two huge searchlights pointed onto the water. At first completely stationary but now moving slowly - which is why they assumed it was a helicopter looking for someone possibly lost in the water.
That explanation was soon rendered impossible even without the police and coastguard saying so, when the object headed inland and passed directly over the couple in front of their cottage. Despite the area being quiet there was no sound at all as the thing headed westwards inland. So it was no helicopter.
They could now see that the object had a flat base and a disk like structure above. There were other glowing lights apart from the two headlights and streams of what looked to be faint vapour emerging from the rear.
They watched as the object circled inland over Sneafell, the mountain inland just behind them, reached by electric tram climbing up from Laxey.
The object then curved north and east again and back out over the Irish Sea.
No explanation was ever found. And no other witnesses came forward. I checked for possible satellite re-entries or bright meteors. But none seemed to have occurred. The only possible explanation I could think of was a military aircraft refueling exercise that use well-lit tanker aircraft very high in the sky linked to smaller planes that are ‘fuelled’ through a pipe in mid-flight.
But again no evidence could be found for such an event occurring that night.
Case 5: UFO CRASH ON SNAEFELL
Snaefell Mountain 14 January 2001
To end with the most intriguing case of all, revealing that even in the 21st century strange things still occur on this island.
At about 4.30 pm on this Sunday afternoon three separate groups of people were on the wintry slopes of Snaefell - the 2037 ft high mountain that dominates the centre and north of the island.
They saw something near the telecommunication mast close to the Bungalow, a famous point on the round island TT motor cycle course.
From Sulby a man described what looked like a ‘microlite’ flying very low near the mast. Meanwhile another man at Jurby reported what seemed to be ‘fire’ falling from the sky near the same place. He thought it might be a distress flare fired by someone on trouble up the mountain in the harsh conditions at this time of year.
Meanwhile two women were horse riding on the opposite, southern slopes of the mountain about three miles away. Their open perspective gave them the most clear view.
They described seeing a ‘small plane-like object’ moving very slowly towards what seemed a possible collision with the communication mast. In horror they watched it strike the mast and emit a shower of sparks and fire that fell towards the top of the mountain.
Convinced they had watched a passenger aircraft crash into the tower they quickly rode to the nearest farm and asked the owner to call the police. He also witnessed the smoke on the top of the mountain as it was still visible when they pointed it out to him.
The police did not take much persuading to investigate because shortly before the call they had had to switch to emergency back up when they lost power from the tower which was used to operate emergency services communications.
By now, being mid-winter, night was closing in and as rescue crews arrived on the desolate scene it was too dark to properly take in what they were seeing. There was evidence of some damage to the tower around them suggesting the collision was real and signs of burning on the ground below.
But crucially there was no obvious wreckage and certainly not any crashed aircraft on the mountain as far as they could tell in the now pitch dark.
There were also no reports of any aircraft in trouble, but the prospect of a light aircraft not under radar control that might have fallen beyond the mountain - possibly even into the sea off Jurby 5 miles west - meant they had to launch a search and rescue mission.
Civil defence, fire and police were all put on alert and an RAF helicopter scrambled from Valley in North Wales (the island’s defence being under control of the UK). But after six hours of searching and still with no reports of any missing aircraft the operation was called off without conclusion.
By Monday morning full power was returned as minimum repairs were needed and in daylight it was clear there was no wreckage anywhere around the apparent collision point but that something had forcefully struck the mast from above.
Interviews with the witnesses had revealed that a trail of smoke seemed to have been coming from the ‘UFO’ after it collided with the tower and so the search was resumed in daylight but called off after several more hours when the parties found no trace of what looked like parts of any kind of aircraft.
The police concluded that the incident had obviously happened but that whatever it was that collided with the mast was able to continue, seemingly to its destination, or gone down unseen over the Irish Sea later.
Though not why, if true, nobody was reported missing.
Once no evidence of a missing plane emerged all Monday Inspector Carolyn Kinrade in charge of the IOM police investigation reported they were considering the theory that a prank ‘balloon’ or a firework had been fired at the tower. She appealed for anyone to come forward and confess.
Nobody ever did, despite her efforts to put the minds at ease of any youngsters who might have done it by saying: ‘They are not in trouble. We just want to know what happened and make sure everyone is OK’.
One of the two women on horseback later told UFO investigator Chris Rolfe that the object they saw was definitely aircraft sized, not a firework, and that after it clearly hit the mast it trailed smoke from its rear in a spiral and that smoke clung to the mountain top for half an hour before the police arrived and she led them to the site. This testimony seems to eliminate the police theory of a firework.
Two days later, on the Tuesday, with the police now having called off the search, they arrived at the workplace of the two women and took them back up the mountain and obtained from them detailed measurements, angles and estimates of size of the UFO.
The police had contacted defence authorities about the RAF search and were told to call off their investigations, because no harm seemed to have occurred and they believed it was just someone flying a model aircraft that had gone out of control and struck the tower.
Some police officers seemed suspicious of this or that the women could have seen a model aircraft three miles away in the semi dark and this is why they took the measurements, which clearly implied something rather larger was involved. Indeed they hinted to the women they felt their account eliminated a model aircraft as they had been advised to close it as now being.
That is officially the story, but Chris Rolfe says he was tipped off by someone that the truth was that the Ministry of Defence did not exactly lie. It WAS in a sense a kind of model aircraft - but not a small toy - rather a very sophisticated RPV - remotely piloted vehicle - about the size of a light plane and used for battlefield observation.
These have no pilots but are computer controlled from hundreds of miles away and this one was on a test flight from Scotland, had lost contact and was recovered subsequently after crashing into the sea.
They clearly preferred not to discuss this secret technology even with the police and so told them the truth in a very roundabout way leading them to assume something different from what this UFO really was.
Military record, Jane’s Defence Weekly, confirmed that flights of these RPV were occurring from Western Scotland at the time. And we have one further big clue.
On 26 October 1996 something very similar happened near the Isle of Lewis, off the Scottish coast. Stornoway coastguard had received several calls of an aircraft like object that exploded in mid air and fell in a spiraling trail of smoke into the sea.
A similar search and rescue mission found no evidence of a missing aircraft and no meteors or satellite debris burning up in the atmosphere that might have caused this incident.
The search in Lewis was called off inconclusively just as five years later on the IOM. But, coincidentally, a NATO exercise involving ships began immediately that the civilian search had ended and observers reported seeing ships appearing to be searching the waters in the same area looking for something floating on the sea. So it seems likely this was an RPV drone that had gone astray and they were attempting to recover.
Implying that something similar could have occurred on Snaefell in 2001.
The only thing I could find on the matter in the MoD file releases was this comment from the Air Staff office in June 2001 to an unknown person whose name was omitted by way of redaction:-
I can confirm that a Search and Rescue helicopter from RAF Valley received a call out at 13 :30 on 14 January to search for a crashed micro-light on the Isle of Man. A comprehensive search of the area was conducted, but nothing was found and the helicopter returned to RAF Valley.
As you can see the reference to the Valley helicopter being called out 3 hours before anyone saw or reported anything does not inspire confidence in the credibility of this MoD response.
The last MOD word on the Snaefell case came in October 2001 when Lord Hill-Norton, the ex Admiral of the Fleet and defence chief who was a UFO believer and took on the MoD over Rendlesham Forest, filed a request for a parliamentary answer on the Snaefell incident.
The MoD spokesperson, an under secretary, Lord Bach, replied to parliament as follows:-
In the early hours of 14 January, and in daylight on 15 January 2001, a military search and rescue helicopter from RAF Valley conducted a comprehensive search of the area around Snaefell Mountain following a report of a suspected light aircraft crash. However, nothing was found as a result of the search.
Interestingly, on an Isle of Man discussion forum I found reference to an engineer who in 2007 reportedly found the remains of a starchaser rocket on the top of Sneafell.
These rockets up to 40 feet in height have been developed by a private company in North West England with many test launches over the Irish Sea. They are part of an attempt to develop an independent method of cheap space flights carrying lucrative cargo.
It is not suggested that one of these rockets caused the incident on Sneafell in 2001 but clearly they were capable of reaching there.
As you can see all of the MoD commentary on this affair is a masterpiece in saying nothing much.
Which in my experience usually implies they have things they do not want to say.

Contents: 196
The Heald Moor Landing
Editor: Jenny Randles JULY 2018
10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire
SK3 8LT
New E mail address:
nufonnews@gmail.com
J.R Comments
First things first:- Please Note the change in E Mail address caused by BT deciding to increase the charge for this service by 500% in 3 years and 50% in a month.
They have now renamed themselves DT - as in Dick Turpin and I could not justify £7.50 pm for an inferior e mail product to the one I switched to for free.
So sorry for any inconvenience - but as the old address will cease on 1 August please use in future:
nufonnews@gmail.com
Secondly, you might be expecting this issue to be Part 2 of the UMMO/APEN story.
But that will not be the case. Owing to events beyond my control I have had to suspend any further writing on this topic.
Nothing sinister, I promise. No visits from MIB. It was a practical decision.
I may well return to the subject in a future edition if circumstances change. But to make clear as to what you are missing, here is the punchline.
Like UMMO, APEN was a hoax - though it had a British focus. It played games with UFO researchers, had political motivations, became quite messy and the police got involved.
It is a story worth telling, but telling it is complicated and distracting right now - also probably not really worth the effort ufologically. And so for the moment at least I won’t and will stick with real UFO matters not silly games by activists - of which I have had enough on Twitter lately.
So….
CASE HISTORY:
THE HEALD MOOR LANDING
THE MAN WHO WATCHED ALAN GODFREY GET ABDUCTED
14 January 1980 06.15 GMT
A 646 Heald Moor, Nr Portsmouth, Lancashire
OS Ref: Map SD 888270
On 28 November 1980, as readers of Who or What Were They? know, West Yorkshire police officer Alan Godfrey had a close encounter whilst driving his patrol car on the A 646 Todmorden to Burnley Road. He was searching for some cows that were causing havoc on a wet night.
At just after 5 am he had driven towards a rotating oval mass above the highway that was disturbing the trees and causing debris to swirl about. He also experienced several remarkable after effects. These include a beam of light that blinded his eyes, vehicle interference and a period of missing time. Subsequent investigation found a swirled dry circle on the highway where the object had been.
There is much more to Alan Godfrey’s story as the book makes clear. Not least that there was another witness on Burnley Road that night - a bus driver who was at the same spot a few minutes earlier but did not see the object overhead or Alan Godfrey at the scene. However, they passed each other in Todmorden centre at one point as Alan had first told me in 1981 years before the driver came forward to describe what he witnessed.
That bus driver did see the swirling effects on the road and stopped on site - leaned out of the cab and felt the vortex from whatever was creating the strange physical phenomena (unseen from above) down on the road beneath.
He drove off to collect another driver from the small village of Portsmouth about two miles north west, then had to get his passenger to the depot as he was set to drive the first service bus of the day in order to leave on time. He was on route back when Alan saw him pass just after 5 am.
Portsmouth is on the edge of Heald Moor and sits at the border where West Yorkshire becomes Lancashire. From here the Burnley Road snakes through a narrow valley with hills on both sides and a railway line running alongside the road carrying passenger and freight trains and semi regular steam specials that allow passengers to enjoy the steep climbs over Pennine scenery.
The Lancashire mill town of Burnley is four miles north-west of here and mid-way to there from Heald Moor is the village of Cliviger. It was here that a witness reported to Todmorden police station on the morning following Alan Godfrey’s encounter that he had seen a UFO around the time of Alan’s sighting. A bluish glow over Burnley Road close by the location of the case you are about to read.
Unfortunately that Cliviger witness has never come forward or been traced.
To the south of Heald Moor sit the northern fringes of the Rossendale Valley with Weir and Sharneyford - small communities two miles away and both the scene of their own close encounters.
It is fair to say this concentrated Pennine region is one of the most UFO active in Britain and is why I wrote a book on some of the events within it - The Pennine UFO Mystery (Granada, 1983).
Pre Traumatic Stress:
This case, which dates from 10 months before Alan Godfrey’s experience occurred on the same highway and is a most fascinating episode. It was investigated by Peter Hough and myself in 1985 and well worth telling here in full detail, which I have not had the space to do before.
The relevance to the Alan Godfrey encounter will become obvious. However I will warn up front that my title is rather misleading - as whilst he did believe this when first reporting his encounter - the witness obviously did NOT see PC Godfrey actually being kidnapped from his patrol car.
The witness to this case was Bill who lived just outside Burnley and had an interesting history leading up to these events that is worth recording before discussing his close encounter. It could be relevant as Alan Godfrey had also suffered a trauma before his encounter and reported similar 'blackouts'.
Born in the 1920s Bill started work as a mechanic at a mill in Nelson, just before WW II and at 18 saw war service with the Royal Marines.
In December 1943 he was on a carrier taking landing craft in the icy waters north east of Britain around the time that the pivotal Battle of North Cape raged. This saw the German Battleship - the Scharnhorst - sunk with the loss of all but 36 of the near 2000 men onboard by the destroyer HMS Duke of York off the coast of Norway.
Bill’s landing craft carrier sank into the freezing seas too and, whilst he survived without major injury, the trauma was horrific. He watched many of his colleagues drown as they were sucked under the sinking ship.
Managing to rescue one drowning man, Bill was taken back to Aberdeen suffering from post- traumatic shock and was cared for in a psychiatric hospital but recovered enough to see thankfully less horrific service at sea until 1946.
Post war the now worldly wise young man used his training to progress at the mill and in 1949 was made a truck driver. He was still working in that same job 31 years later when the close encounter incident occurred - only five months before he was made redundant as unfortunately the mill closed. Victim, like so much of the cotton industry in the area to cheap Asian imports after it had survived the long American Civil War with millworkers facing near starvation thanks to support of a naval blockade that stopped imports of cotton from the rebel southern states. This was something that Abraham Lincoln commended the area over afterwards and a statue of him sits proudly in Manchester to commemorate the way part of Britain 'fought' a small part in the civil war with the Northern States.
Bill confirmed the trauma of the close encounter had revived memories of his post-traumatic stress disorder following the sinking 37 years earlier when the UK and US were once again fighting a common cause together 80 years after that civil war.
‘Things have gone a little wrong with my mind since the UFO’ he told us.
Though he still applied for - and got - another job as a driver for a company that made dairy machinery.
He cites an incident that happened during this period after his UFO event on Burnley Road.
Driving on the ‘Death Valley’ section of the M 62 transpennine motorway he ‘inexplicably blacked out’ and found that he had in the interim crashed into the rear of a car driven by a Polish priest. Though nobody was hurt extensive damage to Bill’s vehicle resulted.
Alan Godfrey had reported similar non UFO related blackouts prior to his close encounter that are mentioned in my book,The Pennine UFO Mystery, Granada, 1983. The relevance of this is open to debate but is something that has cropped up in other close encounters and led to speculation by some doctors that the experience involves a kind of triggered state not unlike migraine or epilepsy.
In Who or What were they? I also mention the potential connection with VVS - Vaso Vagal Syncope - where a sudden drop in blood pressure triggered by a shock can lead to a total systems shut down in susceptible people.
Paranormal Adventures:
Bill claimed not to have had any paranormal experiences himself prior to his close encounter in 1980 but did cite an incident from November 1938 when he was a teenager at school.
He was then staying with his parents in a rented house in Manningham Lane, Bradford, when his parents claimed to see a ghost in the middle of the night. It was the figure of a man, whose feet were missing, but upper body intact, descending the stairs.
The landlady told them that she knew the house was haunted and believed the spectre was a window cleaner who had fallen off his ladder when cleaning the building. He had broken his neck as he crashed onto the stone flags.
However, Bill did say that following his UFO sighting he had also had frequent recurring dreams in which he relived the episode over and over. He says that these added nothing new to the events but caused him to keep questioning what hidden memories might want to emerge.
Again Alan Godfrey had similar nocturnal traumas.
The Close Encounter:
We had difficulty verifying the date of his wartime ship sinking episode - claimed to be the 26 December 1943 - the actual day of the Battle of the North Cape. We found no records of landing craft carrier losses on that date but some data of these events is patchy.
Nonetheless Bill was sure of the date of his UFO encounter because it was the anniversary of his induction into the navy and he says that he had cross checked it against factory duty rosters confirming this. Though by the time we interviewed him the factory had closed and no records were accessible to confirm.
But he was certain it was 14 January 1980 and as he was also convinced he saw Alan Godfrey being abducted that day would not change this date even when we could prove to him that Alan's encounter occurred the following November. So we are inclined to regard It is correct.
Three weeks earlier, immediately prior to Christmas 1979, he had driven the same route and passing the spot where later he had the close encounter Bill says he saw something odd.
It was about 09.00 and as he crossed the railway bridge taking the track under Burnley Road he saw a jeep on the long sloping embankment down toward the line on the far side of the track. Immediately after seeing this (it being on his left driving towards Todmorden) he reached the lay-by on the right which features in his subsequent UFO sighting.
Coming out of here was a police patrol car. Bill flashed his lights, but the officer ignored him. So he stopped, got out and flagged the driver over.
From where the police car was positioned the jeep was blocked from view by a rise of land. But the jeep’s path to get to where it was had become clear - it had come from a farmhouse on the far side of the tracks via two fields and smashing through a fence. Stopped right by the track - which Bill knew but the police could not yet see - meant that it was a clear risk to passing trains if fouling the line.
Satisfied that they would contact British Rail and warn drivers before the jeep got removed Bill drove off to make his delivery run.
The sketch Bill made of the location of his UFO event above on the cover of this month's issue shows the road layout which is relevant to the above incident too.
Whilst this is an interesting story in of itself being at almost the exact location of the subsequent UFO landing, there is no obvious direct link. And no real need to assume supernatural elements as the fields were muddy and rainfall common this high up in the hills and the jeep could just have slipped down the steep slope entirely by accident.
However, Peter and I wanted to record it because it illustrated how he was connecting little dots together to reinforce his persistent belief that police officer Alan Godfrey in his patrol car a couple of miles down the same road was somehow tied into what he later saw. So again here the police featuring in the story took on possibly more significance to him than it merited.
On the morning of the close encounter 3 weeks after the above incident Bill had a major job to do. He was set to drive his truck to the then Courtauld’s textile Mill near Hollingworth Lake. Here he would collect a load of yarn.
His normal route to that factory was on the road through Rossendale via Weir and Bacup and on to Rochdale, as it was more direct. But he had to take the road through Heald Moor because he also had to drop off a package in Todmorden on the way.
It was very cold and overcast and so pitch dark meaning he had to stay below 30 MPH on the moorland road especially with the risk of black ice.
We drove the same route with Bill to the spot where the encounter took place (in daylight and Spring) and that took 15 minutes. His estimate of 20/25 minutes in the dark seemed reasonable.
Bill left home at about 05.45 on 14 January 1980 so he would have passed this same spot where he had seen the jeep around 06.05/06.10.
THE OBJECT IN THE LAY-BY
Immediately after crossing the railway Bill approached the lay by from where he had seen the police patrol car emerge 3 weeks before. The road snakes around at this point and the lay-by is, in fact, the original course of the highway. The road had been straightened out to reduce the twists of this hilly route and the old bend of the course was left in place to form this useful refuge with sheer hillside on the far edge.
Given the lack of habitation until you enter the village of Portsmouth a few hundred yards on there was very little light at that point on a winter morning. So the first thing strange that Bill noticed was a sound.
He reproduced this for us as deep ‘hummmm’ noise and added that it had some similarity to an electric generator with the same note all the time. It was clearly loud as he was in a moving vehicle and the windows were down given the cold weather.
Seconds later Bill spotted an object IN the lay by he was approaching to the right. He described it as a dark shape like a ‘toast rack’.
His sketch of that is also on the cover of this issue.
It had a dark metallic appearance but three ‘red rays’ were emerging from the side nearest the road out of a ‘lip’ a few feet off the ground and with the glow illuminating the lay by surface.
He notes ‘My sketch is what I saw from fifty feet. It is not to scale. I would say it was oblong, about 30 feet long, 20 feet high, the width I don’t know. The rays came from under a ‘canopy’. At the top of the rays were arcs. There must be holes in the body above the arcs as the machine was silhouetted in its own light. There were no windows.’
He also drew some kind of tube or pipe that was curved on the bell shaped rounded top of the object.
Bill added - ‘People were moving about in the rays….The rays were kind of red - I thought flames - Getting nearer I then thought it was refueling because of the pipe on top. But then the red changed to white and now there were people - two figures - silhouetted between the machine and me. One stood straight. The other with bent knees.’
He slowly edged close towards the layby slowing down as he did and then noticed some changes:
‘Getting parallel to the machine I was looking straight into the rays and turned to look back. One of the (two figures) was a policeman. The other was light gray in colour.’
At this point he said with a hint of terror: ‘I was looking straight ahead. I shouted - My lights are out!!! - I just saw black. I remember stopping. And starting. But the time in between. No!’
Missing Time:
We timed carefully the distance from first sight of the object to where he ‘stopped’ next to the lay-by. He says it took about 1 - 2 minutes but going as slowly as we could it only took about 30 seconds. It was just a hundred yards or so.
But Bill says that he could feel his truck lose power as he came alongside the humming object. Firstly the headlights went out and the road ahead was plunged into darkness as there was no other ambient light ahead, only the localized glow of the object to his right.
He does not recall the truck engine stopping and thinks he was just slowing it to a stop. But ‘I went black too’ he commented - so he lost consciousness at this point and can only say the headlights went off but not engine power at his last recall.
He added something Peter and I later found worrying. ‘I think the engine kept running because it was a diesel….I’ve heard about these things with diesel trucks. The engines stop because it gets the spark in the spark plug. That can’t happen with a diesel. It’s just common sense. THEY can’t stop a diesel.’
Whilst in a way all this IS just good sense, it is a slightly odd thing to work out and is a well-known part of UFO investigation lore. There have indeed been cases of diesel engines running on when petrol engines fail in the presence of a UFO.
So the question is, does he know this because he has read a lot about the subject in the 5 years between his sighting and us meeting him?
It appeared from our subsequent investigation that this was the case and - like with the police connections and the attempt to connect his case with Alan Godfrey and his initial belief before he knew the dates were wrong that he SAW Alan Godfrey being abducted - this comes over as Bill just trying to find supporting pointers to prove an alien origin within his story.
Note here too how his sketch of the site sees Bill label the object ‘space ship’ which seems telling. I do not recall a witness doing such a thing in their drawings in many other cases.
What is clear is that after these hints of an Oz Factor state of consciousness as the blackout came on and then memory loss took over - as again happened with Alan Godfrey’s case on the same road - it is hard to know if Bill really was unconscious or for how long. Or, indeed what triggered such unconsciousness - stress, VVS, some kind of PTD, or, of course, the UFO itself.
The very next recall after ‘blacking out’ is of his body ‘jumping’ as if ‘jolting’ on recovery from a deep sleep or a vivid dream. Again, in clear echoes of Alan Godfrey’s story, he was still in his cab and somewhere a little further down the road.
I personally experience VVS - happily only once every decade or so - but I have also experienced this 'jerk'. More interestingly I have heard it described by those who experience 'out of body' or 'near death' visions. They tend to interpret it rather literally - and I can see why from experiencing it.
It feels as if your 'spirit' is 'reentering' your body with a 'bump' but it is likely just the muscles reacting to a sudden return to consciousness and your struggling sense of reality trying to piece together what just happened.
Whatever caused this experience - on 'coming to' Bill was not very far away from the lay by as he had not yet entered the small cluster of houses that form the village of Portsmouth just half a mile beyond. The border from Lancashire, where the lay by is, to West Yorkshire, where Portsmouth is, sits in between.
At point of ‘coming to’ Bill says the truck engine was just idling. He was stationary and the headlights were now back on.
We asked his first thought and he said it was: ‘I’ve escaped!’ He put the truck into gear and drove off straight ahead towards Todmorden without looking back.
As deep as we probed about the blackout Bill just said: ‘I cannot recall anything about this time. I just do not know where I was or where I came to. At the time I did not even realise that I must have been ‘asleep’. I thought it was moments later and the thing was still there so I just wanted to escape’.
But it would seem that it was NOT just a few moments after arriving at the lay by.
Even as he drove the couple of miles into Todmorden past the very spot on Burnley Road where Alan Godfrey would later have his close encounter Bill still felt strange. The Oz Factor seems to have retained a grip on him.
The road and pavements were completely deserted. Not a thing was moving. He also felt a strange ‘light headedness’.
Only as he drove into Todmorden centre did the spell break and he saw a van and some people by the highway.
He also noticed something else a little odd as he entered town whilst trying to collect his senses in order to deliver the package. It was daylight.
It only vaguely registered then and he did not check the time on the Todmorden Fire Station
clock as he passed. Though he says it was never correct anyway in those days!
He also passed the police station but decided not to report what had happened (possibly even to Alan Godfrey had he chosen to have done so!) He merely wanted to get his job over and get home.
Bill dropped off the package in Todmorden and was again not thinking clearly because someone was present to collect it and he did not register that anomaly until later. They should not have been at work yet as it ought to have been still only about 06.30. But in reality it was clearly at least an hour later than that.
‘Who would believe me?’ He told Peter and I on not saying anything. ‘I escaped. That was enough for me. So I did not tell anyone. All I kept thinking was - let the policeman (who he thought he saw next to the UFO) tell his story. They WILL believe him.’
Bill added that he also did not feel well as he drove on from Todmorden towards the mill at Hollingworth.
He described it as feeling very odd:- ‘I was strange. My mind was all queer.’
His consciousness was still ‘vague’ and he was not tying together the clues - such as the fact it was now well into the day as traffic levels revealed - despite being aware that it should not be for another hour or more.
Even so as he drove those few miles he noticed that his left leg was now aching. He could not recall doing anything to it, and chose to drive on and get this day over with as fast as possible.
He reached Courtauld’s in full daylight and still unaware of the time (he had not been wearing a watch that day or this might not have come as a shock like it did). It was clear on arrival that they considered him to be very late and another truck that should have arrived long after him was already there and getting rather impatient.
This was when Bill asked someone what time it was and discovered to his amazement that it was 09.10 which would suggest that he had a period of about two hours unaccounted for since the incident on Heald Moor.
On arrival home that afternoon he felt extraordinarily tired and went to bed very early and in getting undressed noticed that there was a strange mark behind his left knee. It was a star shaped blue bruise about the size of a 10 pence piece.
Within 24 hours the bruising and the extreme tiredness had disappeared. He does not think this injury could have happened when he stopped beside the object as he was crawling so slowly at that point an accident causing injury was unlikely.
All of the other anomalies made no sense either. Such as how he could have stopped his truck on the highway for two hours without causing disruption. Even though traffic would be very light between 06.00 and 08,00 there would be some passing by as it was a Monday and someone would have noticed if he was blocking this exposed highway.
What happened?
So what happened that night to Bill?
Firstly consider what he did to try to report the matter.
Bill did not tell anyone about what happened to him - not even his wife - between January 1980 and December 1981. Then he read an article in the Sunday Mirror about Alan Godfrey’s encounter and came to presume he must have witnessed that incident. A not unreasonable conclusion without knowing the date of Alan’s encounter and given the close proximity of the two incidents. Plus Bill’s belief that he saw a policeman being 'subdued' by bending down within the 'ray' beside the 'landed spaceship' (mostly because of what seemed to be the silhouette of a helmet within the red glow and a hint of a uniform). He believed the PC was being subjugated by the mysterious grey figure in the lay by.
So Alan's story as told by the tabloid hype, seemed too close a match and became quickly conflated as Bill being an observer to the abduction. Which clearly he was not.
Bill now told his wife as she saw him writing to the tabloid about their story on Alan Godfrey’s case. ‘I was stopped by a UFO in the Todmorden valley’ was how he phrased the opening of his story. But curiously the Mirror never replied and did not forward the letter to Alan Godfrey, who had cooperated with the story they had done on him.
Bill had a small row with his wife because it later transpired she posted it to the paper’s London office and he had asked her specifically to contact their Manchester office as this was a ‘northern story’ and he wanted it investigated by ‘northern folk’.
TV comedy viewers might note from the above that the fictional village of Royston Vasey in 'The League of Gentlemen' - actually Hadfield - is not far away across the Pennine moors.
It was to be October 1984 before Bill took further action - this time writing to Granada TV in Manchester and the home of a consumer help programme called ‘This is your right’. They did reply but suggested he contact BUFORA - which had an address ‘down south’ so he again chose not to follow this up! Ironically, as it turned out, because I was BUFORAs ‘Director of Investigations’ in the 1980s and so the letter would have come straight to me from London. But Bill was not to know, of course.
Soon afterwards the local paper announced that Alan Godfrey, along with Harry Harris, was to give a talk in Burnley about his encounter. This was in November 1984 and Bill attended, determined to approach Alan directly having finally found some ‘northern people’ to whom he could tell his story.
On the day, though, he was rather perturbed by the videos of Alan’s hypnosis sessions and his wife made clear to Bill that she felt he should not ‘get involved’ with that ‘scary’ stuff and reluctantly persuaded him to leave without speaking to either man.
Afterwards, though, Bill went to the library, traced Harry Harris’s legal practice (he was a lawyer) and wrote to him. Mysteriously, Harry never replied - though it was most unlike him to miss a case of this nature at that time. As he was regularly organising regression experiments into cases of missing time.
I should add that Peter and I were shown photocopies of these letters which Bill kept as a record, so it seems they were actually sent as described.
This leaves a very frustrating tale of how hard it might be for witnesses of the more significant close encounter cases to figure out how and who to approach and to be able to relate a story that could be very important to follow up quickly.
In the end, as a last resort, Bill did write to BUFORA in February 1985, and I received the letter and immediately set up a visit for Peter Hough and myself to start a long overdue investigation into what we quickly saw was a fascinating case.
INVESTIGATION:
We let Bill tell his story and immediately noticed how he had read around the UFO subject in the past 5 years, which he freely admitted.
This is not unusual after a witness has a close encounter but does make it hard to judge how much impact that acquired information has on testimony.
Many words were used that unfamiliar witnesses who are interviewed soon after their sighting rarely choose - for instance, ‘spaceman’, ‘parent ship’, ‘decoy’ etc. He also kept asking how his story fitted in with Alan Godfrey’s and took some persuading that - other than location - there was no obvious direct connection at all.
We asked him if he reported the problem with the truck headlights to his mill on return next day - as in these going out during the sighting. He told us, no, because he was sure the UFO had done it and so it would now be fine.
We further quizzed on whether he had to refuel earlier than expected - as you might think would be the case if he had been idling his engine for two hours somewhere. He told us it normally did 16 miles to the gallon but nothing odd was noticed and admitted he had never even considered this point up to us asking about it.
He also had never tried to make capital out of his story and, to our knowledge, made no effort to sell it or talk publicly once he had got it off his chest with us.
At no stage in the letters he sent to the media does he imply that he was ‘abducted’ and the only hint to a time lapse comes with him saying he was ‘frozen’ - which seems part of the Oz Factor experience he underwent that only emerged from further questioning and was not elaborated upon in his letters so would likely be interpreted differently.
Indeed you can imagine the Sunday Mirror would not have ignored his letter had they thought he might have been 'abducted'.
The truck was a Ford Custom 10 ton with an ‘S’ suffix registration dating from 1977. So 2 years old at time of incident. It was sold with the mill. It did not experience any major trouble before that date - though it was only a matter of months.
We further tried to see if it was possible that Bill had hit his head during the confrontation and so rendered himself unconscious to account for the missing period. We found no reason to think this likely as he had no head injuries or bruises afterwards.
The time of sunrise that day in Todmorden was 08.19 and indicates the gap unaccounted for after 06.15 - his last memory - is probably at least 90 minutes given the dull overcast weather. And more likely to be nearer 120 minutes given the time he arrived at Hollingworth.
We ascertained that he was NOT wearing a seat belt, but travelling so slowly that it seems unlikely he knocked himself out when pulling up by the lay by. Other than the dizzy sick feeling that might support some trauma from a bump that is speculative only.
We concluded that it was more likely he had ‘episodes’ of blackout due to some reason - the one involving the M 62 car crash being another example.
I have written several columns in Fortean Times over the past decade about my own blackout experiences under VVS - Vaso vagal syncope - which is a sudden drop in blood pressure often caused in the small percentage of society who are susceptible by the presence of some kind of sudden shock or stress. It is basically an extreme faint.
On one occasion it happened when I was asleep triggered by a scary dream. I felt a sense of dread then experienced a disconnect in time and space and 'came to' in another place - on the floor as it turned out. I crawled to the bathroom and was sick. Then passed out again.
Perhaps there is a seed of an explanation why in some UFO close encounters ‘time lapses’ occur. We automatically think these are ‘induced’ by the UFO - perhaps aliens taking control.
But if the pattern of witnesses to such cases having previous mini episodes in non UFO context is true could it just be the reaction to the scary UFO encounter that triggers a latent predisposition to blackouts?
So the sighting happens, the time lapse happens, but they have two totally different cases and are linked only by assumption (and perhaps artificial means such as hypnotic regression) afterwards.
Local witnesses:
Only two houses are in the vicinity of the lay-by and Peter Hough and I visited both to talk to the occupants.
The farm across the railway line from where the jeep had ‘moved’ was one. We were unable to speak to the owners, as they seemed reluctant to talk on the subject, but we did discover from other locals that the farmer had spoken of ‘seeing a UFO coming over the hills a few years ago’. Which was the only information they were willing to share.
The other building is a farm cottage on the roadside just beyond the layby close to where Bill says his truck stopped. A small waterfall trickles down beside it.
We were invited in to chat to the family who live there. This was after we convinced them we were not from the spoof TV show ‘Game for a laugh’ which at first the young couple seemed sure we had to be. Given our story that is hardly surprising but a first for one of my investigations!
Unfortunately, they had bought the cottage after Bill’s sighting and were then renovating the property. They did admit that they experienced ‘considerable’ trouble with electric power with lights going on and off on several occasions with these disappearing and then returning to life on their own.
They had been sufficiently concerned to get the power company out to investigate who said there must be a fault and replaced components - but the problem had recurred twice since it had been supposedly fixed.
These events were not tied in to severe weather during the winter but occurred at all time throughout the year even in fine conditions.
Explanations:
The working theory that Peter and I developed in the aftermath of this investigation was that Bill had chanced upon a council works machine in the lay by. Perhaps involved in some overnight winter road gritting or even tar laying. The basic shape of the object and other factors and its stoppage in a lay by refuge all made sense.
We could find no evidence via the local council that this was happening but they did not keep such specific records that far back by the time we talked.
Old fashioned machinery did have a shape not unlike the tortoiseshell description and the downward pointing arc lights could be consistent with a need to illuminate the road surface they were working on. So we certainly felt this was a possible trigger, though Bill was not convinced by the theory.
Close questioning of Bill revealed that he could not actually say for sure that the man bending down (as if inspecting the floor possibly?) was a policeman. This conclusion was made from the fact he was wearing a cap and some type of uniform. As a council worker might also have done perhaps.
The other individual was said to be silver/grey enhancing the space man imagery but if hot materials were inside of the machinery then an asbestos like fire suit might even have been necessary.
Perhaps a reader of this magazine will have had direct experience of this kind of road work and might comment on the possible likelihood of such a theory.
I did talk to someone at Burnley council works to talk this over. They noted that they did sometimes work on highways overnight to avoid closures during the day but he had no recall of that here and given the darkness of the location he would have expected the presence of some other source of strong illumination to guard against accidents from passing traffic.
Though being in the lay by they might not have had need of this at that point.
So in the end we had to leave this as an unproven possibility to bear in mind. But one for which we only have a small expectation might be the solution.
Other sightings:
There have been several other interesting UFO cases in close proximity to this spot on Heald Moor. This is an area I know well because my Rossendale ancestors lived in and around the small communities of Water and Weir, on the moors due south of Heald Moor for hundreds of years.
As a child I often walked across those hills with my grandfather from Stacksteads telling me tales handed down through the generations before returning to civilization after a few miles descending into Waterfoot where he had grown up.
It helped develop interest in UFOs as on those hikes in the 50s and 60s he told me of the ‘things up in the sky’ that people ‘had long seen around these parts’. Sadly when up there with him I only ever got to see spectacular views of planets such as Venus in the cold, clear Pennine air.
I myself saw a light over a small lake during a 1982 skywatch at Weir, but it was an optical illusion caused by a star’s light bent by the atmosphere.
Other events are much more interesting.
On 24 September 1982 a relative of mine at Stacksteads saw two white lights side by side seeming to move across one of the moorland tracks. He assumed these were a car headlamp and moved aside. But the lights then climbed in an arc UP into the sky and disappeared towards a dark mass only dimly visible in the sky overhead.
Another case came my way some time later after I had appeared on Woman’s Hour, the long running BBC radio magazine programme.
It came from a family who on 10 December 1982 were driving over the moorland road from Burnley to Bacup that Bill would have normally taken on the day of his encounter had he not needed to go via Todmorden that day.
They were in the vicinity of Weir village crossing Deerplay Moor passing the spot where I saw the star anomaly when a strange white glow appeared coming at them from the south. It was so strange they stopped the car on the edge of the village and got out to watch as it approached.
The object moved extremely slowly and they did something interesting during the 8 minutes that it took to fly low over their heads in total silence heading north towards Heald Moor where Bill had his experience.
In fact the lay by where Bill saw the object is as the crow flies less than a mile north east from where they were.
They placed a comb on the roof of the vehicle and used it to gauge the reality of what looked like a ‘wobbling’ motion of the UFO. The comb demonstrated via the object's movement through the individual teeth that it was indeed swinging from side to side in a kind of ‘falling leaf’ motion.
When directly overhead they estimated it was 500 feet above them and could be seen to have a rugby ball shape with red strip light glows at each end and two arcs of white material encasing the ball.
As it moved away from them in an interesting parallel to the report by my relative at Stacksteads (2 miles south west of Weir) two white lights appeared side by side from the south and climbed over their heads and swooped above and beyond the strange object as it headed north.
On 4 February 1988 a scientist who worked in a laboratory was driving on the Bacup to Todmorden road late at night at Sharneyford village - under two miles south east of Weir.
A strange object appeared hovering over the moors. It was oval and had swirling multicoloured patches of fiery liquid inside wriggling like worms. This is a common description of plasma energy which she herself recognised. In fact we speculated about its possible cause as the rare natural phenomenon - ball lightning.
Again in February 1995 an egg shape was seen hovering over the wind farm at Coal Clough which is just behind the farm where the jeep slipped off towards the railway track in Bill’s encounter.
Today a spectacular art installation - the Singing Ringing Tree - sits on the moors south of Cliviger, close to the road towards Weir and with a UFO like appearance of assembled hollow metal tubes that eerily channel the wind in perfect harmony with the alien feel of events that have been reported locally.
Another sculpture, the halo, sits on the moors near Haslingden on the far side of the Rossendale Valley. At night in blue light it closely resembles a landed disk shaped UFO sitting on three legs.
These two artworks installed in the past decade or so will guarantee the UFO history of the region is not soon forgotten.

195
JUNE 2018
JUNE 2018

CONTENTS:
HOAX - THE BIGGEST EXPERIMENT IN UFO HISTORY?
What was behind the UMMO contacts?
EDITOR: Jenny Randles 10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
E mail: nufonnews @ gmail.com
HOAX - THE BIGGEST EXPERIMENT IN UFO HISTORY?
What was behind the UMMO contacts?
EDITOR: Jenny Randles 10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
E mail: nufonnews @ gmail.com
#
THE SHADOWLANDS OF UFOLOGY
PART ONE: The greatest hoax of all time?
I first got interested in UFOs whilst at school in the 1960s.
It was the height of the space race and stories about strange sightings were in the press every day. Most of them I knew were nonsense.
I was taking science subjects to A Level and set on University, where I was accepted in 1970 to study astrophysics at Edinburgh.
But life got in the way in bewildering fashion and I never fulfilled that dream of investigating the mysteries of space using the scientific method.
In those days my medical background did not involve going on Twitter and telling the world as today. It was about hospital investigation and life on hold until various specialists decided what to do.
However, I did take astronomy, physics and geology classes at college as this all progressed and I was led down ever stranger pathways.
So I was increasingly walking a tightrope between UFOs and destiny that pulled me in different directions.
Those early forays into UFOs came via joining the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) and subscribing to FSR - Flying Saucer Review magazine - then edited by Charles Bowen and full of articles by scientists such as Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallee and Claude Poher. It was an unusual kind of UFO journal for that era.
It was exciting to see that UFO research could be done objectively - seeking answers, presuming nothing and just wanting to learn the truth.
But at the same time I was being guided in ways that made it hard to have public association with anyone for whom being taken seriously was already fraught with difficulty.
Because, my life might become a story one day and might cause repercussions for the struggling credibility image of anyone taking ‘flying saucers’ seriously.
Happily BUFORA were forward thinking when told before asking me to become an officer.
By then I was taking all sorts of jobs just to pay my way, even briefly as a fingerprint detective in days when there were no computers and you had to use eyesight to compare hastily taken smudgy prints that might resolve a crime.
This was the same time period that 30 years later the hit BBC TV ‘historical’ drama - ‘Life on Mars’ -was set - based in the same Manchester police area where I worked. This was like a documentary when I saw that show! The sexist banter that dominated the TV drama was real. Hence my not lasting very long round there in 1972!
At 20 I became part of the local UFO scene, joining the Manchester UFO Research Association (MUFORA), a small team of invite only members run by amateur astronomer Peter Warrington. We met in the boardroom at Granada TV.
Both MUFORA and BUFORA accommodated my fast changing world in and out of hospital with remarkable ease for which I have always been grateful. Though there were exceptions who struggled with concepts then far ahead of time.
This rather ambling introduction might seem curious and irrelevant for the story I am about to tell over the next two issues, but just bear it in mind as hopefully you will come to see why it matters.
In short I may have been ‘targeted’ because of this situation.
Even by the early 70s there had been some hints of games being played with UFO researchers in what seems like a gigantic and well-constructed hoax.
This first part of the story in Northern UFO News will lead next month into how and why anyone would want to ‘interfere’ with UFOlogy in the UK.
But this was by no means the first such strange hint of something odd in the background - because as far back as the 1950s there had been hoax saucer crashes like the one on Silpho Moor in Yorkshire (see NUN 192).
There, you will recall, considerable money was invested in creating a believable ‘crashed object’ and a message from its ‘alien’ occupants, complete with a language that was deciphered by linguists and a story of their home planet culture.
So it seems it has long been tempting for some people to use UFOs as a kind of role play fantasy game with obscure motivation.
The question we will have to consider over these next two issues is why would anyone do that?
Of course, there may be even more sinister motives sometimes afoot - and that is certainly where the story that follows seems to take us as it slowly unfolds.
In part one here I look at a curious prelude to the British drama that I will describe in the next issue. Thy might seem quite different but as you will see the parallels are strong enough to ponder what they mean.
OUT OF URANUS…..
The UMMO affair is an extraordinary case. It is little known in English speaking countries such as the US and the UK because most activity focused on Spain and France and so tended to be published in those two languages rather than English.
Though there was a third language involved too - that of Wolf 424, the star 14 light years away from which the aliens allegedly arrived to take part in this bizarre interaction with UFO researchers.
The creation of an entire consistent language for the ‘alien’ observers went some way to persuade UFO researchers during the 1960s that the UMMO saga was for real.
It was analyzed by linguistic experts and found to be a remarkable example of a language using only 18 symbols that created a coherent set of words that could be deciphered consistently without a dictionary.
This was a level up in sophistication from the Silpho Moor basic symbol code alien language.
Indeed 400 UMMO words, such as Oemmoyuagaa - for earth residents, Waam for cosmos and Woa for God - were submitted to the University of Seville and they were unable to decide if they came from a real obscure language from somewhere on Earth (or another planet!) or cleverly made up.
The UMMO aliens fitted the pattern of 1950s contactee stories, too - tall, blond human like and friendly whilst displaying spiritual interests.
They allegedly stayed on Earth for 30 years or so interacting without being noticed. This must have been an off time for the world’s defence agencies who are allegedly so good at locking up little green men.
There was a remarkable degree of attention to detail in this affair.
The story started in a suburb of Madrid, with a landing case and grew to embrace extensive physical evidence that even surpassed the detail of the Silpho Moor crash.
A man called Jose Jordan Pena claimed that on 6 February 1966 he saw a disk like UFO over a field that had a curious symbol underneath. Once described it was clear, in fact, that this was not unlike the astrological glyph for the planet Uranus.
Contact began with letters and photographs sent unsolicited to several people in Spain claiming to be from occupants of the craft seen. Some photographs showed the underside of the UFO with the huge symbol on there as reported above.
(See the photo on the cover above).
Typescripts were eventually submitted that had been ‘dictated’ by the UMMO folk and sent to people telling all about how they discovered Earth.
Being a spiritual and very advanced race they chose not to interfere in life here but to observe what was ‘for them’ our diverse peoples and cultures.
They had first landed in France in the 1950s and then Spain in 1966 and informed their confidants of a further landing due to occur on in Summer 1967 at San Jose de Valderas, another Madrid district.
UMMOING AND AAHING
One of those who got these messages soon contacted UFO author Antonio Ribera, from Barcelona, who went on to write in Spanish about the whole affair.
Ribera met the recipient of this UMMO material in a café and discovered that various messages in typescript and some phone calls had been made to this group of about 20 people, mostly in Madrid, but some located elsewhere in Spain, all somehow selected for contact by UMMO.
One of the recipients was an engineer who got offered technical plans. All the submitted typescripts had an identifying mark on the material that was the same Uranus symbol seen on the base of the UFOs over Madrid.
At that time (up to 1975) Spain was still a fascist dictatorship under Franco and the people getting the messages were liberal voices, such as a free thinking playwright and a woman who worked at the US embassy.
File this thought away as it might be rather important when we get deeper into this two part story.
Before long Ribera also started getting these unsolicited letters from the UMMO aliens as did his colleague Rafaeal Farriols. The two would later write, again in Spanish, the story in a book that translates into English as ‘The Perfect Case’.
One reason it might have looked like that unlikely description was how the gradually evolving episode led to several of the UMMO recipients proving to have had letters in advance of the 1967 ‘landing’ at San Jose de Valderas saying it was happening.
These letters gave the date and coordinates of where the UMMO craft was going to appear! 40 people later signed declarations that they were told this on the day before.
CONTACT WITH UMMO
A man named Enrique Villagrasa described in detail to the two researchers one of the conversations with one of the undercover aliens that lasted 2 hours from midnight on 28 November 1966.
The caller claimed to be living on Earth and spoke with a foreign accent (in Spanish) and answered many questions on history and science.
From the account of the mode of speech looking back from a more modern era the method of talking seems almost to have been like it might have come from a computer - then, of course, not in very common usage and certainly not familiar to most people. Indeed Ribera described it at the time as speaking like an ‘electronic brain’.
Another similar account came from a police officer who described his phone chat with a further ‘being’ from UMMO.
But this was always a one way street. There was no way to initiate contact with the UMMO people. They had to contact you.
Next month, when we move onto the British equivalent of this bizarre affair you will see clear parallels with a lot of what was involved with UMMO.
As time went by (into the early 1970s) many calls and documents were received by the small group of chosen communicants. This added up to a vast array of information about the culture of the planet around star Wolf 424.
Some things were bizarre science - such as a thesis on how mutation of life forms occur around the universe on scales so vast that human minds cannot properly understand the principles.
There was also mystical stuff about a chain of atoms in one part of the brain that is the basis of the ‘soul’ but is beyond our science to comprehend.
Also a discussion of what they called Ibozoo Uu which is basically supposed to be the astrophysics of the future (or the current level of UMMO inhabitants in that perspective). This makes our present concept of space/time seem simplistic in the way quantum physics might baffle the thinking of someone from Earth 3000 years ago where atomic theory was at best a radical hypothesis.
In essence this UMMO science is an as yet undetected sub atomic particle at the heart of all things which orientates in different dimensional axes to create all kinds of radiation, energy and matter. It is the root of their magical technology.
There was much of this kind of chatter - which must either be future knowledge or utter made up gibberish depending on your tolerance and always lightly explained because it was regarded as ‘beyond our ken’. Conveniently as you might think.
Nonetheless the UMMO people claimed that their technology is based on manipulating the Ibozoo Uu and as a result ‘switching dimensions’ and travelling in what sounds like Star Trek style. It takes them 8 months by this method of ‘folding space’ to travel the 14 light years to Earth.
More and more bizarre stories followed, such as a university medical professor who claimed he was called up by an UMMO doctor. The alien declined his invite to come over for tea! However, he did ‘lend’ the doctor a small black box which had smooth sides which he was able to keep for a day.
He claims that when speaking in the vowel dominated word language of UMMO in a sequence as instructed the box became transparent and revealed an enlarged screen showing a ‘living’ image of a neuron (brain cell) in action.
Allegedly he took photos but I have not been able to find them anywhere curiously.
The UMMO people also offered a lot of information about their philosophy and science over the years that was along similar lines. How much you regard this as carefully constructed gobbledegook is another matter.
LIFE ON UMMO
Here is a sample:
"For us, who view the warp and woof of the Cosmos as a harmonious 'whole' which cannot be split up into disciplines or science without gravely distorting the truth, this separation into such compartments as Cosmo-philosophical, Religious-Moral, and Physical is of course artificial and wrong. The links between the various different aspects of the Universe are so intimate that the mental projection of them into separate watertight compartments easily alienate the student.
Profound or profoundly daft - you be judge!
Here is how another UMMO message describes the first contact with humanity as a kind of audio transcript.
"I am DEI 98, son of DEI 97. I shall explain how our world of UMMO came into contact with a sister world called by its inhabitants Earth - a planet which we call Oyagaa.….. our technicians recorded a message from cosmic space which was not natural. We know it was not a part of the natural noise of the Galaxy. We received it in a frequency you call the 21 cm band, that of natural hydrogen. It was a radio-electric message in code and its origin was undoubtedly intelligent.
"Our technicians went to work and soon located the source of the emissions. It was your planet, Earth, 'a cold star of this quadrant for reasons which we will not now explain.
With emotion we understood this to be a message of great importance. It was intelligent; a succession of dots and dashes that, as we later came to understand, corresponded to the emissions in your hertzian waves that in Earth-year 1938 was launched into space (from Norway, JR) …..
A train of waves penetrated the ether of space and was lost. Fourteen years later arrived at UMMO and was recorded….
'We then decided to organize our first inayaisuu (expedition) to the mysterious planet…
Nine months after departing UMMO was produced the Oawooleaida, (or materialization) instantaneously of our ship in a pre-selected place above your Earth.
Again this comes across as pop science fiction more than real science fact from another solar system and alarm bells should have started ringing for those involved by this point.
However, when you are in the grip of a cosmic saga like this and living as part of it then it is deceptively difficult to see sense from nonsense.
There is a little voice in the back of your head telling you that this just could be the greatest event in human history and you are now a part of it.
That is far more satisfying to any person than thinking that they are being taken for a ride.
This is a perennial problem of UFO research. The stranger a case, the more the saga expands, the less likely those of us ensnared directly within it are to stop and think rationally and say…..hang on a minute!
LANDING FROM PLANET UMMO
Of course, the temptation is to want to hear more. So this is the account from Antony Ribera of (supposedly) that ‘first contact’ as told from the alien perspective.
….the ship from UMMO materializes in a ball of yellow-orange light with traces of a greenish luminous corona, and remains suspended a few meters above the ground as a tripod landing gear is extended for landing and it slowly settles onto the surface.
In a few seconds, as the luminosity fades, a door opens in the side and the first Ummites jump to the ground dressed in dark formfitting suits. They are tall and light....Altogether there are two women and six men in this landing party. They begin to inspect their surroundings. They are at the foot of the Cheval Blanc peak (in the French Alps).
The leader of the mission is OEOE 95, son of OEOE 91.
A telepathic dialogue then takes place:
Woman - Our leader OEOE 95 has something to say.
Oeoe 95 - Our telemetric apparatus is not mistaken. This planet could be a twin of UMMO, similar mass, similar diameter, composition, though the biological explosion here seems more important…..
He advances several paces and examines in turn and recognizes the features of some plants.
OEOE 95 - Bring the atomic disintegrators from the ship and we will excavate a provisional shelter.
They come across some cows in a meadow. OEOE 95 and his companions contemplate the ruminants, animals completely unknown to them. Soon from beyond a rock comes an Earth boy about 11 years old, the shepherd who has been tending the herd of cows. Surprised, he looks at the strange Ummites, making a visor with his hands to see better in the bright sunlight…..They think this is an Earth greeting.
You surely get the drift by now. Only if you are ensnared within the grip of this ongoing drama as it unfolds around you over a period of years are you likely to emerge from the above (and it really goes on and on….) thinking you have just read a first-hand account of the biggest event in the history of mankind and not the rejected script from an episode of ‘Lost in Space’.
But the fascination with wanting to unravel a mystery such as this will always win out. It is the nature of being a curious UFO investigator, or, indeed a human being.
EVIDENCE OF UMMO
However, then comes another twist, which peppered the decades of investigation of the UMMO affair.
The UMMO landing expedition in France in 1950 had allegedly taken some items from a building nearby during that mission, including soap and domestic items like lightbulbs - the soap supposedly being mistaken for Earth food.
24 years after ‘the landing’ French UFO researcher Claude Poher contacted the local Gendarmes in the small Alpen area and found that there had been an unsolved robbery at the building in question at that time and the items listed were as allegedly taken for analysis according to the UMMO folk by then in Spain.
These objects were amongst the odd assortment of things that UMMO said they had procured all those years before and that were really missing from that theft.
This makes you almost wonder if this intricate connection is proof of the reality of UMMO.
Or perhaps just the ingenuity of a hoaxer linking the subsequently invented story of a ‘landing’ to a minor crime they fished out of archives lost to history.
And then you discover that the owners of the missing items in the 1970s when the police were contacted had ‘moved on’ from this poor part of southern France and were all living in luxury near the posh resort of Cannes - which UMMO explained was because they had ‘made up’ for the losses incurred on those humans in that first contact mission by helping them become ‘upwardly mobile’!
This reminds me of the Rendlesham Forest case where we spent some time seeking a farmer who we had been told had his cattle disturbed during the USAF encounter with UFOs in December 1980.
He had reported they had fled into the road scared by the ‘thing’ in the sky and got injured by a passing vehicle - so blamed the matter on the air force. He basically told them it was either an alien craft, which they were there to protect us from, or one of their secret planes that did the scaring.
Either way he wanted compensation for the harm done!
It was quite an effort to trace the man and when we did, he, too, was relocated some distance away in more pleasant surroundings. He claimed he had received ‘compensation’ and ‘retired’ as a result, but would not tell us how much money the USAF paid - only - ‘whatever it was it was not enough!’
The San Jose de Valderas landing in 1967 later took this question of ‘evidence’ to a whole new level.
An event really ‘happened’ - in the sense that several witnesses on the picnic ground that Summer day claimed to watch the object land in a field. It left indent marks, they said, and some strange plastic like tubes were found nearby of unidentified origin.
The day afterwards one of the witnesses sent a photo taken of the UFO to the media showing the object before it landed, revealing the familiar Uranus symbol underneath. Later a second photo came to light.
These events preceded the arrival of the people claiming to be contacted by UMMO who said they were forewarned of this landing.
The material found at the landing site on analysis also proved to be an advanced and then rare type of plastic - polyvinyl fluoride - that was unusual but not from a star many light years away.
It was made on Earth, as far as could be told, but easily mistaken for something out of this world to the uninitiated.
UMMO AND OUT
So what actually happened in this UMMO affair?
There are people who still think it might have been a real alien contact with Earth.
Others note the range of witnesses contacted at a time when liberal movements in Spain were fighting back to end political oppression.
Was it a bizarre publicity stunt to aid this return to democracy perhaps?
Next month the political implications will resurface when we shift focus to events in the UK.
However, almost thirty years after the UMMO affair became a legend in European UFO research one of the first people involved in the case - psychiatrist Jose Jordan Pena - claimed in a skeptics journal (La Alternativa Racional) - that he had created the entire saga as a work of fiction.
It was a sort of ‘living experiment’.
His goal was to prove that paranoia was widespread in modern Spanish society and anything could be accepted if it was believed by enough people and would spread by contagion.
There were clues in the ‘messages’ given and sent to the chosen liberal elite that he targeted - such as the UMMO people telling of struggles against a tyrant called NA 456 who exploited her people by putting scientific progress over individual lives.
She died in mystery circumstances to be replaced by the megalomaniac young daughter WIE 1 (ironically in English this child tyrant reads as wee one making it even more ironic!) This new leader went on to assassinate four million UMMO citizens.
A way in real life Spain to make a point without being considered a political enemy, you might wonder?
Meanwhile 'back in the land of the UMMO' a period of terrible oppression followed with libraries burned and such like until the arrival of a very Christ-like figure Ummowoa who was sentenced to torture and death but mysteriously vanished at that point and created a religion.
It is hard not to equate this kind of story (hardly your usual alien contact fare) with the politics of Spain in the 60s and 70s and the use of liberal voices to inspire freedom thinking at the time. The claimed mind game experiment seems well moulded round that rather more credibly than a real extraterrestrial encounter with suspiciously Earth like political problems.
If true this reflects an interesting side to the ‘real’ UFO mystery and how social forces such as these really are part of the overall equation.
But do we accept this confession at face value, as might seem sensible?
Some researchers are reluctant to do so arguing that the whole UMMO affair is so well planned and huge in scope that it seems beyond the capabilities of one person to have engineered consistently over years and in such sophisticated detail.
For instance the hoaxer said that he sourced the plastic from the US space industry - then the only place this was available and so guaranteed to baffle locals in Madrid in 1967. But he put them into 99% pure nickel tubes equally hard to come by then.
The alien culture created in the many messages was complex and more cohesive. Occasionally it touched on things at the forefront of knowledge that inspired scientists interested in the story.
Consider the UMMO concept of Waam Waam, basically translating as plural cosmos, in English - which is a form of multiverse concept that is today better thought of by physicists than it was 50 years ago.
Of course, it is not really very likely that aliens from UMMO did briefly dally just with a few folk from France and Spain. And the photos of the Madrid ‘spaceship’ are themselves long established as hoaxed with computer analysis study of them appearing to show string holding models up otherwise masked by the background sky.
If that cornerstone of the case crumbles so readily then the whole UMMO affair that followed has to be equally suspect.
But even as a hoax it is remarkable in its attention to detail and its apparent motivation as some kind of long term strategy using UFOs to follow some deeper psychological necessity.
Moreover its effects outlived the original creation. Pena himself said that by the latter years things were appearing that were tied into the UMMO universe that he did not himself invent. Someone else did! It had adopted a kind of quasi reality that the hoaxer no longer has the ability to control.
In a way it is like when someone creates a ‘universe’, such as Game of Thrones. The original novels tell the author’s conception but it becomes so huge as a cultural effect that this becomes ever more diluted.
The vastly successful TV series has taken it in its own direction diverging from the novels. Now that this story is nearing its end (the final series is being filmed for on screen in 2019) others are being brought in who are fans of the story to create ‘new worlds’ tied into Westeros.
Indeed the pilot just commissioned for the first spin off episode is to be created and the series run by Jane Goldman, who I mentioned in NUN last month when referring to the X Files conference in Manchester where we both lectured.
Jane, who is married to Jonathon Ross, who I know from talking to him is interested in UFOS, has also written about the subject herself.
This is just coincidence of course, but it shows how the real and imaginary worlds of UFOs can mesh in ways that impact hugely on modern culture.
Aside from these authorized additions to the world of Game of Thrones there are many examples of ‘fan fiction’ where those who love the stories have adopted the universe created and penned their own stories that are set within the framework originally created but having nothing directly to do with it.
This happens a lot in this kind of 'alien' fiction - almost every major TV science fiction series from Star Trek to Doctor Who - has a vast array of authorized and unauthorized story telling loosely connected.
Someone creates a world and everybody adopts it as sufficiently 'real' they have a stake in letting it develop.
So it should not be a great surprise to see this occurring in a real world social experiment of a space adventure if that is indeed what this is.
Or, perhaps, on the scale of the collective consciousness of mankind where instead of UMMO or Game of Thrones there is a mass creative writing project penning without our realising it the latest episode of 'Game of Saucers'.
But there is one further possibility about UMMO that caught the attention of one of the most brilliant minds in UFO research, Jacques Vallee.
He has suggested that UMMO might be a larger creation with more sinister overtones than a psychologists pet experiment.
Moreover he sees the parallels that I do with the British equivalent long term saga - the story of APEN.
Vallee speculates that the ‘experiment’ was real and some of the political manipulation, too. But that the originators of the experiment were one, or several intelligence agencies playing a game of chess with the public for rather darker reasons.
This side of the story will come more to the fore next month when the story crosses the English Channel and arrives in British UFOlogy.
The saga began and developed over a not dissimilar time scale And another group of strange people appeared claiming to be from a mysterious four letter word place who had emerged from the shadows and decided to make contact.
APEN had arrived.
To be continued next issue....

194
MAY 2018
CONTENTS: WHY DID THE MOD STOP COLLECTING UFO REPORTS?
Special Investigation
The MOD as UAP and the Yorkshire Moors Encounter, 1972
Sing a song of saucers - music of the spheres
Picture above:- How DI 55 revealed their role in UFO investigation
EDITOR: JENNY RANDLES 10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
E:MAIL nufon@btinternet.com
JR Comments…..
Why were the MOD interested in UFOs?
For a long time we have speculated about why the Ministry of Defence bothered to investigate UFOs for so long, until officially closing the doors 9 years ago.
This was particularly perplexing in that they had insisted that nothing strange or probative had ever been uncovered to suggest that UFOs possessed defence implications, let alone that any were alien in origin as per popular speculation.
The US Air Force dropped their 22 year study half a century ago in 1969 when Project Blue Book shut up shop. So why did Whitehall carry on collating UFO sightings from airports and police officers and the public for another four decades?
Over the past 25 years a huge stream of ‘files’ has been released onto the PRO (public record office) in Kew. At first this was every January after the expiration of the 30 year rule protecting documents such as these from being made public.
That only really started with files dating from the mid-60s as earlier ones were ‘routinely destroyed’ as being of no presumed public interest!
A few earlier reports escaped the cull via copies retained in other records that were not casually discarded so got released if found. This was quite exciting in the period when regular batches of fresh cases were made accessible each New Year.
I was an early visitor to see the national archives in Kew in those days and in the mid-90s made several visits looking at the files from the 1960s as they appeared. I also was asked to be filmed doing this at Kew and then follow up on some of the cases on behalf of the BBC for a TV documentary that I wrote and presented for them in April 1996.
This looked at two specific cases involving early releases - the Burgh Marsh ‘Cumberland Spaceman’ photo taken on 24 May 1964 by local fireman Jim Templeton which had some documentation because of a coincidental link with footage of a ‘UFO’ captured during launch of a Blue Streak rocket from Woomera in Australia a few days later.
In the mid-60s these former missiles had become a European space programme booster rocket assembled at RAF Spadeadam near Burgh Marsh where the Cumberland ‘spaceman’ photo was taken shortly before testing of another rocket in the Australian outback.
The connection was a coincidence and neither chance event is a real UFO and definitely not of alien origin. The Templeton photo is either a fluke that resembles a spaceman or a hoax played on the witness afterwards by a colleague and the Woomera launch footage is just a lens flare caused by the strong Aussie sun.
However, you can see why the fluke connection of the two might have led to some interest in official quarters.
I was able to go to meet the Templeton family in Carlisle and record their account as to how they launched a police investigation into the photograph because Jim was a photographer for the force at fire crime scenes.
The long married couple told me of how they were then visited by two strange acting men who used numbers not names for one another and claimed to be from the MOD then following up this encounter!
These men behaved oddly and were asking puzzling questions about the atmospheric conditions and the reactions of local cattle on the marsh.
No MoD records reveal evidence that anyone did visit the Templeton’s from data released onto Kew. But the Templetons both saw these strangers and I am certain that they were real - though the origin of who they were remains more of a puzzle.
Ex MOD UFO desk officer turned UFO writer, Nick Pope, told me on my BBC documentary that he thought the two men might be rogue UFO buffs ‘play acting’ as men from the ministry to get the witnesses to open up.
Perhaps - but we know for sure that REAL men from the ministry did visit PC Colin Perks in Wilmslow less than two years later in February 1966 as we saw in the full story reported (below) in Northern UFO News 192.
And that Alan Godfrey also had such a visit from someone who was certainly not a rogue UFO investigator (as he had the MOD case file with him on that visit in 1982 as described by Alan in his 2017 book - Who or what were they?) He gained access to senior staff at a police station with the credentials shown so is not likely to be a brazen UFO investigator impersonating someone else.
So it remains very possible the Ministry or some other agency sent people to see the Templetons given the obvious potential defence links between their story and the British space programme. That there were none in the end matters little.
Even though the two events had nothing to do with UFOs as it transpired the possible link would have been sufficient reason to engage an investigation. Though, the eccentricity of the two men on the day is very hard to square with a ministerial origin and might better fit Nick Pope’s rogue UFOlogists.
No files exist to reveal any conclusions on this case - just as there is no file at all about Alan Godfrey’s case at the archives - including the report which we know WAS sent by the West Yorkshire police but has not been released.
The other case I covered on that BBC documentary (which can be viewed on You Tube as Britain’s Secret UFO Files) was a radar/visual encounter at Lakenheath in East Anglia that occurred on 13/14 August 1956.
As it predated the retention of MOD files there is no actual investigation on that case released onto the National Archives at Kew.
But there are 1950s cases and documents that survived and some notes about radar visual encounters from the period when it happened - making its omission from that list even stranger.
We only know of its existence because it involved joint bases in East Anglia and the US Air Force reports about it did emerge in the States. They were published in the late 60s and early 70s and a British Squadron Leader then came forward to affirm his role in the story coordinating intercepts on the night.
However, I tracked down and interviewed two of the RAF aircrew flying jets that came into contact with something over East Anglia on that night. There were sightings around both Lakenheath and Bentwaters airbases and we went to Lakenheath US Air Force Base and filmed the crew revealing their log books that recorded the event for the first time in 40 years. Then let them describe the encounters with an object on that strange night back in 1956.
Most interestingly, whilst what these men encountered definitely was NOT caused by it, as they were too far distant, one of the things seen that night further south was blamed on a rather familiar object by UFO skeptics. The Orford Ness lighthouse - so famous for its later association with the Rendlesham Forest saga in 1980.
It here got the blame first round for this 1956 case. However, no direct evidence was found. Even so it has to be the only lighthouse in UFO history blamed TWICE for two of the most significant cases on record.
After these early files had created puzzles and many questions of which the above are just a fraction, Dr David Clarke was invited by the PRO to act as project coordinator and help release all the more recent UFO files onto the public record.
This was necessary after the turn of the Millennium - following the Freedom of Information laws requiring open data access.
Dr Clarke was well suited for this role as he was a Fortean researcher interested in historical oddities, had been a journalist covering UFO cases for some years and teaches as an academic at Sheffield Hallam University.
David was noted for his skeptical approach to UFOs and 35 years ago when he was still a teenager I actually published one of his first case investigations in this very magazine.
It was an object seen by a nurse from a Yorkshire hospital ward and David went above and beyond to look for an answer - mapping traffic patterns in the middle of the night outside the hospital and visiting the ward at the same unearthly hour as the event to get the view that the witness had days earlier.
From this expert investigation I knew quickly that David was going to be a huge asset to UFO research in Britain - and so it proved.
In this incident David had speculated that an astronomical explanation seemed possible and following that clue I was able to check records and establish when writing up his report for NUN that the nurse had clearly been watching the moon.
It is surprising how often this common sight does trigger UFO reports when seen low through mist, for example.
Years later, just before he started work for the achives - in 2000 - Dave Clarke, Andy Roberts and I co-authored, The UFOs That Never Were, one of the few books to look entirely at solved UFO cases.
Whilst all three of us are proud of that work it totally bombed sales wise. We could not give the thing away - which sadly shows how little importance UFO enthusiasts - quite wrongly in my view - afford to this side of the phenomenon.
From the early 2000s large batches of older files were released by the national archives every few months, gradually publishing all data and catching up over the decades via tens of thousands of pages. David issued guides for the media on the highlights of each release as they were usually too big for journalists to plough through looking for anything interesting.
After several years this brought the data right up to the closing down of the MoD UFO project in 2009. All files are now accessible via Kew.
Indeed the last batches covering odds and ends that were initially held back for various intelligence reasons or through bureaucratic necessities have only just filtered out this year.
It was possible to freely download on line most of these MOD case file and policy documents for a time after each batch was released and I have vast collection of these mostly boring, redacted bits of data that cover assorted lights in the sky sent into the MOD from the public or via airports and police.
They were hardly ever followed up at all, let alone in any meaningful way. Most have all identifying detail removed such as witness names.
Of course, a few good cases are lurking in there but it is a bit like seeking just one cornflake on a cornflake factory production line. And investigating them is hard unless the same case was reported to the UFO community, as a few of them were, meaning the identity of the witness becomes identifiable and not unknown behind redacted ink.
Most of them are of less use than the countless thousands of sighting report forms held on the archives of dozens of UK UFO groups collated in equally haphazard fashion during the second half of the 20th century.
Interestingly, UFO groups, that once used to exist in every major town are heading towards extinction and UFO investigation of that type has ended publicly around the same point as the MOD has decided to shut up shop.
Meaning any claim from conspiracy theorists for a cover up behind the ministry ending their interest would have to account for why UFO groups seem to have run out of steam in the same manner and timescale.
So where does this leave our assessment of why the MOD persisted in chasing such apparently worthless data for so many decades?
Well, a great place to look for clues is David Clarke. He has long published a blog that in archive fashion has looked at the data he helped steer onto the public domain over the past decade and you should check it out as an informative read.
It provides a fascinating historical account of the details of this story as it emerged and has just been updated early in May 2018 with what may be the final chapter covering the last MOD file release saga.
In early May the Guardian posted a piece about this new data suggesting that the ‘end game’ David reveals was linked to DI 55 - a ‘defence intelligence’ unit long known to be connected with MOD UFO study.
Indeed the role of DI units connected to MOD UFO files was only accidentally revealed and then became intriguing. This happened when the air staff office that acted as a shop window for UFO interaction with the public sent out letters to UFO researchers in 1982/3 (including me) that mistakenly left on the distribution list showing where they sent other copies - as in these DI intelligence agencies.
The cover photo of this issue shows one of those accidental file releases naming D1 55 and other locations they forwarded UFO data onto from the Air Staff public desk.
The files only just released show the embarrassment that the significance of this ‘cock up’ caused as it was soon spotted by UFOlogists such as myself and commented upon. We recognised the significance of intelligence agencies reviewing the UFO data the MOD tended to dismiss when asked as never being of much interest.
The mistaken release of the distribution list compromised some of the MODs thinking on data about the Rendlesham Forest case which by chance was then at a key stage of being made public. It might be why the Halt memo surfaced in the USA (via the MOD) but was denied to anyone in the UK asking the Air Staff for a copy.
These newly revealed files show that for years after their role was discovered DI 55 were getting letters asking them trivial questions as UFO buffs imagined them the ‘true’ home of UFO research, even though that seems unlikely.
They were most likely just reviewing the data to assess its potential relevance to the defence of the realm - to see, for instance, whether a UFO might be an undetected intrusion by a foreign power using unknown technology - perhaps a stealth drone or experimental propulsion system.
The scientists and ex RAF personnel employed were well suited to cover these questions.
These DI units, of course, are the places from where any REAL ‘Men from the Ministry’ visited UFO witnesses such as PC Colin Perks in Wilmslow in 1966. And they did so rarely and only when there was good cause - in the Perks case probably because physical residue was reportedly found at the site where he saw an unknown object.
It will certainly be a valuable exercise to look at the range of cases where visitors from a DI unit did apparently go to see witnesses following up a sighting. There may be a pattern that illuminates which cases they regarded as worth that risk.
Other apparent examples include Alan Godfrey, where again physical traces were left and there was suspicion of a possible ‘plasma’ event.
And another case I looked into that happened in North Yorkshire in 1972 where police officers were seemingly involved in a puzzling manner. I will include details of that interesting case later in this issue as it is worth comparing with the others incidents where on the spot follow up visits seem to have happened.
The Ministry going out and meeting witnesses is a seemingly rare occurrence and collating those cases where might reveal clues about what attracted them to that case above others.
I think the possibility of an atmospheric energy or plasma seems to run through them with bright energetic glows featuring. Someone might have thought this was where the ‘real’ UFO phenomenon was going to be found.
From the newly released documents discussing how the DI agency were wrestling with the UFO mystery around the turn of the Millennium it looks like they were desperate to find a way out of the game.
They tried to argue that their brief should have nothing to do with UFOs, per se, and was about foreign earth power technology and what it could do and if it was intruding into our air space. Which seems reasonable enough.
So they were not interested in aliens - as such - just foreigners.
The outcome was the already released (though deeply redacted) Condign Report that was being penned by a DI agency source around the time David, Andy and I were releasing our solved UFO book in 2000.
But which was only released to Kew a decade later after a bit of a fight. Once you read it you can see why.
This in depth study used the term UAP instead of UFO, something UFO researchers had been doing since the early 80s for cases we have long felt were unexplained atmospheric phenomena. And also because we wanted to avoid creating the impression that by using the word UFO we implied we believed that the things being discussed might be alien spaceships.
Seemingly the MOD reached the same conclusion for much the same reasons that we did!
This led to the prospect assessed by Condign that some UFOs might be a rare plasma phenomenon of some sort (a kind of super ball lightning - a term I have used about them before) and that may or may not be useful as a power source and might put aircraft, including military aircraft, at risk.
So - far from shutting things down as irrelevant to the MoD - the unnamed author of the Condign study gave reasons why maybe the MOD should perhaps have been paying more attention all along.
Indeed the report suggested of these energy events that the MoD ‘has no idea what they are’.
This meaning UAP, not UFOs in the more exotic sense the public would assume if that word were used, of course!
It is not hard to see why that line was never released by the MoD to the media - though it is pretty much what most sensible UFO researchers have argued in our writings for years as the reason why the MOD continued to collate data.
They might not think they are spaceships from Mars but if they might be an enemy power technology or something you can harness yourself to turn into a weapon to use against an enemy then you keep collating the data and looking at what it tells you.
Though, interestingly, DI 55 did ask for no more reports to be sent to them after receipt of the Condign study!
The reasons are unclear as much of that part of the file is a sea of black ink and redacted argument.
Reading some of the author’s justifications for retaining interest in these UAP I kept thinking I could have been writing these words for the MoD within the Condign report. In fact I had written similar ones in several books and articles.
So I was smiling that some might even suspect that I had secretly authored this report as an MoD sleeper agent.
I didn’t, of course, and the author, as David Clarke’s blog explains, was someone far better qualified to discuss these matters so anyone thinking that the MOD employed a UFO investigator would be wrong.
Anyhow, whilst the Condign author believed in UAP as likely a kind of plasma and a possible source of technology that the MOD might harness for their own needs - it seems that this person struggled to persuade the Ministry of this theory just as much as I have failed over the years to convince UFO researchers that plasmas might be triggering UFO events.
Here, for instance is what I wrote in 1998 in ‘Something in the Air’ - my book about mid-air UFO sightings. This was being written at the time the Condign report was starting to be put together unbeknown to me:-
‘UFOlogists on the whole view such cases in a most inappropriate manner - as an alien invasion. Too little is done, either by them or scientists, to try to understand what may be a fascinating, perhaps even dangerous problem and certainly one that offers a potentially invaluable source of energy.
This is one reason for the so-called cover up regarding UFOs allegedly conducted by the authorities.
I believe that long ago all major nations realised that most UFO sightings are examples of mistaken identity and others stem from strange natural phenomena.
Few - if any - have the remotest likelihood of resulting from an alien invasion. Yet, any government scientist worth their salt will have advised their respective administration that these reports offer insights into some untapped energy source.
The race is on to harness this power and to become a global leader in a hot technology that everyone will want during the 21st century.
In those circumstances it would be a positive advantage if people only ever talked about UFOs in the context of aliens and little green men because this would ensure that scientists not under government control do not spend much time investigating these matters.
If you want the political edge then you must tackle these issues covertly and not share what you are discovering through the pages of New Scientist.’
This now looks almost as if I had inside knowledge of the Condign research, but it was just an educated guess based on following the MOD argument on UFOs for 25 years.
My view that a plasma was possibly the cause of the object seen by Alan Godfey stems from the above. But the theory has been scoffed at by most researchers in Ufology just as the Condign author faced similar rejection at the MOD.
Perhaps it will indeed prove to be nonsense. But at least I know how the author of the Condign report feels in trying to argue for something that builds a bridge between science and UFOs.
And we will both be proven either right or wrong!
Either way the MOD decided enough was enough and shut up shop for good in 2009.
The MOD had long been in a quandary about how to look into the subject without implying that there really might be UFOs (or UAP) traversing British skies. Condign helped provide an end game.
It was all a bit ‘don’t say anything to suggest we are really interested when we have been telling them for years that we are not’. Yet even when they ended their role exactly how and why they did so was fraught with worry over how to persuade people they were not withholding further dark secrets.
Cover ups never die in the popular imagination - so whilst I think there is no substance in this theory I also know it will probably never go away just like the idea that the Apollo Missions never went to the Moon and were all filmed in a studio has not.
David Clarke’s blog reports in depth with quotes and extracts from the new files and he will tell the full story soon. For now do read his work and see the extraordinary story unfold.
It is a fascinating insight into the machinations of the corridors of power.
https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/
THE MOORLAND UAP AND THE MEN FROM THE MINISTRY
This is one of the most fascinating cases that I have investigated involving the MOD and mystery visitors. It has hidden depths that I will not go into here, as they are not directly relevant to the Ministry side of this story, but add nuance to the case itself. Particularly in what they reveal about how witnesses can be prone to experiencing the extraordinary in many shades and forms.
UFOs are but one colour on a very rich spectrum of events that intersect throughout a lifetime.
These witnesses first reported a different story to me that I investigated along with colleague Roy Sandbach. But after looking at the ghostly events and missing time adventure of this well to do couple who live in a smart home in Cheshire it became clear that they really started with an episode on the night of 16/17 August 1972.
Sandra was a professional dancer and her husband Peter ran a construction business. She had been performing far from home on this warm Summer evening on the north east coast. Because she would not finish until midnight her husband had arranged his schedule so that he could travel over 100 miles north and drive her home.
After such an exhausting day for both of them they were heading back through Swaledale in North Yorkshire. It was about 2 am and they were on the A 61 between Thirsk and Ripon at what I estimate to be near the village of Baldersby.
This is an interesting spot, though in the darkness on an unfamiliar route they were not to know.
Just south of here is the military field at Dishforth adjacent to an RAF base called Topcliffe.
Readers of Who or What Were They? - Alan Godfrey’s book - will recognize the importance of this. Dishforth is where he did his police officer training. And Dishforth and Topcliffe airfields were both part of the 1952 UFO encounter amidst the Operation Mainbrace NATO exercise that also saw a UFO buzz a nuclear weapons equipped US aircraft carrier off the Yorkshire coast.
These events were extraordinary in their time and led to the then prime minister - Winston Churchill - ordering an investigation. That was one of the first jobs to be carried out by a young Defence Ministry aid who was working for the minister and went to Yorkshire to gather evidence. His name was Ralph Noyes.
That study led to Churchill ordering the creation of an investigation unit into UFOs that matched the one created in the US as Project Blue Book.
In the UK that study became the UFO desk that operated from Whitehall right through to 2009 when, as reported above, it was shut down.
Noyes himself would rise in rank to run the full department including that UFO desk and oversaw those who manned it. This was over two decades before Nick Pope took the job in the 1990s and Noyes later told me how on taking the role he was shown gun camera footage of strange glows being chased by RAF planes. To him they were evidence of real unknown phenomena but did not appear to be craft or alien in origin.
This footage has never been released from the archives and is officially supposed to have just got lost somewhere over the years.
Ralph Noyes was a fascinating man who first came openly into the UFO mystery after his retirement in 1983 and for several years he was very helpful to our investigation of the Rendlesham Forest case where Noyes was adamant he saw evidence of a ‘cover up’ by the MoD that he had long worked for. As doing that was a no no during his tenancy he suspected there had to be good reasons why they acted so differently over this particular event.
He and I coordinated pressure on politicians searching for answers and he was a part time UFO lecturer in his retirement. Ralph gave me an excellent interview not long before he died about MOD files.
Noyes believed that most UFOs were explainable but that a few represented a natural phenomenon - a UAP in fact, though I do not think he used that term.
He once told me that he thought it was akin to a rainbow - something so strange occurring in the atmosphere that it once would have been deified by witnesses until we had the science to understand how it happened.
UFOs were not, in his view, signs of aliens, but an energy phenomenon we might one day tame. But right now were still perceiving it in the 'deification' stage where in this case the 'god' was an alien.
He thought that the MOD were interested in understanding the power involved in this natural phenomenon and perhaps using it in some way - probably as a weapon - hence the cover up.
If this is all sounding like a familiar record, it is, but I can assure you that Noyes was NOT the author of the Condign report - though he might have influenced the person who was, just like his thinking certainly influenced my interest in UAP.
Noyes wrote one UFO book after retirement - an extraordinary novel that clearly used the Rendlesham Forest case as a platform to explain via fiction because he felt unable to do so in fact what he really thought might be happening. It is about global forces harnessing power for offensive and defensive use culled from what we otherwise call UFOs.
That novel is ‘A Secret Property’.
Returning to Sandra and Peter on that Yorkshire road there is more to tell, because just a few miles south west of where they were driving was another military complex. RAF Menwith Hill just outside Harrogate is a vast electronics communication facility with golf ball dome technology that is a hive of covert interception activity. Jointly run by the UK and US and coordinated via the NSA - the US National Security Agency - it is very interestingly in the midst of an area where glowing light UFOs have long been reported.
So, quite without realizing it, as they drove home that night, Sandra and Peter were in a hotbed of both UFO activity and military covert intelligence facilities. Somewhere that if a UFO appears it would get the attention of the Ministry of Defence.
Which seems to be what happened that night.
Driving south west they saw to the south and east of them an object that appeared to be descending into a small copse. Peter slowed right down and as they cleared the trees they could see that it had, in fact, come down in a field beyond here.
Sandra told us ‘It was a large melon shape. I had no idea UFOs were supposed to look like that. I thought they were like saucers.’
Her husband added that its colour was very vivid. ‘It was a really bright green like those florescent socks’.
From apparent distance (50 feet) the size of the object was estimated to be around 30 feet across.
My first theory here was that this might be the moon, despite the colour. But checks revealed that it had gone below the horizon several hours earlier that Wednesday.
They were travelling the A61 at that point in a convoy of 4 vehicles which were close together in the dark surroundings. They were not travelling fast because the lead vehicle was a by chance a police car!
The witnesses are certain the occupants of the other three vehicles saw the object saying ‘it was impossible to miss in the sky ahead of us as it came down’. Indeed they saw them all slow to almost a stop suggesting they did do.
But nobody appeared to get out for a closer look.
At this point the object, now apparently on the ground in the field, did something extraordinary. A door opened in its side.
‘It was a vivid blue/white,’ Peter told us. ‘In sharp contrast to the vivid green around. It was like a slow motion flashbulb as it appeared’.
Sandra was more explicit likening it to when you used to turn off an old fashioned TV screen but in reverse. ‘It appeared from nowhere like a dot and then opened up into a T shape several feet across’.
Further discussion suggested that it might be akin to an ultra violet colour as Sandra said it reminded her of a sunbed lamp’.
There was now a very strange sensation - Sandra reports. ‘I felt a compulsion to get out of the car. To walk across the field to it. Something just made me want to get out and I started to do so.’
Peter added - ‘Yes, I grabbed her. I was pulling her back in. I had to drag her away from doing this.’
Both also added that in recalling this scary part of the story they had just realized that something else odd was happening.
It will sound familiar to you given the name of this website.
‘You know,’ Sandra told us, ‘that was strange. There was just no noise. Not even trees in the wind. Nothing. No normal night sounds.’
Peter started nodding, realizing she was right and that this eerie stillness had descended as they stopped to watch the landing and as his wife had tried to get out of the car.
This state of consciousness was the Oz factor.
‘That was the weirdest part. The silence. There is always something even at night. Birds twittering. Rustling. But nothing was doing nothing that night.’ he added.
As Peter hauled her back from heading out across the field as if following the ‘pied piper’ toward the landed object Sandra smiled as she recalled what he cried out to her, thus breaking the silence.
‘Sod this for a game of soldiers!’ Peter screamed - as he put his foot down and drove off at speed.
Oddly they do not recall passing the police car directly ahead of them on the road but would have had to do.
Their next memory was of the road ahead being clear and nobody else around them and them well on their way back to Cheshire.
We asked if they got home early or late, but as Peter said pointedly - ‘When you see something like this you don’t spend time looking at clocks.’
The couple arrived home in the pre-dawn a couple of hours after the sighting and were very surprised as they hurried back toward their house.
A police car was parked outside their door waiting for them!
Two officers got out and asked the couple quizzically - ‘Have you anything to report?’
They had decided en route they were not telling anybody about what just happened, so they said no. But were asked further questions - such as where had they been? Why are you returning home in the middle of the night?
They just mumbled replies hoping the cops were merely being cautious and were eventually allowed into their house.
Sandra felt that this was just a routine patrol being suspicious of their arrival after 4 am. Peter thought not as being parked waiting at their home was odd.
The Yorkshire police car would have seen them ‘flee the scene’ of the UFO landing and might have taken their number and sent local police to trace it and wait for them to reach home.
Either way they went to bed right away and fell asleep - though Sandra woke just 3 hours later ‘on a high’. She was literally euphoric and pleaded with Peter to ‘tell the world’, but he was much more reticent about doing so.
Sandra insisted they should and so phoned the local police that morning to say they had seen a UFO land and rather surprisingly two officers arrived before noon to interview her, which is certainly not what you would normally expect in these circumstances.
She was sure they knew what she was going to tell them. Indeed they more or less confirmed that by saying at one point - ‘Other cars were there, too, weren’t they?’ Something they could only know if they had been told this already.
This was quickly confirmed when the officers added that the ‘York police’ were investigating and had told them they had solved the case - ‘it was just a large tent’.
Sandra shook her head as she was asked: ‘Do you want to change your story in the light of that information?’
Her reply was succinct. ‘I have very good eyesight. I know what I saw.’
That was it as far as the couple was concerned. Sandra had reported it. Peter was happy to forget it. But that proved impossible.
A week later their regional newspaper carried a story about how a local couple had ‘fled in terror’ and on reading the story intrigued were stunned to learn that the couple were them!
At no point had they spoken to the press. They knew the police must have given them the story but had no idea why they would do so and were most upset.
Interestingly, this is very similar to what happened to Alan Godfrey where the police called the press and he was told to give an interview. Colin Perks, the police officer in Wilmslow was also put in the spotlight in this way by the police.
Could it have been a distraction tactic to subtly associate what was witnessed as a UFO in the traditional sense of that word within the public imagination? A distraction IF instead it was something else which the powers that be knew about but wanted to obscure. Odd tactic if this is the case.
Of course, the simplest option is that local media do talk to the police to get interesting stories from the case blotter. But they usually want to talk to the witnesses on something like this. Hard to understand why the police would on three occasions in cases where the MOD was involved bring the media into the picture of themselves.
However, if you think the extraordinary actions of the police had ended here, you would be wrong.
A few days after the article (which gave the couple’s address and led to ‘UFO buffs’ pestering them to tell their story) the police phoned to explain that the national papers now wanted to hear their story, too, and they - the police - would organize a press conference for the couple!
Sandra was by chance then working abroad in a cabaret so Peter, never keen to talk about this in the first place, accepted the police protection that was being offered.
On the day several reporters arrived at the house and the officer in charge set up a rota so they would be able to use the phone one by one to call in their story to the editor - then retired to the kitchen to make some tea!
I have never come across anything like this from the police in a UFO case before. It is really strange behaviour.
You might now be wondering why this story was not front page news and common knowledge to UFO researchers everywhere in 1972.
The answer is that a ring on the door aborted the entire press conference before it got underway!
A brand new looking dark car was parked outside and two men in black suits walked in. Only one did all the talking and led Peter away to another room for ‘a quiet word’.
Here the men flashed cards revealing they were from the defence ministry and said they wanted all the reporters to leave immediately.
‘It is in your interests that you do not talk to anyone about this experience’, the man explained.
Peter told them that none of this was his idea and the police had reported the story and set up the press conference but these reporters were here now so what could he do?
‘Leave that to me’ the man from the ministry said and went out and asked all the reporters to leave.
Peter heard a few murmurs of discontent but never understood how they were persuaded to leave by this man relatively easily.
So I talked to someone at the local paper and asked.
They did not recall the incident, then 16 years earlier, but suggested in similar situations the only thing likely to persuade them to leave such an open event was one reporter explaining they had signed the witnesses up to an exclusive.
This may be why the man from the ministry took Peter aside, to create the belief he had just negotiated the rights from him via a big money deal.
After the press had gone the ministry officer asked Peter a number of questions about the event.
He told me, ‘You know what is odd. Before they were made to leave the reporters all wanted me to tell them the full story. I never got the chance. These ministry people were only interested in one thing - the florescent T shaped door. The man kept asking me to tell him about it over and over and in as much detail as I could recall. It was really strange. He was obsessed with that part alone.’
What this story tells us about why the MOD are interested in a tiny few UFO cases and go to such lengths to pursue them as they seemingly did here is fascinating.
It may be a major clue as to what these things really are - be they UFO, military technology or UAP.
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
In my column for the May 2018 issue of the newsstand magazine Fortean Times I told the story of how singer Kim Wilde came to record a new track - the chorus of which gives the name to her comeback album - Here Come The Aliens.
This month she is on tour around the UK in an alien themed show built around this cheery new rock anthem.
And it was all based on a real UFO sighting she had from her garden in Hertfordshire in June 2009.
Kim did not report what she saw at the time - worried about being asked if ‘wine was involved’ - but other locals did decide to tell the media about it.
I also tracked down the MOD file on this case - one of the last just before they shut up shop for good weeks later.
In fact the MOD report from the one witness whose story found its way to them came via a nearby air base. It was a masterpiece of uselessness. It described what was seen merely as a ‘UFO’ and that was pretty much it.
Actually the witnesses here saw more than one object (as did Kim) and took a photograph too. On the day that photo appeared in the press the MOD wrote to the witness telling them that they knew of no other reports locally.
Whereas the local paper was by now full of them! Indeed even the MOD records show numerous other similar reports around the period that Kim Wilde had her sighting.
This rather demonstrates the fact that the MOD closing the UFO department is not much of a loss to science as its data was often of this typical degree of worthlessness.
In truth this sighting is most likely to be explained - possibly as a laser light show, or fire lanterns at a summer fete. But as Kim Wilde was already a space and science fiction enthusiast since watching the moon landing in 1969 then any UFO sighting would take on personal moment and who cares about the men from the ministry if a good pop record eventually emerges.
What is more interesting here is the association between pop music and UFOs. It has long been surprisingly close.
John Lennon once wrote a personal sighting into a song - saying ‘There’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised’ following an object seen from his apartment at 9 pm on 23 August 1974.
He was with his secretary May Pang and they watched it from a telescope that Lennon had set up. They reported it to the media and there were several other witnesses who had come forward.
It was a large, circular object and May Pang later described it as ‘shaped like a flattened cone and on top was a large, brilliant red light…with a row or circle of white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft."
Lennon was far from the only musician to be fascinated by this mystery. There seems a strong affiliation between musical creativity and UFO interest.
Kate Bush, Shaun Ryder (who even met Alan Godfrey), David Bowie and Robbie Williams have all dabbled in UFO investigation or been associated with groups or read UFO magazines. There are plenty of others.
In Scotland the group CE IV featuring song writers Brian McMullan senior and junior have produced several albums of UFO related music with lyrics about cases or the phenomenon in general.
They have played to large crowds and their website reveals they are working on a new album to mark the 30th anniversary of their popular work - ‘Abduction’ - released in 1988.
Their interest was spiked by a personal sighting on the night of the original Live Aid concert.
As I mentioned in an earlier issue in the late 60s I wrote some lyrics for my brother’s group, Passion Wagon, who never had a record deal but did play many gigs around the UK and are one of those who are immortalized at the venue for having played the Cavern Club in Liverpool during that Merseybeat era.
Far more impressive in the writing stakes is renowned American UFO researcher Jerome Clark who has written country and western music that that has been recorded by hit artists such as Emmylou Harris.
Mind you I have at least actually appeared on an album track from Captain Sensible - in the sense that he sampled my voice from a radio interview about UFOs as part of one of his songs. Though not Happy Talk!
And there is the Californian group Unwritten Law whose song that starts with the great lyric - ‘Look to the sky at night and dream’ is actually titled Oz Factor, after which their second studio album is also named.
The links go even deeper as my mum once had a sighting of a UFO with the next door neighbour when she lived in Irlam back in 1978. I was away at the time but interviewed both witnesses and our neighbours extended family who were playing outside at the time as the two women chatted. Some of the kids shared the incident.
One of that extended family grew up to be quite well known as a musician, her brother’s son being then an 8 year old lad called Jason - Jason Orange - who was for many years part of Take That and sang with the aforementioned Robbie Williams and co and wrote many well loved songs - including the title track to the movie Stardust - Rule The World.
However, the most interesting musical connection has to be a young lad who once worked with my uncle in the Rossendale Valley. He has worked as a tailor and lives in the same small village where I was born - Stacksteads in Lancashire.
My Stacksteads family name was even Taylor.
In October 1978 this man called me from his home to report a UFO sighting having got my number via Jodrell Bank.
We did not know of the family link at that point.
A few months later, in February 1979, he called me live on that number as he witnessed a spectacular UFO from his window and watched it descend into a quarry behind his house.
This was a quarry where my great grandfather had once actually worked.
Mike went to his get his brother Ray and they climbed the hills in the dark and had further strange experiences as they wandered around the quarry in the dark.
That case turned out to be an extraordinary one that baffles to this day and ended 30 miles west when a security guard working on the pier in Blackpool watched as the UFO that zoomed across Lancashire flew over the Irish Sea seemingly pursued by a USAF fighter jet at low level with a roar of afterburners that shook the pier.
Just before this sudden event made him look up the guard had been reading that week’s issue of Titbits magazine and an article within it that was an interview with ‘Britain’s UFO Girl’ - by which the magazine meant me.
The full story of this encounter is told in Alan Godfrey’s book - Who or what were they? Alan’s sergeant, of course, also being the husband of my childhood babysitter and my cousin.
So quite a strange circle of links there.
But there is one more twist to come as the Manchester Evening News of 11 May 2018 reports.
In the Manchester Pop Trail feature it talks of uncovering a ‘forgotten story via a rare 1965 press release’.
The story was not forgotten by everyone though. I was aware of it. For it reports the recording career of a 1960s band.
The paper had discovered the single released on Mercury Records label titled ‘My Little One’ - a Christmas track from the Rossendale band The Idols.
The Idols had, like my brother’s group and that of my cousin, Les Brazil, been playing the same local clubs in those swinging sixties driving around in big painted vans whilst I recorded them onto sadly long lost tapes via my Grundig tape recorder.
My brother was most travelled covering much of the country.
But all three groups are featured on the Manchester Beat music archive website with photos and details of their music and updates of what happened next. As they were playing shows in the city often at that time.
My cousin’s group which became Chalice went to an audition in London and met a manager who wanted to sign up either of the groups Mud or Paper Lace, missed out on both and so signed Chalice instead.
On understanding they moved to Australia.
They recorded very melodic singles and albums and some of their records were made at the famous Strawberry Studios in Stockport run by the successful 10 CC.
One such track and the accompanying pop video - The Writings on the Wall - is playable via Manchester Beat.
In Australia they had a good career and even appeared in one of the Aussie soaps. Les stayed near Melbourne and worked in the music industry - though he has been back a few times to say hello.
As for The Idols, that was a name they had to adopt on getting a record deal in 1965 because their original - The Vikings - was taken by a recording artist already.
The lead singer and song writer was Mike Sax who wrote several singles with brother Ray.
One of these - Don’t Walk Away - actually became a number one hit in Turkey.
Mike Sax, real name Mike Sacks, is the witness to the Stacksteads quarry encounter, and Ray, his co writing brother, was also involved in the UFO events.
Mike went on to become a UFO investigator as part of MUFORA in the 70s and 80s and was one of the team most closely involved in Alan Godfrey’s case investigation as Who or What Were They? explains.
The Sacks brothers may not be recording professionally any more but their love of singing and songwriting goes on.
You can find old and new versions of some of the Idols music on You Tube and some excellent new recordings and songs written and played by the Brothers as a kind of new mini album they produced in 2013.
Some tracks touch on the mystical with Mary Celeste about the mysterious ship and Merlin, about magic and the wizard.
Check them out and see for yourself how singer songwriting and UFOs seem to have a long and deep relationship.
Why were the MOD interested in UFOs?
For a long time we have speculated about why the Ministry of Defence bothered to investigate UFOs for so long, until officially closing the doors 9 years ago.
This was particularly perplexing in that they had insisted that nothing strange or probative had ever been uncovered to suggest that UFOs possessed defence implications, let alone that any were alien in origin as per popular speculation.
The US Air Force dropped their 22 year study half a century ago in 1969 when Project Blue Book shut up shop. So why did Whitehall carry on collating UFO sightings from airports and police officers and the public for another four decades?
Over the past 25 years a huge stream of ‘files’ has been released onto the PRO (public record office) in Kew. At first this was every January after the expiration of the 30 year rule protecting documents such as these from being made public.
That only really started with files dating from the mid-60s as earlier ones were ‘routinely destroyed’ as being of no presumed public interest!
A few earlier reports escaped the cull via copies retained in other records that were not casually discarded so got released if found. This was quite exciting in the period when regular batches of fresh cases were made accessible each New Year.
I was an early visitor to see the national archives in Kew in those days and in the mid-90s made several visits looking at the files from the 1960s as they appeared. I also was asked to be filmed doing this at Kew and then follow up on some of the cases on behalf of the BBC for a TV documentary that I wrote and presented for them in April 1996.
This looked at two specific cases involving early releases - the Burgh Marsh ‘Cumberland Spaceman’ photo taken on 24 May 1964 by local fireman Jim Templeton which had some documentation because of a coincidental link with footage of a ‘UFO’ captured during launch of a Blue Streak rocket from Woomera in Australia a few days later.
In the mid-60s these former missiles had become a European space programme booster rocket assembled at RAF Spadeadam near Burgh Marsh where the Cumberland ‘spaceman’ photo was taken shortly before testing of another rocket in the Australian outback.
The connection was a coincidence and neither chance event is a real UFO and definitely not of alien origin. The Templeton photo is either a fluke that resembles a spaceman or a hoax played on the witness afterwards by a colleague and the Woomera launch footage is just a lens flare caused by the strong Aussie sun.
However, you can see why the fluke connection of the two might have led to some interest in official quarters.
I was able to go to meet the Templeton family in Carlisle and record their account as to how they launched a police investigation into the photograph because Jim was a photographer for the force at fire crime scenes.
The long married couple told me of how they were then visited by two strange acting men who used numbers not names for one another and claimed to be from the MOD then following up this encounter!
These men behaved oddly and were asking puzzling questions about the atmospheric conditions and the reactions of local cattle on the marsh.
No MoD records reveal evidence that anyone did visit the Templeton’s from data released onto Kew. But the Templetons both saw these strangers and I am certain that they were real - though the origin of who they were remains more of a puzzle.
Ex MOD UFO desk officer turned UFO writer, Nick Pope, told me on my BBC documentary that he thought the two men might be rogue UFO buffs ‘play acting’ as men from the ministry to get the witnesses to open up.
Perhaps - but we know for sure that REAL men from the ministry did visit PC Colin Perks in Wilmslow less than two years later in February 1966 as we saw in the full story reported (below) in Northern UFO News 192.
And that Alan Godfrey also had such a visit from someone who was certainly not a rogue UFO investigator (as he had the MOD case file with him on that visit in 1982 as described by Alan in his 2017 book - Who or what were they?) He gained access to senior staff at a police station with the credentials shown so is not likely to be a brazen UFO investigator impersonating someone else.
So it remains very possible the Ministry or some other agency sent people to see the Templetons given the obvious potential defence links between their story and the British space programme. That there were none in the end matters little.
Even though the two events had nothing to do with UFOs as it transpired the possible link would have been sufficient reason to engage an investigation. Though, the eccentricity of the two men on the day is very hard to square with a ministerial origin and might better fit Nick Pope’s rogue UFOlogists.
No files exist to reveal any conclusions on this case - just as there is no file at all about Alan Godfrey’s case at the archives - including the report which we know WAS sent by the West Yorkshire police but has not been released.
The other case I covered on that BBC documentary (which can be viewed on You Tube as Britain’s Secret UFO Files) was a radar/visual encounter at Lakenheath in East Anglia that occurred on 13/14 August 1956.
As it predated the retention of MOD files there is no actual investigation on that case released onto the National Archives at Kew.
But there are 1950s cases and documents that survived and some notes about radar visual encounters from the period when it happened - making its omission from that list even stranger.
We only know of its existence because it involved joint bases in East Anglia and the US Air Force reports about it did emerge in the States. They were published in the late 60s and early 70s and a British Squadron Leader then came forward to affirm his role in the story coordinating intercepts on the night.
However, I tracked down and interviewed two of the RAF aircrew flying jets that came into contact with something over East Anglia on that night. There were sightings around both Lakenheath and Bentwaters airbases and we went to Lakenheath US Air Force Base and filmed the crew revealing their log books that recorded the event for the first time in 40 years. Then let them describe the encounters with an object on that strange night back in 1956.
Most interestingly, whilst what these men encountered definitely was NOT caused by it, as they were too far distant, one of the things seen that night further south was blamed on a rather familiar object by UFO skeptics. The Orford Ness lighthouse - so famous for its later association with the Rendlesham Forest saga in 1980.
It here got the blame first round for this 1956 case. However, no direct evidence was found. Even so it has to be the only lighthouse in UFO history blamed TWICE for two of the most significant cases on record.
After these early files had created puzzles and many questions of which the above are just a fraction, Dr David Clarke was invited by the PRO to act as project coordinator and help release all the more recent UFO files onto the public record.
This was necessary after the turn of the Millennium - following the Freedom of Information laws requiring open data access.
Dr Clarke was well suited for this role as he was a Fortean researcher interested in historical oddities, had been a journalist covering UFO cases for some years and teaches as an academic at Sheffield Hallam University.
David was noted for his skeptical approach to UFOs and 35 years ago when he was still a teenager I actually published one of his first case investigations in this very magazine.
It was an object seen by a nurse from a Yorkshire hospital ward and David went above and beyond to look for an answer - mapping traffic patterns in the middle of the night outside the hospital and visiting the ward at the same unearthly hour as the event to get the view that the witness had days earlier.
From this expert investigation I knew quickly that David was going to be a huge asset to UFO research in Britain - and so it proved.
In this incident David had speculated that an astronomical explanation seemed possible and following that clue I was able to check records and establish when writing up his report for NUN that the nurse had clearly been watching the moon.
It is surprising how often this common sight does trigger UFO reports when seen low through mist, for example.
Years later, just before he started work for the achives - in 2000 - Dave Clarke, Andy Roberts and I co-authored, The UFOs That Never Were, one of the few books to look entirely at solved UFO cases.
Whilst all three of us are proud of that work it totally bombed sales wise. We could not give the thing away - which sadly shows how little importance UFO enthusiasts - quite wrongly in my view - afford to this side of the phenomenon.
From the early 2000s large batches of older files were released by the national archives every few months, gradually publishing all data and catching up over the decades via tens of thousands of pages. David issued guides for the media on the highlights of each release as they were usually too big for journalists to plough through looking for anything interesting.
After several years this brought the data right up to the closing down of the MoD UFO project in 2009. All files are now accessible via Kew.
Indeed the last batches covering odds and ends that were initially held back for various intelligence reasons or through bureaucratic necessities have only just filtered out this year.
It was possible to freely download on line most of these MOD case file and policy documents for a time after each batch was released and I have vast collection of these mostly boring, redacted bits of data that cover assorted lights in the sky sent into the MOD from the public or via airports and police.
They were hardly ever followed up at all, let alone in any meaningful way. Most have all identifying detail removed such as witness names.
Of course, a few good cases are lurking in there but it is a bit like seeking just one cornflake on a cornflake factory production line. And investigating them is hard unless the same case was reported to the UFO community, as a few of them were, meaning the identity of the witness becomes identifiable and not unknown behind redacted ink.
Most of them are of less use than the countless thousands of sighting report forms held on the archives of dozens of UK UFO groups collated in equally haphazard fashion during the second half of the 20th century.
Interestingly, UFO groups, that once used to exist in every major town are heading towards extinction and UFO investigation of that type has ended publicly around the same point as the MOD has decided to shut up shop.
Meaning any claim from conspiracy theorists for a cover up behind the ministry ending their interest would have to account for why UFO groups seem to have run out of steam in the same manner and timescale.
So where does this leave our assessment of why the MOD persisted in chasing such apparently worthless data for so many decades?
Well, a great place to look for clues is David Clarke. He has long published a blog that in archive fashion has looked at the data he helped steer onto the public domain over the past decade and you should check it out as an informative read.
It provides a fascinating historical account of the details of this story as it emerged and has just been updated early in May 2018 with what may be the final chapter covering the last MOD file release saga.
In early May the Guardian posted a piece about this new data suggesting that the ‘end game’ David reveals was linked to DI 55 - a ‘defence intelligence’ unit long known to be connected with MOD UFO study.
Indeed the role of DI units connected to MOD UFO files was only accidentally revealed and then became intriguing. This happened when the air staff office that acted as a shop window for UFO interaction with the public sent out letters to UFO researchers in 1982/3 (including me) that mistakenly left on the distribution list showing where they sent other copies - as in these DI intelligence agencies.
The cover photo of this issue shows one of those accidental file releases naming D1 55 and other locations they forwarded UFO data onto from the Air Staff public desk.
The files only just released show the embarrassment that the significance of this ‘cock up’ caused as it was soon spotted by UFOlogists such as myself and commented upon. We recognised the significance of intelligence agencies reviewing the UFO data the MOD tended to dismiss when asked as never being of much interest.
The mistaken release of the distribution list compromised some of the MODs thinking on data about the Rendlesham Forest case which by chance was then at a key stage of being made public. It might be why the Halt memo surfaced in the USA (via the MOD) but was denied to anyone in the UK asking the Air Staff for a copy.
These newly revealed files show that for years after their role was discovered DI 55 were getting letters asking them trivial questions as UFO buffs imagined them the ‘true’ home of UFO research, even though that seems unlikely.
They were most likely just reviewing the data to assess its potential relevance to the defence of the realm - to see, for instance, whether a UFO might be an undetected intrusion by a foreign power using unknown technology - perhaps a stealth drone or experimental propulsion system.
The scientists and ex RAF personnel employed were well suited to cover these questions.
These DI units, of course, are the places from where any REAL ‘Men from the Ministry’ visited UFO witnesses such as PC Colin Perks in Wilmslow in 1966. And they did so rarely and only when there was good cause - in the Perks case probably because physical residue was reportedly found at the site where he saw an unknown object.
It will certainly be a valuable exercise to look at the range of cases where visitors from a DI unit did apparently go to see witnesses following up a sighting. There may be a pattern that illuminates which cases they regarded as worth that risk.
Other apparent examples include Alan Godfrey, where again physical traces were left and there was suspicion of a possible ‘plasma’ event.
And another case I looked into that happened in North Yorkshire in 1972 where police officers were seemingly involved in a puzzling manner. I will include details of that interesting case later in this issue as it is worth comparing with the others incidents where on the spot follow up visits seem to have happened.
The Ministry going out and meeting witnesses is a seemingly rare occurrence and collating those cases where might reveal clues about what attracted them to that case above others.
I think the possibility of an atmospheric energy or plasma seems to run through them with bright energetic glows featuring. Someone might have thought this was where the ‘real’ UFO phenomenon was going to be found.
From the newly released documents discussing how the DI agency were wrestling with the UFO mystery around the turn of the Millennium it looks like they were desperate to find a way out of the game.
They tried to argue that their brief should have nothing to do with UFOs, per se, and was about foreign earth power technology and what it could do and if it was intruding into our air space. Which seems reasonable enough.
So they were not interested in aliens - as such - just foreigners.
The outcome was the already released (though deeply redacted) Condign Report that was being penned by a DI agency source around the time David, Andy and I were releasing our solved UFO book in 2000.
But which was only released to Kew a decade later after a bit of a fight. Once you read it you can see why.
This in depth study used the term UAP instead of UFO, something UFO researchers had been doing since the early 80s for cases we have long felt were unexplained atmospheric phenomena. And also because we wanted to avoid creating the impression that by using the word UFO we implied we believed that the things being discussed might be alien spaceships.
Seemingly the MOD reached the same conclusion for much the same reasons that we did!
This led to the prospect assessed by Condign that some UFOs might be a rare plasma phenomenon of some sort (a kind of super ball lightning - a term I have used about them before) and that may or may not be useful as a power source and might put aircraft, including military aircraft, at risk.
So - far from shutting things down as irrelevant to the MoD - the unnamed author of the Condign study gave reasons why maybe the MOD should perhaps have been paying more attention all along.
Indeed the report suggested of these energy events that the MoD ‘has no idea what they are’.
This meaning UAP, not UFOs in the more exotic sense the public would assume if that word were used, of course!
It is not hard to see why that line was never released by the MoD to the media - though it is pretty much what most sensible UFO researchers have argued in our writings for years as the reason why the MOD continued to collate data.
They might not think they are spaceships from Mars but if they might be an enemy power technology or something you can harness yourself to turn into a weapon to use against an enemy then you keep collating the data and looking at what it tells you.
Though, interestingly, DI 55 did ask for no more reports to be sent to them after receipt of the Condign study!
The reasons are unclear as much of that part of the file is a sea of black ink and redacted argument.
Reading some of the author’s justifications for retaining interest in these UAP I kept thinking I could have been writing these words for the MoD within the Condign report. In fact I had written similar ones in several books and articles.
So I was smiling that some might even suspect that I had secretly authored this report as an MoD sleeper agent.
I didn’t, of course, and the author, as David Clarke’s blog explains, was someone far better qualified to discuss these matters so anyone thinking that the MOD employed a UFO investigator would be wrong.
Anyhow, whilst the Condign author believed in UAP as likely a kind of plasma and a possible source of technology that the MOD might harness for their own needs - it seems that this person struggled to persuade the Ministry of this theory just as much as I have failed over the years to convince UFO researchers that plasmas might be triggering UFO events.
Here, for instance is what I wrote in 1998 in ‘Something in the Air’ - my book about mid-air UFO sightings. This was being written at the time the Condign report was starting to be put together unbeknown to me:-
‘UFOlogists on the whole view such cases in a most inappropriate manner - as an alien invasion. Too little is done, either by them or scientists, to try to understand what may be a fascinating, perhaps even dangerous problem and certainly one that offers a potentially invaluable source of energy.
This is one reason for the so-called cover up regarding UFOs allegedly conducted by the authorities.
I believe that long ago all major nations realised that most UFO sightings are examples of mistaken identity and others stem from strange natural phenomena.
Few - if any - have the remotest likelihood of resulting from an alien invasion. Yet, any government scientist worth their salt will have advised their respective administration that these reports offer insights into some untapped energy source.
The race is on to harness this power and to become a global leader in a hot technology that everyone will want during the 21st century.
In those circumstances it would be a positive advantage if people only ever talked about UFOs in the context of aliens and little green men because this would ensure that scientists not under government control do not spend much time investigating these matters.
If you want the political edge then you must tackle these issues covertly and not share what you are discovering through the pages of New Scientist.’
This now looks almost as if I had inside knowledge of the Condign research, but it was just an educated guess based on following the MOD argument on UFOs for 25 years.
My view that a plasma was possibly the cause of the object seen by Alan Godfey stems from the above. But the theory has been scoffed at by most researchers in Ufology just as the Condign author faced similar rejection at the MOD.
Perhaps it will indeed prove to be nonsense. But at least I know how the author of the Condign report feels in trying to argue for something that builds a bridge between science and UFOs.
And we will both be proven either right or wrong!
Either way the MOD decided enough was enough and shut up shop for good in 2009.
The MOD had long been in a quandary about how to look into the subject without implying that there really might be UFOs (or UAP) traversing British skies. Condign helped provide an end game.
It was all a bit ‘don’t say anything to suggest we are really interested when we have been telling them for years that we are not’. Yet even when they ended their role exactly how and why they did so was fraught with worry over how to persuade people they were not withholding further dark secrets.
Cover ups never die in the popular imagination - so whilst I think there is no substance in this theory I also know it will probably never go away just like the idea that the Apollo Missions never went to the Moon and were all filmed in a studio has not.
David Clarke’s blog reports in depth with quotes and extracts from the new files and he will tell the full story soon. For now do read his work and see the extraordinary story unfold.
It is a fascinating insight into the machinations of the corridors of power.
https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/
THE MOORLAND UAP AND THE MEN FROM THE MINISTRY
This is one of the most fascinating cases that I have investigated involving the MOD and mystery visitors. It has hidden depths that I will not go into here, as they are not directly relevant to the Ministry side of this story, but add nuance to the case itself. Particularly in what they reveal about how witnesses can be prone to experiencing the extraordinary in many shades and forms.
UFOs are but one colour on a very rich spectrum of events that intersect throughout a lifetime.
These witnesses first reported a different story to me that I investigated along with colleague Roy Sandbach. But after looking at the ghostly events and missing time adventure of this well to do couple who live in a smart home in Cheshire it became clear that they really started with an episode on the night of 16/17 August 1972.
Sandra was a professional dancer and her husband Peter ran a construction business. She had been performing far from home on this warm Summer evening on the north east coast. Because she would not finish until midnight her husband had arranged his schedule so that he could travel over 100 miles north and drive her home.
After such an exhausting day for both of them they were heading back through Swaledale in North Yorkshire. It was about 2 am and they were on the A 61 between Thirsk and Ripon at what I estimate to be near the village of Baldersby.
This is an interesting spot, though in the darkness on an unfamiliar route they were not to know.
Just south of here is the military field at Dishforth adjacent to an RAF base called Topcliffe.
Readers of Who or What Were They? - Alan Godfrey’s book - will recognize the importance of this. Dishforth is where he did his police officer training. And Dishforth and Topcliffe airfields were both part of the 1952 UFO encounter amidst the Operation Mainbrace NATO exercise that also saw a UFO buzz a nuclear weapons equipped US aircraft carrier off the Yorkshire coast.
These events were extraordinary in their time and led to the then prime minister - Winston Churchill - ordering an investigation. That was one of the first jobs to be carried out by a young Defence Ministry aid who was working for the minister and went to Yorkshire to gather evidence. His name was Ralph Noyes.
That study led to Churchill ordering the creation of an investigation unit into UFOs that matched the one created in the US as Project Blue Book.
In the UK that study became the UFO desk that operated from Whitehall right through to 2009 when, as reported above, it was shut down.
Noyes himself would rise in rank to run the full department including that UFO desk and oversaw those who manned it. This was over two decades before Nick Pope took the job in the 1990s and Noyes later told me how on taking the role he was shown gun camera footage of strange glows being chased by RAF planes. To him they were evidence of real unknown phenomena but did not appear to be craft or alien in origin.
This footage has never been released from the archives and is officially supposed to have just got lost somewhere over the years.
Ralph Noyes was a fascinating man who first came openly into the UFO mystery after his retirement in 1983 and for several years he was very helpful to our investigation of the Rendlesham Forest case where Noyes was adamant he saw evidence of a ‘cover up’ by the MoD that he had long worked for. As doing that was a no no during his tenancy he suspected there had to be good reasons why they acted so differently over this particular event.
He and I coordinated pressure on politicians searching for answers and he was a part time UFO lecturer in his retirement. Ralph gave me an excellent interview not long before he died about MOD files.
Noyes believed that most UFOs were explainable but that a few represented a natural phenomenon - a UAP in fact, though I do not think he used that term.
He once told me that he thought it was akin to a rainbow - something so strange occurring in the atmosphere that it once would have been deified by witnesses until we had the science to understand how it happened.
UFOs were not, in his view, signs of aliens, but an energy phenomenon we might one day tame. But right now were still perceiving it in the 'deification' stage where in this case the 'god' was an alien.
He thought that the MOD were interested in understanding the power involved in this natural phenomenon and perhaps using it in some way - probably as a weapon - hence the cover up.
If this is all sounding like a familiar record, it is, but I can assure you that Noyes was NOT the author of the Condign report - though he might have influenced the person who was, just like his thinking certainly influenced my interest in UAP.
Noyes wrote one UFO book after retirement - an extraordinary novel that clearly used the Rendlesham Forest case as a platform to explain via fiction because he felt unable to do so in fact what he really thought might be happening. It is about global forces harnessing power for offensive and defensive use culled from what we otherwise call UFOs.
That novel is ‘A Secret Property’.
Returning to Sandra and Peter on that Yorkshire road there is more to tell, because just a few miles south west of where they were driving was another military complex. RAF Menwith Hill just outside Harrogate is a vast electronics communication facility with golf ball dome technology that is a hive of covert interception activity. Jointly run by the UK and US and coordinated via the NSA - the US National Security Agency - it is very interestingly in the midst of an area where glowing light UFOs have long been reported.
So, quite without realizing it, as they drove home that night, Sandra and Peter were in a hotbed of both UFO activity and military covert intelligence facilities. Somewhere that if a UFO appears it would get the attention of the Ministry of Defence.
Which seems to be what happened that night.
Driving south west they saw to the south and east of them an object that appeared to be descending into a small copse. Peter slowed right down and as they cleared the trees they could see that it had, in fact, come down in a field beyond here.
Sandra told us ‘It was a large melon shape. I had no idea UFOs were supposed to look like that. I thought they were like saucers.’
Her husband added that its colour was very vivid. ‘It was a really bright green like those florescent socks’.
From apparent distance (50 feet) the size of the object was estimated to be around 30 feet across.
My first theory here was that this might be the moon, despite the colour. But checks revealed that it had gone below the horizon several hours earlier that Wednesday.
They were travelling the A61 at that point in a convoy of 4 vehicles which were close together in the dark surroundings. They were not travelling fast because the lead vehicle was a by chance a police car!
The witnesses are certain the occupants of the other three vehicles saw the object saying ‘it was impossible to miss in the sky ahead of us as it came down’. Indeed they saw them all slow to almost a stop suggesting they did do.
But nobody appeared to get out for a closer look.
At this point the object, now apparently on the ground in the field, did something extraordinary. A door opened in its side.
‘It was a vivid blue/white,’ Peter told us. ‘In sharp contrast to the vivid green around. It was like a slow motion flashbulb as it appeared’.
Sandra was more explicit likening it to when you used to turn off an old fashioned TV screen but in reverse. ‘It appeared from nowhere like a dot and then opened up into a T shape several feet across’.
Further discussion suggested that it might be akin to an ultra violet colour as Sandra said it reminded her of a sunbed lamp’.
There was now a very strange sensation - Sandra reports. ‘I felt a compulsion to get out of the car. To walk across the field to it. Something just made me want to get out and I started to do so.’
Peter added - ‘Yes, I grabbed her. I was pulling her back in. I had to drag her away from doing this.’
Both also added that in recalling this scary part of the story they had just realized that something else odd was happening.
It will sound familiar to you given the name of this website.
‘You know,’ Sandra told us, ‘that was strange. There was just no noise. Not even trees in the wind. Nothing. No normal night sounds.’
Peter started nodding, realizing she was right and that this eerie stillness had descended as they stopped to watch the landing and as his wife had tried to get out of the car.
This state of consciousness was the Oz factor.
‘That was the weirdest part. The silence. There is always something even at night. Birds twittering. Rustling. But nothing was doing nothing that night.’ he added.
As Peter hauled her back from heading out across the field as if following the ‘pied piper’ toward the landed object Sandra smiled as she recalled what he cried out to her, thus breaking the silence.
‘Sod this for a game of soldiers!’ Peter screamed - as he put his foot down and drove off at speed.
Oddly they do not recall passing the police car directly ahead of them on the road but would have had to do.
Their next memory was of the road ahead being clear and nobody else around them and them well on their way back to Cheshire.
We asked if they got home early or late, but as Peter said pointedly - ‘When you see something like this you don’t spend time looking at clocks.’
The couple arrived home in the pre-dawn a couple of hours after the sighting and were very surprised as they hurried back toward their house.
A police car was parked outside their door waiting for them!
Two officers got out and asked the couple quizzically - ‘Have you anything to report?’
They had decided en route they were not telling anybody about what just happened, so they said no. But were asked further questions - such as where had they been? Why are you returning home in the middle of the night?
They just mumbled replies hoping the cops were merely being cautious and were eventually allowed into their house.
Sandra felt that this was just a routine patrol being suspicious of their arrival after 4 am. Peter thought not as being parked waiting at their home was odd.
The Yorkshire police car would have seen them ‘flee the scene’ of the UFO landing and might have taken their number and sent local police to trace it and wait for them to reach home.
Either way they went to bed right away and fell asleep - though Sandra woke just 3 hours later ‘on a high’. She was literally euphoric and pleaded with Peter to ‘tell the world’, but he was much more reticent about doing so.
Sandra insisted they should and so phoned the local police that morning to say they had seen a UFO land and rather surprisingly two officers arrived before noon to interview her, which is certainly not what you would normally expect in these circumstances.
She was sure they knew what she was going to tell them. Indeed they more or less confirmed that by saying at one point - ‘Other cars were there, too, weren’t they?’ Something they could only know if they had been told this already.
This was quickly confirmed when the officers added that the ‘York police’ were investigating and had told them they had solved the case - ‘it was just a large tent’.
Sandra shook her head as she was asked: ‘Do you want to change your story in the light of that information?’
Her reply was succinct. ‘I have very good eyesight. I know what I saw.’
That was it as far as the couple was concerned. Sandra had reported it. Peter was happy to forget it. But that proved impossible.
A week later their regional newspaper carried a story about how a local couple had ‘fled in terror’ and on reading the story intrigued were stunned to learn that the couple were them!
At no point had they spoken to the press. They knew the police must have given them the story but had no idea why they would do so and were most upset.
Interestingly, this is very similar to what happened to Alan Godfrey where the police called the press and he was told to give an interview. Colin Perks, the police officer in Wilmslow was also put in the spotlight in this way by the police.
Could it have been a distraction tactic to subtly associate what was witnessed as a UFO in the traditional sense of that word within the public imagination? A distraction IF instead it was something else which the powers that be knew about but wanted to obscure. Odd tactic if this is the case.
Of course, the simplest option is that local media do talk to the police to get interesting stories from the case blotter. But they usually want to talk to the witnesses on something like this. Hard to understand why the police would on three occasions in cases where the MOD was involved bring the media into the picture of themselves.
However, if you think the extraordinary actions of the police had ended here, you would be wrong.
A few days after the article (which gave the couple’s address and led to ‘UFO buffs’ pestering them to tell their story) the police phoned to explain that the national papers now wanted to hear their story, too, and they - the police - would organize a press conference for the couple!
Sandra was by chance then working abroad in a cabaret so Peter, never keen to talk about this in the first place, accepted the police protection that was being offered.
On the day several reporters arrived at the house and the officer in charge set up a rota so they would be able to use the phone one by one to call in their story to the editor - then retired to the kitchen to make some tea!
I have never come across anything like this from the police in a UFO case before. It is really strange behaviour.
You might now be wondering why this story was not front page news and common knowledge to UFO researchers everywhere in 1972.
The answer is that a ring on the door aborted the entire press conference before it got underway!
A brand new looking dark car was parked outside and two men in black suits walked in. Only one did all the talking and led Peter away to another room for ‘a quiet word’.
Here the men flashed cards revealing they were from the defence ministry and said they wanted all the reporters to leave immediately.
‘It is in your interests that you do not talk to anyone about this experience’, the man explained.
Peter told them that none of this was his idea and the police had reported the story and set up the press conference but these reporters were here now so what could he do?
‘Leave that to me’ the man from the ministry said and went out and asked all the reporters to leave.
Peter heard a few murmurs of discontent but never understood how they were persuaded to leave by this man relatively easily.
So I talked to someone at the local paper and asked.
They did not recall the incident, then 16 years earlier, but suggested in similar situations the only thing likely to persuade them to leave such an open event was one reporter explaining they had signed the witnesses up to an exclusive.
This may be why the man from the ministry took Peter aside, to create the belief he had just negotiated the rights from him via a big money deal.
After the press had gone the ministry officer asked Peter a number of questions about the event.
He told me, ‘You know what is odd. Before they were made to leave the reporters all wanted me to tell them the full story. I never got the chance. These ministry people were only interested in one thing - the florescent T shaped door. The man kept asking me to tell him about it over and over and in as much detail as I could recall. It was really strange. He was obsessed with that part alone.’
What this story tells us about why the MOD are interested in a tiny few UFO cases and go to such lengths to pursue them as they seemingly did here is fascinating.
It may be a major clue as to what these things really are - be they UFO, military technology or UAP.
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
In my column for the May 2018 issue of the newsstand magazine Fortean Times I told the story of how singer Kim Wilde came to record a new track - the chorus of which gives the name to her comeback album - Here Come The Aliens.
This month she is on tour around the UK in an alien themed show built around this cheery new rock anthem.
And it was all based on a real UFO sighting she had from her garden in Hertfordshire in June 2009.
Kim did not report what she saw at the time - worried about being asked if ‘wine was involved’ - but other locals did decide to tell the media about it.
I also tracked down the MOD file on this case - one of the last just before they shut up shop for good weeks later.
In fact the MOD report from the one witness whose story found its way to them came via a nearby air base. It was a masterpiece of uselessness. It described what was seen merely as a ‘UFO’ and that was pretty much it.
Actually the witnesses here saw more than one object (as did Kim) and took a photograph too. On the day that photo appeared in the press the MOD wrote to the witness telling them that they knew of no other reports locally.
Whereas the local paper was by now full of them! Indeed even the MOD records show numerous other similar reports around the period that Kim Wilde had her sighting.
This rather demonstrates the fact that the MOD closing the UFO department is not much of a loss to science as its data was often of this typical degree of worthlessness.
In truth this sighting is most likely to be explained - possibly as a laser light show, or fire lanterns at a summer fete. But as Kim Wilde was already a space and science fiction enthusiast since watching the moon landing in 1969 then any UFO sighting would take on personal moment and who cares about the men from the ministry if a good pop record eventually emerges.
What is more interesting here is the association between pop music and UFOs. It has long been surprisingly close.
John Lennon once wrote a personal sighting into a song - saying ‘There’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised’ following an object seen from his apartment at 9 pm on 23 August 1974.
He was with his secretary May Pang and they watched it from a telescope that Lennon had set up. They reported it to the media and there were several other witnesses who had come forward.
It was a large, circular object and May Pang later described it as ‘shaped like a flattened cone and on top was a large, brilliant red light…with a row or circle of white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft."
Lennon was far from the only musician to be fascinated by this mystery. There seems a strong affiliation between musical creativity and UFO interest.
Kate Bush, Shaun Ryder (who even met Alan Godfrey), David Bowie and Robbie Williams have all dabbled in UFO investigation or been associated with groups or read UFO magazines. There are plenty of others.
In Scotland the group CE IV featuring song writers Brian McMullan senior and junior have produced several albums of UFO related music with lyrics about cases or the phenomenon in general.
They have played to large crowds and their website reveals they are working on a new album to mark the 30th anniversary of their popular work - ‘Abduction’ - released in 1988.
Their interest was spiked by a personal sighting on the night of the original Live Aid concert.
As I mentioned in an earlier issue in the late 60s I wrote some lyrics for my brother’s group, Passion Wagon, who never had a record deal but did play many gigs around the UK and are one of those who are immortalized at the venue for having played the Cavern Club in Liverpool during that Merseybeat era.
Far more impressive in the writing stakes is renowned American UFO researcher Jerome Clark who has written country and western music that that has been recorded by hit artists such as Emmylou Harris.
Mind you I have at least actually appeared on an album track from Captain Sensible - in the sense that he sampled my voice from a radio interview about UFOs as part of one of his songs. Though not Happy Talk!
And there is the Californian group Unwritten Law whose song that starts with the great lyric - ‘Look to the sky at night and dream’ is actually titled Oz Factor, after which their second studio album is also named.
The links go even deeper as my mum once had a sighting of a UFO with the next door neighbour when she lived in Irlam back in 1978. I was away at the time but interviewed both witnesses and our neighbours extended family who were playing outside at the time as the two women chatted. Some of the kids shared the incident.
One of that extended family grew up to be quite well known as a musician, her brother’s son being then an 8 year old lad called Jason - Jason Orange - who was for many years part of Take That and sang with the aforementioned Robbie Williams and co and wrote many well loved songs - including the title track to the movie Stardust - Rule The World.
However, the most interesting musical connection has to be a young lad who once worked with my uncle in the Rossendale Valley. He has worked as a tailor and lives in the same small village where I was born - Stacksteads in Lancashire.
My Stacksteads family name was even Taylor.
In October 1978 this man called me from his home to report a UFO sighting having got my number via Jodrell Bank.
We did not know of the family link at that point.
A few months later, in February 1979, he called me live on that number as he witnessed a spectacular UFO from his window and watched it descend into a quarry behind his house.
This was a quarry where my great grandfather had once actually worked.
Mike went to his get his brother Ray and they climbed the hills in the dark and had further strange experiences as they wandered around the quarry in the dark.
That case turned out to be an extraordinary one that baffles to this day and ended 30 miles west when a security guard working on the pier in Blackpool watched as the UFO that zoomed across Lancashire flew over the Irish Sea seemingly pursued by a USAF fighter jet at low level with a roar of afterburners that shook the pier.
Just before this sudden event made him look up the guard had been reading that week’s issue of Titbits magazine and an article within it that was an interview with ‘Britain’s UFO Girl’ - by which the magazine meant me.
The full story of this encounter is told in Alan Godfrey’s book - Who or what were they? Alan’s sergeant, of course, also being the husband of my childhood babysitter and my cousin.
So quite a strange circle of links there.
But there is one more twist to come as the Manchester Evening News of 11 May 2018 reports.
In the Manchester Pop Trail feature it talks of uncovering a ‘forgotten story via a rare 1965 press release’.
The story was not forgotten by everyone though. I was aware of it. For it reports the recording career of a 1960s band.
The paper had discovered the single released on Mercury Records label titled ‘My Little One’ - a Christmas track from the Rossendale band The Idols.
The Idols had, like my brother’s group and that of my cousin, Les Brazil, been playing the same local clubs in those swinging sixties driving around in big painted vans whilst I recorded them onto sadly long lost tapes via my Grundig tape recorder.
My brother was most travelled covering much of the country.
But all three groups are featured on the Manchester Beat music archive website with photos and details of their music and updates of what happened next. As they were playing shows in the city often at that time.
My cousin’s group which became Chalice went to an audition in London and met a manager who wanted to sign up either of the groups Mud or Paper Lace, missed out on both and so signed Chalice instead.
On understanding they moved to Australia.
They recorded very melodic singles and albums and some of their records were made at the famous Strawberry Studios in Stockport run by the successful 10 CC.
One such track and the accompanying pop video - The Writings on the Wall - is playable via Manchester Beat.
In Australia they had a good career and even appeared in one of the Aussie soaps. Les stayed near Melbourne and worked in the music industry - though he has been back a few times to say hello.
As for The Idols, that was a name they had to adopt on getting a record deal in 1965 because their original - The Vikings - was taken by a recording artist already.
The lead singer and song writer was Mike Sax who wrote several singles with brother Ray.
One of these - Don’t Walk Away - actually became a number one hit in Turkey.
Mike Sax, real name Mike Sacks, is the witness to the Stacksteads quarry encounter, and Ray, his co writing brother, was also involved in the UFO events.
Mike went on to become a UFO investigator as part of MUFORA in the 70s and 80s and was one of the team most closely involved in Alan Godfrey’s case investigation as Who or What Were They? explains.
The Sacks brothers may not be recording professionally any more but their love of singing and songwriting goes on.
You can find old and new versions of some of the Idols music on You Tube and some excellent new recordings and songs written and played by the Brothers as a kind of new mini album they produced in 2013.
Some tracks touch on the mystical with Mary Celeste about the mysterious ship and Merlin, about magic and the wizard.
Check them out and see for yourself how singer songwriting and UFOs seem to have a long and deep relationship.


193
APRIL
2018
Contents: Ancient Astronuts - Moon Landing UFO , Mid Air Encounter over USA Feb 2018
EDITOR: JENNY RANDLES
10 MARTON GREEN STOCKPORT CHESHIRE SK3 8LT
E mail: nufon@btinternet.com
Photo above: The NASA space shuttle launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida in November
1983. Did astronauts see UFOs in space 14 years earlier. Did ancient astronauts visit Earth much earlier still. And did airline pilots see a UFO at 50,000 feet in February 2018?
10 MARTON GREEN STOCKPORT CHESHIRE SK3 8LT
E mail: nufon@btinternet.com
Photo above: The NASA space shuttle launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida in November
1983. Did astronauts see UFOs in space 14 years earlier. Did ancient astronauts visit Earth much earlier still. And did airline pilots see a UFO at 50,000 feet in February 2018?
JR Comments….
ANCIENT ASTRO-NUTS?
One of the first UFO lectures I ever attended was by British writer Raymond Drake who was in his 60s back then and so a veteran when he gave a talk at UMIST - the Manchester University.
He was an interesting person who specialised and wrote several books about the possibility that aliens have been visiting Earth throughout human history.
Each of his titles involved trawling through ancient texts and records or paintings and cave art to find what might resemble contact with unearthly beings that had originally been interpreted not as extra-terrestrials but Gods.
His first book, Gods or Spaceman? appeared in 1964 and the last - shortly before his death - was Cosmic Continents in 1986. In 11 titles he scoured the world looking for evidence in the manner of Charles Forte - after whom the magazine Fortean Times is named - and who was Drake’s hero.
Though he rarely gets the recognition today, he actually predated by several years the one name most people associate with this ‘ancient astronauts’ school of thinking.
That, of course, is Swiss researcher Eric von Daniken - whose book ‘Chariots of the Gods’ was a global sensation in 1968 in the year when we first circled and soon after landed upon the Moon as humanity became a spacefaring race for the first time. 50 years and 21 books later he has just released his latest - ‘The Gods Never Left Us’.
I can still remember the global sensation when von Daniken first hit the news with the media shout line - Was God an Astronaut? I was at school with a job delivering newspapers and the posters and serialisations were intriguing.
Certainly I could never have dreamt that three decades later I would lecture alongside von Daniken at a conference in Vienna. Though that event is more memorable for me regarding what happened at the start of my talk when I wandered towards the screen to point out something in an illustration projected onto a screen and promptly fell into a pit invisible in the darkness.
Embarrassed more than anything - as cameras were filming! - I scrambled up and somehow got through my lecture. Not realising until the pain kicked in that I had broken fingers on my hand. I needed hospital treatment on arriving back in the UK and still get the odd twinge from the damaged digits.
Daniken later designed and opened a theme park on this research and alien astronauts theme at Interlaken in his native Switzerland. That was in 2003 - and, although it has had limited success, its several pavilions still look at various themes taken from his books.
It is easy to see why the concept of our history having been influenced by aliens coming to Earth long ago was beguiling at the height of the space age. And might be a little old fashioned after long now being the subject of movies and TV series such as Stargate.
We wondered at the start of the space age if somehow vastly intelligent and scientifically advanced beings had guided our primitive selves towards civilisation with ancient humans being aware of their true origin. Instead we interpreted them as godly beings becoming the basis of multiple beliefs and religions.
In the 1980s this concept was taken in a very interesting new direction with a 5 book series of science fiction novels - ‘The Canopus in Argos’ series - written by Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing. I was thrilled to meet her, too, when we did a BBC radio show together as she had long been a heroine of mine.
Two of her interlinked series of novels - Shikasta in 1979 and The Sirian Experiments in 1980 - focus on the same story as told from two perspectives. They cover vast periods of time as differing aliens visit, report back on, interact with and in some cases experiment upon life on Earth and humanity in particular.
Though dense and allegorical in many ways to her unique views about civilisation which led to her rejecting a Damehood - they are a lasting literary mirror to the simplicity and guesswork of the searchers for ancient astronaut history using images and artefacts. Yes these vaguely resemble something like modern technology and suggest that this might be of alien origin as it could not then be constructed by anyone terrestrial.
This kind of thinking has not disappeared. You only need to look at the schedules of some of the satellite TV channels to find them full of Ancient Aliens and similar shows that dissect these matters to the nth degree.
The concept of ancient astronauts is viewed by UFO researchers in one way or another. Either as over interpretation of mundane things judged out of context - or as proof that the aliens we think might be coming here today and abducting people have been around and maybe doing that for countless centuries.
Either way this focuses the evidence as if it supports - or does not support - the modern extra-terrestrial hypothesis that some think explains the stranger cases that we observe right now.
So are there really ancient astronauts in our far history or is the theory simply astro - nuts?
However, there is another perhaps more interesting way of thinking about this subject which does not stand or fall on the existence of any aliens ever coming here but still has significance for the UFO mystery itself.
It could reveal a very long term force within human consciousness - the desire to not be alone but have someone to share our seemingly unique grasp of science and the cosmos. We alone on Earth seem aware that the universe is far more than just us on this rocky world whilst experiencing the day to day mundane details of life and survival.
We dream of the great beyond and aspire to find others out there amongst it. And this is not just a 21st century thing. We have been pondering such matters for millennia. It is deeply engrained into the soul of the human species. It is why we created a pantheon of Gods and supernatural entities pulling the strings and dancing in shadows.
Aliens are really just the modern day extension of a very long history of the need for another.
There are many ways we can see this in the history of humanity - every generation has its own version of the supernatural and beings that dance upon the edges of reality. UFO researcher Jacques Vallee in books such as Passport to Magonia introduced this netherworld of elves and fairies, sprites and demons into the same company as greys and Martians.
And asks the question are these beings in any sense real entities that exist just beyond human perception? Or are they manifestations of the cry of a lonely species desperate for something to aspire towards - be that Gods who give purpose to our destiny or beings that infer there is magic and other realities beyond our day to day fight for survival?
Today are we asking the very same question but focusing it in a modern way appropriate to our age of scientific endeavour - seeking aliens with knowledge that could bring wonders we cannot yet achieve?
The literal reality of what might be an ancient artefact of a ten thousand year old alien invader or a accidentally shaped rock fossil that acts like a simulacra to tease our human senses is not really the point. The things we perceive might be astronauts or our senses might just be going a little gaga.
What does matters is that, just like lights in the sky are to us today, these things burrow into our consciousness as a source of wonder and imagination that then toys with our primeval need not to be the only one who understands the profundity of what lies all around us in this universe.
UFO research is in many ways the 21st century version of the ancient druid priests or the necromancers and mystics of old trying to look beyond the crack between the edge of the universe and call out 'hello' to whoever might be there.
No wonder the extra-terrestrial hypothesis will not die. Evidentially it has long been on life support but it is a dream that we seem to share deep within the human spirit.
95% of what we see are readily explicable and the rest of things as yet unresolved might more likely be caused by things from this Earth rather than another.
But we do not want to be alone and we will cling on to that hope for as long as the lights in the sky fly amongst us.
SIGHTINGS:
MID AIR ENCOUNTER OVER ARIZONA
24 February 2018
“Was anybody, uh, above us that passed us like 30 seconds ago?” the voice of the pilot said.
“Negative,” an air traffic controller replied.
“Okay....Something did.”
These were the confused words spoken by the pilot of a Learjet operated by Phoenix Air and then flying at 37,000 feet over the western USA heading towards California.
He was talking to the Air Traffic Control at Albuquerque, New Mexico at about 3.30 pm on a bright sunny afternoon in late February.
So far this is just like hundreds of other mid-air encounters involving aircrew - although ones in broad daylight are rarer than nocturnal sightings where misperceptions of things such as meteors are common. These can look very spectacular far above the clouds in very clear air and not, of course, be seen below cloud cover on the ground. So might not easily be recognised at the time for what they are.
These factors can also make them look big and close and in a vulnerable aircraft very scary indeed. Such reports date back to the dawn of aviation. Because we had entered a strange new realm above the clouds and were seeing things that had always been visible through human eyes for the very first time.
“A UFO!” A voice from the Learjet cockpit interrupted the silence.
“Yeah,” the pilot followed with sounds like a chuckle
Three minutes after the above incident an American Airlines Airbus was flying at 40,000 feet and over the Sonoran Desert between Picacho and Mammoth not far away from where the Lear Jet had been.
Ironically this desert was the location of a close encounter in the famous Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind 40 years ago - a film based on real sightings in astronomer J Allen Hynek’s book ‘The UFO Experience’ . Also in that film was another scene of an aircraft to air traffic control communication based on a real case like this one.
The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) was caught on the hop when a US magazine featured the report in early March and took the remarkable step of quickly not only confirming the events had really occurred but authenticating a release of the digital recording between the control tower and both aircraft cockpits and allowing it to appear in the Phoenix New Times.
"Other than the brief conversation between two aircraft, the controller was unable to verify that any other aircraft was in the area," Lynn Lunsford, of the FAA said to the paper.
"We have a close working relationship with a number of other agencies and safely handle military aircraft and civilian aircraft of all types in that area every day, including high-altitude weather balloons."
This suggests that the FAA had not been aware of any such traffic due up there or were able to explain what was seen by the crews of the two jets just three minutes apart.
Albuquerque ATC had alerted the crew of the American Airbus 321 on a flight from Dallas to San Diego after seeing from their radar track that they were heading across the path of the object reported by the Lear Jet pilot just before. Though no UFO was on that screen. Just the two aircraft.
“American 1095, uh, let me know if, uh, you see anything pass over you here in the next, uh, 15 miles,” the controller says on the tape of the communication.
“Let you know if anything passes over us?” the pilot responded puzzled by the unusual request.
“American 1095, affirmative,” the controller said. “We had an aircraft in front of you … that reported something pass over him and, uh, we didn’t have any targets. So just, uh, let me know if you see anything pass over you.”
“Alright,” the pilot responded still a little confused.
Then the Lear Jet pilot returned to the conversation to add more detail for the crew of the new aircraft passing into the location where the UFO had been to digest.
“I don’t know what it was….It wasn’t an airplane, but it passed us going the opposite direction.”
Moments later, the Airbus pilot was back on air.
“It’s American 1095. Yeah, something just passed over us. Uh, I don’t know what it was, but at least two-three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over the top of us.”
That means that it was above the 40,000 feet that the Airbus 321 was then flying at.
“Okay, American 1095. Thank you,” the controller replied.
Then he asked the Airbus pilot: “Can you tell if it was, uh, in motion or just hovering?”
“No cannot make it out — whether it was a balloon or whatnot,” was the reply.
But the Airbus pilot added that the thing had a “big reflection” as it passed overhead. He said it was traveling “several thousand feet above us, going the opposite direction.”
“Was it a Google balloon?” came a suggestion from an unidentified voice.
“Doubtful,” the pilot replied.
To which another voice commented using that word again: “UFO.”
This was the extent of the mid air encounter described over the recording. But Lynn Lunsford, for the FAA, later issued a statement to The Washington Post that the air traffic controller was “unable to verify that any other aircraft was in the area.”
However, there were possible resolutions that the FAA were looking into.
“We have a close working relationship with a number of other agencies and safely handle military aircraft and civilian aircraft of all types in that area every day, including high-altitude weather balloons.”
However, no such identification had been made at date of writing that anything of that nature was in the area at the time.
In late March the pilot of the American Airbus gave an interview to his local US TV station KTAB to describe what he witnessed. He was Blenus Green, with 20 years of experience and a former B 1 pilot with the US Air Force.
‘I was looking out of the windscreen to see if it was there and, yeah, I did. I saw it. It was very bright but not so bright you couldn’t look at it…..It didn’t look anything like an airplane.’
He added that normally an object lit by the sun reveals its shape by illumination on the appropriate side - but ‘this was bright all the way around. It was so bright you couldn’t make it out - what shape it was.’
Whilst the Learjet pilot did not go on TV the boss of the Phoenix air group confirmed they had done a full debriefing with him and after talking to the pilot were left thinking ‘what the hell was it?’.
They said they had chosen not to go public because they were afraid he would be ‘overwhelmed’ with interest if they did. But he was a 15 year veteran with over 14,000 hours flying time.
The company did confirm that they were flying an Air Ambulance mission for the Military Air Mobility Command at the time. And says in the debriefing he and the co pilot both saw the object and said ‘what the hell is that?’
They also commented on the brilliance of the light emitted and how it felt like ‘when you woke up in morning and stared at a bright light’. So the illumination clearly was unusual. Though the skies over Arizona can be very clear at that height - it ‘filled the whole windshield’.
Both pilots used their fingers against the cockpit windscreen to try to judge height as it passed them in the opposite direction and estimate that the unknown object was at around 50,000 feet. Too far away for the aircraft collision alarm signal which never sounded.
The pilot was familiar with all sorts of balloons such as research experiments. But that this was not like one and they estimated it passed them moving at ‘a similar speed that an airliner would’ - which, if true, would eliminate a wind borne balloon as the explanation.
Mid Air encounters in daylight between aircraft and UFOs have been reported before but multiple sightings of the same object are rare. Incidents where the Air Traffic Control are directly involved also enhance this case.
One of the most interesting UK cases of this kind is the following:
15 July 1991 Sussex, UK
A Britannia Airways Boeing 737 was inbound to London Gatwick at 5.45 pm on a sunny summer afternoon after a return holiday flight from Crete in the Mediterranean.
Descending through 15,000 feet and crossing the Sussex coast south of Arundel and under London air traffic control the co-pilot spotted something approaching fast ahead of them. He yelled to the pilot a collision alert as it was only an estimated half a mile away when first seen and rushed rapidly past their right hand wing in seconds. They estimated it came within 300 feet of hitting them but they reported no wake turbulence.
They described the object as small - but it could have been larger and further away as the lack of wake suggests. It was reported to ATC and in the subsequent Air Proximity report and to the MoD UFO department described as resembling a ‘black lozenge’
London ATC reacted immediately to their radio report of the object and their description of it as a ‘near collision’. Gatwick radar control immediately confirmed that they had an unidentified target on radar that had just passed the 737 and its unsuspecting passengers and was now about 10 miles behind them rapidly heading out towards the English Channel.
The UFO was not any known military traffic and that it was not giving a transponder signal so not any known civilian traffic either. They measured its departure speed as about 120 MPH.
More seriously the lozenge was on the radar screens heading into the path of a second inbound aircraft following the 737 towards landing. Because it was further out it was slightly higher than the Britannia aircraft, but the ATC were not about to take chances and ordered the second aircraft to change course in a series of turns and clear out of the way of the unknown target.
The UFO on radar had changed its course, was below the second aircraft (whose crew did not ever see it) and soon after this change of course the object disappeared off Gatwick radar heading for France.
Because of the ‘live’ radio communication of this encounter aircraft enthusiasts were immediately alerted to this event as they overheard it and the media got quickly involved. The Civil Aviation Authority were not thrilled as they were planning a several month AirProx investigation and did not want to comment prematurely.
Needless to say some of the reporting was a little over the top and aliens and spaceships were hinted at when nothing of the kind was being described. The airline and the CAA were less than thrilled with this complication and tried to shut down cooperation - which only enhanced suspicions of course.
Quite reasonably the authorities expected to find an explanation of some sort with diligent enquiry. Perhaps a military drone had strayed into airspace where it should not be. But aliens were the last thing they needed to be talking about whilst that was happening.
At first the prime candidate for an explanation was a meteorological balloon, released every few hours to test wind speeds and directions at different heights. One had been released from nearby Crawley but it had been carefully plotted - which these things are as that is kind of the point of releasing them. It never got close to be at 15,000 feet near the 737.
Indeed it was at the point of the sighting heading east with the wind at 42 mph whilst the UFO had been heading south at three times that speed. Too fast given the wind then recorded for a balloon.
They did consider a ‘toy’ balloon released from a Summer fair, for example. But one of those being large enough, fast enough, flying against the wind and even reaching 15,000 feet without bursting was considered very unlikely.
A balloon expert suggested that there were records of these reaching 7000 feet - under half the altitude of this UFO. But the met office said they had no data of one reaching more than 6000 feet. Their weather balloons were larger and went much higher but they knew where they all were and none were near the 737.
The press furore soon died down and we managed to get access to a copy of the CAA report on their investigation in April 1992 - although it was to be 2009 before that file was released publicly via the Ministry of Defence UFO files.
Indeed I wrote about this case in my book covering mid air UFO sightings - Something in the Air (Robert Hale, 1998).
The team based at RAF Uxbridge did run with the toy balloon theory in the final analysis despite concerns over how one of these (at just a foot long) was close enough to be seen as described without actually striking the aircraft. Not to mention the fact that it could not be the unidentified target on radar as something that small would not register. Yet that appeared to be the same object seen visually.
Group Captain John Maitland did argue that he ‘suspected’ that it might be ‘some sort of small balloon’ but would not comment further as none were traced.
The CAA report concluded that they did not have enough evidence to judge ‘what damage could have occurred had the object struck the aircraft’ but agreed that ‘there had been a possible risk of collision’ with whatever the UFO was.
However, not long after the report there was a new type of toy balloon - the UFO Solar - that started to be sold in Europe. It used the sun’s rays, could reach great heights, travel long distances and was shaped as a 10 foot long black cigar shape.
Once these started to appear in UK shops the possibility that this was what was encountered over the Sussex coast did emerge as a possibility.
Though it remains unclear if it could have been tracked on radar (some balloons this size can be) or how it would have reached 120 MPH the case has to be considered as having a likely explanation.
Indeed several other similar cases were recorded in the next few years. But whether a balloon or some other kind of airborne UAP the risk to air traffic was obvious and became the basis of a then secret MoD file, the Condign Report, created around 2000 and eventually released (heavily redacted) more recently.
This report carried out by a military science expert under an MoD grant made clear that there was a risk of collision between air traffic and 'UAP' - a term he had adopted instead of UFO rather as many in the UFO community long have to avoid the implication that we are talking of some kind of machine. It is evident that the possibility being considered here was some sort of atmospheric phenomenon might also be a cause and source of threat.
When you bear in mind the concerns right now about the rising number of drones being flown by amateurs near to aircraft landing and taking off and the potential risk of collision, you can gauge the problem.
These drones are relatively small, often only inches across. These UAP appear much bigger and potentially far more deadly.
SPACE ODDITIES
The risk of flying 40,000 feet above the Earth and colliding with a UFO is obvious. Lives are at risk. But what if you are much higher and outside the planet's atmosphere altogether?
There have been many reports of UFO encounters involving missions into space. Mankind has been able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and reach orbit for over 60 years and we have landed astronauts on the Moon, sent robot probes to wander for years filming and digging into the surface of Mars and taped recordings of human civilization that have been despatched out beyond Pluto heading towards potential alien races trillions of miles away.
In many respects it is not a surprise that just as in an aircraft when ‘up there’ in space odd things have been perceived.
It is a new hostile environment and there is no atmosphere to distort vision so things look very strange. Plus most observation is done via many layers of equipment and very thick windows which act as the only barrier between life and almost instant death for the crew so necessarily heavily protected.
During many early manned flights from the late 50s onward things were seen for the first time - such as auroral displays around the pole from above. Or multiple micro meteorites visible in the vacuum of space in ways they never can be from beneath a thick atmosphere.
Debris ejected from missions and even human urine - literally humans 'boldly going' where no man has gone before - were mistaken for UFOs as they floated weightless and were curiously reflected by unfiltered sunlight.
Right up to the long duration shuttle missions of the 1990s and the permanent habitation of the international space station where astronauts have now been living often for a year at a time conducting experiments and observations free of our gravity there have been UFO sightings and claims of cover ups of alien contact.
Some of these appear to have involved observations of rare interactions between energy particles and the Earth's atmosphere that only became apparent when we were actually living in space for years on end and so in a position to catch one of these things occurring.
Most stories of astronaut UFOs have taken on a life of their own by telling and retelling of episodes that started off as a rumour or a joke and ended up being conveyed as truth by the 100th person to have relayed them.
I recall meeting a radio ham in London who told me with apparent sincerity that he had heard Neil Armstrong talk to NASA from the surface of the Moon in July 1969.
‘They saw aliens there - in a crater’ I was assured. He added that we axed future Moon missions on 'alien orders' and would never build a space station because ‘they’ had warned us off.
This non return to the Moon after the early 1970s with several later missions cancelled was, in reality, down to budgetary reasons as the cost of manned flight is huge and the risk to life immense when technology had improved to allow instruments to do all that was necessary more easily.
This tale was told to me just a few years before we actually did build that space station, so presumably the aliens relented and allowed us up there after all.
Fast forward to April 2018 and we now have a new story - that ‘lie detectors’ have proven that the astronauts were telling the truth when they described some of the most famous spaceborne close encounters.
Notably this meant one case involving Buzz Aldrin, now 88, and part of the crew of the lunar landing, Apollo 11, in July 1969, the first to land humans on any location off the Earth.
He was in fact the second human to set foot on the Moon minutes after Neil Armstrong ‘giant leap for mankind’ in which they saw those aliens up there who promptly sent us packing - if you believe the radio hack (as I don't).
Probably this is the one event that school children will be guaranteed to learn about from our lifetimes for the rest of future history.
The story that did the rounds in the UK media (a British tabloid started it) was that Aldrin had just passed a test that proved he had really seen aliens on route to the Moon.
That he had reported back to NASA ‘something out there that was close enough to be observed - sort of L shaped.’
However, he was understandably rather peeved within hours of this claim breaking - because that is not at all what really happened.
Here in his own words is what he really reported at the time:
"On Apollo 11 (in July 1969) en route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world -- it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft.
So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be ‘unidentified.’
‘We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network.
And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that i had not given them the information.
It was not an alien.
Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That's what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost CERTAIN that there is life somewhere in space. It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today.
But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away."
That is what Aldrin said on Reddit - the online news media question and answer site - about his sighting - whilst talking freely about the lunar landing.
That was back in 2015. It is consistent with past reports from him referring to the episode over the years. And as it predates the press report in April 2018 by 3 years was not influenced by it.
Okay, so no UFO then, let alone aliens. So what about the lie detector test?
Well even that is a bit misleading. The story broke in the British tabloid media on 8 April 2018 and involves a claim that Aldrin and several other astronauts - Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell and Al Worden had all taken part in an experimental test of new equipment by the Institute of Bio-acoustic biology in Ohio.
Which they did - sort of - but without any of them knowing - which was particularly true in the cases of Cooper and Mitchell as both were dead when the testing occurred - Cooper 14 years before!
The organisation involved used some new equipment they are marketing on their web site to test the voices recorded at the time of these astronauts all describing back to NASA by radio what they saw and which in later years have been said by some researchers to be UFO events.
They aimed to establish that a better kind of test on voice was possible, although lie detectors are notorious for uncertainty about their provenance and are rarely used when establishing this is a necessity such as in a court of law.
This is what they reported about the test they did on Aldrin’s voice from the 1969 message to Earth without him knowing about it.
‘Aldrin believes what he is saying emotionally but has doubts intellectually. His ego, on a highly spiritual level, is solidly involved. He has a firm belief in what he saw but logical awareness that he cannot explain what he saw; therefore he thinks he should be doubted. His gut level emotions and system of integrity is well grounded with the exception that he has some issues around people asking too much of him and expecting him to take care of things for them. For the benefit of the people, he wants his statements about his seeing a UFO to be believed.’
Exactly how you equate that interpretation using this new equipment with what Aldrin himself said three years before that assessment of his radio voice 49 years ago is up to you.
But as proof of alien contact or a major cover up of a close encounter?
Sorry, not for me.
APEN AND UFOs - RENDLESHAM FOREST Will be held over until the May issue.

192
March
2018
March
2018
THE PC PERKS SPECIAL - left PC Perks sketch of UFO, centre site of encounter, right sketch by Mrs Walker
with thanks to Google Earth
with thanks to Google Earth
EDITOR: JENNY RANDLES
10 Marton Green Stockport Cheshire SK3 8LT
e mail address: nufon@btinternet.com
Contents: The future of the UFO conference.....Special in depth case history - everything you need to know about the PC Perks, Wilmslow, Cheshire close encounter and its importance to UFO research
J R COMMENTS:
CONFERENCE CALLS
For almost the entire history of UFOs there have been conferences - or conventions as they are sometimes called, especially in the early days and in America. They still happen to this day, and several are promoted at the back of this issue of Northern UFO News for later in 2018.
They are outliving most of the local investigation groups and the national associations - such as BUFORA in the UK. These once ran such events virtually every year and crowds of hundreds or even thousands would attend. At one big event near Hyde Park in London I recall even a famous newscaster wandering around with a camera crew filming an item for the national news. This was at the height of UFO fascination when the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was hot 40 years ago this month!
I have lost count of how many of these events, often lasting two or three days, that I must have attended or lectured at since my first one in Manchester. Though I do recall with a smile my lecture that day at UMIST ending by asking for questions and the sight as the whole audience turned as one - not to see me, but the questioner, whose voice they recognised!
It was none other than William Roache, father of Linus (US TV star of Law and Order and, currently, with Clare Danes in the latest series of Homeland). William himself is equally famous as his alter ego Ken Barlow in Coronation Street - a character he has played continuously for 55 years - making him the longest running actor in a single role in the history of world television. Even then I knew that he has long had an interest in strange phenomena and I interviewed him for my book - Phantoms of the Soap Operas.
My experience of these events all over the world since 1975 have been mostly enjoyable and they are a great opportunity for like-minded people to talk freely to one another and for worried witnesses to test the water and hear ideas about what might have happened to them and, just perhaps, come forward and report their story for the first time.
The local media can also be attracted and in turn the promotion can help a group get their message across to the public.
So I am the last person to decry their value and I have long been willing to give presentations and not charge lecture fees as I know some authors are wont to do. I was happy to talk just for travel expenses in the same way that I did when invited to schools, arts festivals, libraries or bookstores. Indeed I gained as much from being there as I hope the audiences sometimes did.
I got to meet many of my own childhood heroes at these events, too, sometimes even sharing a platform with them left me rather star struck. This left me as thrilled as anyone to watch Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallee, John Keel and many more major players in UFO history present their views. And I was willing to suspend judgement and enjoy being a somewhat more reductionist foil when appearing alongside pop culture presenters like Eric von Daniken.
These big names were there for a reason, of course, as I understand from the conferences that I have had some hand in organising. The first one being the BUFORA event in Birmingham in 1976 where I was not myself yet beingasked to present talks - indeed Peter Warrington and I had just started work on our first book together - UFOs: A British Viewpoint.
But I remember the discussions as the event was put together and some of the presentations - from Roy Dutton’s attempt to create a mathematical model of UFO event prediction to the neatly titled lecture about photographic cases - They Shoot UFOs, don’t they?
Then there was a Fortean Times London event where Budd Hopkins declined to debate so was replaced by a cut-out, and Vienna, where I fell off a stage at the start of my talk and had to present with broken fingers ignoring the pain, or Sydney where I had to walk out amidst dry ice to the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey in what felt like an extraordinarily cringeworthy entrance.
Another one in Manchester in 1997 saw me give a talk to an X Files convention along with Jane Goldman, writer of one of my favourite movies, Stardust (by chance the film that made a star out of Clare Danes - looping synchronistically back to my other Manchester appearance two decades earlier).
At the X Files event I had to fill in at a Q and A audience session when special guest Jerry Hardin - Deep Throat from the X FIles TV series - was otherwise engaged (no doubt plotting more machinations of the cover up!)
However, fun as such events have been, most actual UFO conferences have never really progressed UFO research in any meaningful way. They raise the profile of a group or, these days, sell a popular on line access tabloid paranormal publication, and, of course bring in funds because nobody pays anyone to do UFO research this side of the MIB in the mythical employ of some covert intelligence agency.
Only one conference that I attended ever achieved that. This was in June 1992 and occurred in (or more correctly just across the Charles River in Cambridge from) Boston, Massachusetts.
This event was at MIT - the most prestigious university and considered the world leader in science. Here for five days occurred what in my view qwas a model event was held that should have been a template for the future of UFOlogy.
Yet somehow never was.
What the MIT UFO Abduction Symposium did was act as a working event, sponsored by a grant to pay for invited speakers to attend. And to be not so much aimed at the public so featuring talks on popular topics to gather the generally interested. It was created by a physicist and a psychologist and set the aim of laying down what we knew about alien abductions and what we needed to know to progress knowledge, with suggestions as to how we might go about bridging that gap.
Researchers around the world were sent a list of themes and questions and encouraged to present papers on as many of these as they wished.
They were also encouraged to conduct original experiments or test out ideas posed by the set of questions. Those invited were based on the submissions offered and told which papers they should get together, along with any projects, over the coming months.
At the event itself there were witnesses, scientists, sceptics and researchers from around the world. I was unfortunately the only one invited from the UK but was honoured to do so and presented several papers - one based on an original experiment into the difference between imagined aliens as perceived by those who had read UFO literature and those who had not.
Each presentation was strictly timed by buzzer light alarm on the podium and restricted to just a few minutes to ensure no waffle. I can see many of you gawping at the prospect of me doing that! It worked, though, creating a fact packed week of papers with ample time to debate around the issues and time at the end to determine protocols to put in place for future research.
The media were not widely invited but one award winning reporter was asked - CDB Bryan - who (and here we go looping back coincidentally again) was the author of the 1976 book Friendly Fire, investigating a real life military incident during the Vietnam War. In the movie of his book Bryan himself was played by Sam Waterston, later to become the Attorney in the long running US TV franchise Law and Order. The role that then passed to Linus Roache when Sam had moved on.
Bryan’s book (Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind) based on his time at the MIT event is an excellent outsider’s perspective. He started out as a sceptic knowing little, as he told me when he interviewed me during the event, but he was clearly being won over by the care and concern being applied to this event by the organisers, David Pritchard and John Mack.
Mack wrote a best-selling book on abductions but tragically died not long after in an accident when he was in London. Pritchard, the scientist, compiled all the presentations and Q & A sessions into a mammoth book afterwards.
Together these two volumes convey the facts but not the excitement of trying something really new that this event represented.
Anyone who had anything to contribute that might help us decide the way to take abduction research had the chance to take part whatever their perspective. And as such it was almost unique in UFO history.
Of course, it was hugely ambitious - possibly overly so as it tackled such a big area of our research and over so many days was awash with ideas and information. So as a legacy it probably did not change a great deal.
But I was surely not the only one who hoped this was a pointer towards the future.
I mooted to several sources in UFO research at the time that we needed to do something like this in the UK - more narrowly focused, perhaps, so there was a smaller area of study that could be covered in a few days with new ideas and protocols suggested.
Indeed I suggested something like Car Stop or Vehicle Interference cases was a good place to start. There are maybe 1000 such reports well documented in UFO history and they form a coherent set of questions as to what causes a car engine or lights or both to fail in the presence of a UFO.
These cases point right at the heart of the cause of UFOs, as they imply a physically real energy. They are not reliant on perception or imagination. Hard science is involved. What is more there were obvious opportunities here to bring in outsiders - people who have never had an interest in UFOs or looked at the evidence. Car mechanics, electronic engineers, physicists and so on might well have invaluable suggestions and avenues of future research to offer to the inevitably more narrowly focused perspectives of UFO researchers.
So here was a chance for a really focused UK event on the lines of the MIT conference - something that just might have taken us forward.
Unfortunately, I could not persuade any major group to consider it as it would sacrifice the commercial opportunism that conferences have always been. You cannot make money from and might need to pay for the running of an event of this type. So it was a no go and back to inviting big name speakers talking about their latest case or theory to as many members of the public who will buy a ticket.
I feel this is a big missed opportunity in UFO research and that, if we ever want to get beyond being seen as a bunch of enthusiasts trying to persuade a disbelieving world that aliens have landed, then we have to think out of the loop like this and take some risks.
I have on UFO chat lists suggests that we might take advantage of the rise of the internet and the ability to have virtual conferences and instant communication through electronic mail means that this possibly could be done cost free and more easily than was possible 26 years ago.
Still no interest has surfaced. But I honestly believe that this is the future of UFO research. It does not have to be on Car Stop cases. It can any of many possible selective areas of UFO research where we can bring outsiders into the assessment process.
In fact being out of the public limelight might attract people who would never dream of giving a paper at a UFO conference and risk being reported in the local rag.
When MUFORA - the local Manchester group that helped found this magazine some 44 years ago - was active we found ways to work on cases in a similar way - getting help from those who would not do so openly but were intrigued by the mystery to offer suggestions and insights.
This way we often got scientists at Jodrell Bank to assist with data or even run an experiment. We got help from atmospheric physicists and even Ministry of Defence specialists to case conference significant reports. Peter Warrington and I also spent time with Kodak at their labs in Hemel Hempstead assessing and trying to solve UFO photographic cases.
On one occasion we were even able to trap a UFO and solve a series of cases by coordinating a skywatch on its path with Peter being in the radar room of a major facility watching the tracks of air traffic as the UFO appeared. As a result its identity was for one of the first times ever 100% solved.
It was a major airline with a regular cargo flight throttling back engines and all but gliding in lights off so they could enjoy the view - whilst scaring the hell out of witnesses below them on the flightpath.
This extraordinary experiment not only solved a case that might otherwise have never been solved but it ended up being portrayed on TV as an episode of the long running TV series Heartbeat.
Sadly we got no credit for that, but they did acknowledge to me that our work was the source for the fictional account where the plucky copper solved the UFO sightings in a darn sight less time and more easily than we did in real life.
So, I remain convinced that the legacy of the MIT conference is there to be explored. And I just wonder how we go about finding a way to make this work to the benefit of some real progressive UFO research.
Let us know if you have any suggestions!
AS I WAS PROCEEDING….
The full story of the PC Perks, Wilmslow, Cheshire case
In the book Who or What Were They? by Alan Godfrey (2017) there is reference to a case that was relevant to his own story in many ways - the encounter of another police officer 14 years before him in the nearby county of Cheshire.
That previous case was mentioned because of Alan’s dramatic new revelation that someone professing to be from the Ministry of Defence had visited him at Todmorden police station to reinforce his allegiance to the Official Secrets Act .
Alan was persuaded under supervision by his senior station officer to not discuss several things.
These included more than just his own close encounter from a patrol car on Burnley Road Todmorden, West Yorkshire, in November 1980. He was also quizzed regarding letters that the MoD were aware had been sent to PC Godfrey from a scientist in Moscow.
The letters were asking him questions and seeming to link his story to the well-known events in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, just 4 weeks after Alan’s own encounter. The ‘Man from the Ministry’ wanted these letters - which arrived at a time before the wider British public learned of that case via its front page coverage in the News of the World in October 1983.
So concerned was PC Godfrey over this MoD interest in a Soviet Union contact that he destroyed the last letter over fear for the safety of his family.
Puzzlingly the policeman was also enforced the secrecy act to prevent him discussing his on scene presence and subsequent investigation of a mystery death involving the discovery of a body atop a coal heap in Todmorden. That happened some five months prior to his UFO encounter.
This death went through three inquest sessions, to which Alan was never called, despite being first on scene and officer who was present at the identification of the body of Zigmund Adamski - a man who disappeared 5 days earlier for no known reason over 20 miles away. He was also the PC who traced a key witness that proved Adamski was already dead before he arrived on that heap of coal his eyes staring skyward seemingly in fear.
There are local rumours to this day about what really happened to Adamski but the inquest left the verdict open, nobody was ever arrested in connection and the Coroner later called it the most puzzling case of his career. He even told the press he did not rule out a possible UFO connection - although there is no actual evidence for one beyond coincidence of Alan Godfrey’s role and a reported sighting nearby a few hours before the body was found.
Whatever the case this visit from an alleged MoD officer was a factor in Alan Godfrey leaving the force when his position became hard to sustain under such restraint and given his fear for the safety of his young family.
However, there was one problem with this visit by that Official Secrets Act toting officer. The Ministry of Defence supposedly do not investigate UFO cases first hand. They merely collect sightings on bits of paper from police or airports and file them in their office - tens of thousands of which have been released over the last 20 years onto the Public Record Office.
They occasionally do some internal investigation, but - according to heads of the MoD department over the years, notably Nick Pope, who left the MoD to become a UFO writer - they do not visit witnesses at the scene as seemingly was the case with Alan in 1982 if this man was who he claimed to be.
Yet, when I collated several stories where witnesses claimed the same thing had happened to them for my book ‘The truth behind the Men in Black Phenomenon’ Nick Pope told me clearly that he thought these stories were probably caused by rogue UFO investigators who were pretending to be with the government and in effect visiting witnesses in ‘disguise’.
As there was a most peculiar band of UFO investigators who called themselves APEN - Aerial Phenomena Enquiry Network - who between at least 1974 and 1984 acted very strangely in connection with major UFO cases and went to some lengths to seem to confuse and discredit genuine UFO researchers - that is not quite so absurd as it sounds.
In next month’s Northern UFO News I will look in more detail at the APEN story and their little known connection with this magazine, Rendlesham Forest and more - as I had several run ins with them myself.
However, there is no obvious reason to connect APEN directly with the MIB cases I have investigated such as Alan Godfrey’s where an origin in the Ministry of Defence was clearly stated. APEN always wanted to take credit for their actions not hide behind the MoD. And it seemed improbable that they would forge official credentials or risk using them to enter a police station and jointly quiz a policeman alongside his commanding officer.
Moreover in Alan’s book much added evidence was given as to why the Man from the Ministry at least had actual authority within and over the police force and at the headquarters of the force itself. Alan later saw him there, for example. Rogue UFO investigators cannot explain any of that.
As you will see - though - this case from 1966 offers a much more direct support for Alan Godfrey’s story. Alan had no idea about the existence of this previous episode when we were writing his story last year. I had to inform him about it.
But it indicates at the very least that one swallow does not have to make a Summer on its own when we have solid proof of a second one.
The events occurred in the north Cheshire town of Wilmslow, south of Stockport. A prosperous place that has many TV celebs and footballers living locally who have called it home in the decades since these events.
PC Colin Perks was working the very same shift as Alan Godfrey - 10 pm to 6 am - and it was in the early hours of Friday 7 January 1966 when he saw what he did.
At the time he was 28, married with a baby daughter living locally in town. He had trained as a motor mechanic before joining the force in 1962.
That Thursday/Friday night shift was cold with a light easterly breeze and clear skies but brightly lit with the Moon actually at full.
After 3 hours on shift PC Perks had a refreshment break between 1.15 am and 2 am in the station before heading off back into the chilly streets to patrol the shops looking out for any trouble.
He was in fact engaged very much in the same jobs that Alan Godfrey was 14 years later, though alone on foot, not in a patrol car as was Alan.
After walking the area without incident for about two hours PC Perks was on what was then the A 34 Alderley Road (which to the north headed towards Manchester as Wilmslow Road and to the south towards Alderley Edge - associated long associated with tales of the supernatural, wizards and witchcraft popularised in the books of Alan Garner).
Today it still exists but is a B road as the A 34 is now a modern by pass around Wilmslow. Perks walked around the Rex Cinema and headed south checking property for any signs of a break in at the large rows of shops in this area. At about 4.10 am he was checking the rear yard area of one shop with a deserted car park and service access road to the shops adjacent when he heard a strange noise.
‘I heard a high pitched whine for a moment,’ he told BUFORA in a report signed 1 May 1966. ‘I couldn’t place the noise as it was most unfamiliar with the normal surroundings.’ He later added that his initial thought was that it was an alarm at a jewellers shop but that was quickly recognised as not the case given the steady and high pitched note.
He turned around towards the source of the noise, now facing south east across the empty car park and a field beyond with the main rail line south towards Crewe and London a few hundred yards away. Most of the land beyond here was open countryside then and indeed still is.
The general view from where PC Perks was located during his sighting is indicated from the Google streetview image on the cover. This dates from 2017 and the store to the left is the building he was checking and the car park is the same one. There are more things in the view now but the UFO was to the right of shot as you are looking into the picture.
As he continued in the BUFORA report - ‘ I turned around and saw a greenish grey glow in the sky about 100 yards from me and 35 feet up in the air. I stopped in my tracks unable to believe what I could see.’
He paused for a few seconds to gather his composure and then made the following observations. It was ‘about the length of a bus - 30 feet….I estimate it being 20 feet wide and 15 feet high. It was elliptic in shape and emanated the greenish grey glow which I can only describe as an eerie greeny colour….It appeared to be motionless of itself, that is there was no impression of rotation. It had a flat bottom.’
He told fellow police officer Gary Heseltine - a UFO investigator - that there was no light emerging from the underside making the air below seem dark. But the green glow spread out on all sides from the object by several feet. He described the shape as being ‘tiered’ and akin to a ‘dustbin lid’.
You can see Colin Perk's sketch of the object on the cover.
Throughout these observations the high pitched whine emerging from it did not alter in pitch. It was stationary for about 5 seconds before it started to move very fast away towards the east south eastwards vanishing rapidly.
Of this motion PC Perks reported: ‘It did not appear to rotate but move off sideways with the 30 ft side to the front and rear. It is possible that the short side given as 20 ft may in fact be longer as I was looking under the object at the time and may have been deceived.’
He insisted ‘there is no doubt the object I saw was of a sharp, distinctive, definite shape and of a solid substance.’ He saw no ‘portholes or other place of access’ but ‘the glow was from the exterior of the object. This was the only light visible.’
PC Perks was, of course, aware of then fairly recently electrified main line railway ‘about 500 yards east of me’ and referred to it in his report to BUFORA pre-empting suspicions that he had had himself but saying it was not connected with the wiring or operations here:- ‘The noise I heard had nothing to do with electric trains’.
He contacted from the police station later that day both Jodrell Bank science centre and Manchester Airport, each just a few miles away. Neither had any explanation to offer for what the officer had seen.
Other details from his BUFORA report were that the object was brighter than the full Moon very visible that night and resembled a ‘luminous dial’ as found on some 1960s florescent ‘glow in the dark’ clocks and watches. He says its path away from him was level to the ground at a consistent height.
He also described the noise as ‘that of a high speed electric motor’.
His sketch of the UFO is very much like a classic flying saucer shape - rather more than you might expect from his actual account. He used the term ‘dustbin lid’ when asked to liken it to a familiar object by BUFORA.
When asked to give an opinion as to what the UFO was he states intriguingly: ‘Flying craft of the future’.
The form was filed with BUFORA but no actual investigation seems to have happened in 1966. It was assessed by John Cleary Baker who concluded that the fact that the officer immediately reported it to his superior officer on return to Wilmslow police station ruled out a hoax as ‘flying saucer spotting is hardly an open sesame to promotion in the police force in the UK’.
He also assessed the prospect of a sudden hallucination but pointed out that as he was outside in the cold and alert checking stores that whilst in a single witness case it ‘could be due to hallucination, of course. (so) one is obliged to fall back on common sense’ and that he rejects hallucination because of the lack of ‘any obvious reason why otherwise normal persons could suddernly become the prey of gross delusions’.
After a promising start to the assessment, J-C-B, as he was known and whom I never met as I joined BUFORA council a decade later, drifts into ‘the possible reasons for the UFO being where it was at 4.10 am’ and rules out survey missions and so asks ‘what are these low hovering UFOs really up to?’
This rather shows the thinking of UFOlogists five decades ago where the idea that it was a craft and what it was up to is taken as a given. As opposed to my thoughts that this sounds like some intriguing kind of UAP - an electrical energy or plasma or ball lightning akin phenomenon and the presence of the electric railway might not have been irrelevant.
So, yes, intriguing case but with an aftermath that really makes it into even more of one - as we are very far from telling the full story yet.
In those days there were no personal radios and to report back to base officers had to go to a phone box (indeed special police ones like that in Doctor Who were still then situated around towns for this purpose but ordinary phone boxes were used too).
PC Perks was calling in every half an hour but after this returned to the station to advise his sergeant. The officer could see the shock in his face and despite fellow officers chuckling about whether there were any Daleks aboard, passed it on to the superintendant. It then made its way to the Chief Constable of Cheshire and, with the clear belief of those who knew PC Perks, decided to file an official report with the Ministry of Defence.
Where, of course, the file sat for the next 30 years with its secrets awaiting discovery in 1997 - although we did have a clue about something interesting before then.
BUFORA learned about this case when a short item appeared in the Daily Mirror on 3 March 1966: - ‘Beg to report, Sir, one flying saucer’. This was what led to them seeking a report from the officer itself.
Though the press story was only a brief account it did have one intriguing sentence in it that BUFORA seemingly missed: -’ A Man from the Ministry went to Wilmslow to investigate’.
Man from the Ministry was the very phrase that 16 years later the person used to describe himself by when he went to Todmorden to see Alan Godfrey.
It would be three decades before we learned more about that earlier visit in Wilmslow than the one line the Mirror.
Meanwhile the case was quietly forgotten by UFOlogy until 9 years later, in 1975, when I was asked to join the council of BUFORA at a meeting at Newchapel Observatory in Staffordshire organised by Tony Pace.
In those days computers cost millions and were the size of a room. Having science A levels I had recently spent a year before college working for an insurance company to transfer all the car registration details around the UK from hand card index files onto their first computer.
BUFORA, of course, could not afford an actual computer (home ones were still a decade away) but designed a system using knitting needles! As I had worked with card transfers and could knit I got the job of transferring data from raw case files to these cards. They had holes punched in them that allowed some sort of analog version of a computer sorting process to occur when looking for data. A system that had had its day pretty much as soon as the process of transferring thousands of UFO files onto it was completed !
As a result I spent a long time viewing all the BUFORA case files and re-evaluating them into a four tier system designed for the transfer. I also made copious notes of cases like this one that I was trying to persuade BUFORA to let me write up as ‘Case Histories’ that would present their best cases and raise funds for the group.
Sadly we never did more than one of these - the Peter Day Cine Film case released as ‘Fire in the Sky’ (before there was a UFO movie of that title about a different case!) But at least I can partly put that right here with this detailed study of what would have been one of those case histories.
In the knitting needle computer system at BUFORA a Red rated case meant solved as an IFO, orange meant it was very likely an IFO but this had not been proven, Yellow meant it could still be an IFO but had enough interesting features to possibly be unexplained so needed more data. And Green meant it was on present evidence interesting and currently unexplained.
The PC Perks case had no real evaluation on it other than the comments from JCB (John Cleary Baker) in the file itself. It had been filed and forgotten. I checked through old copies of the BUFORA magazine and his comments in the two paragraph evaluation on the file that I summarised earlier did appear in the Summer 1966 edition of that journal but there was nothing new. And no follow up appeared in the magazine until I stopped looking after 1968.
However, my coding process of all the BUFORA files turned up a bit of a twist as there was a second sighting of the same object that nobody at BUFORA had spotted to connect with the PC Perks case. Perhaps because the witness gave two possible dates, one of which was ruled out as soon as I accessed weather records. So it clearly was the other date - which the witness described as 4.30 am on 7 January 1966 and within minutes of PC Perks.
This witness was a 52 year old catalogue compiler, Mrs Walker. She lived near Styal Prison just outside Morley Green, down the Altrincham Road with a view over fields back to what is now a Texaco garage toward where PC Perks was located. This was about a mile south and east of where the PC was in Wilmslow.
Her account was quite sketchy and not pursued for reasons apparent in a moment. It was basically a report form sent in by DIGAP - the Stockport based UFO group affiliated to BUFORA in the late 50s and 60s and indeed this magazine in the 70s. MUFORA occasionally did joint investigations with them as late as the 1980s and the psychologist Dr John Dale, involved in the Silpho Moor ‘crashed saucer’ affair (see Northern UFO News 191) was a member.
Mrs Walker describes seeing a ‘pearly luminous green’ saucer like object with f- rom her sketch - obvious similarities to what PC Perks drew. She was in her bedroom and ‘looked through the window’ to see this object ‘stationary’ and ‘it then moved away at terrific speed (70 mph)’ . She reported no sound. It was said to be in view ‘3 to 4 seconds’. Her drawing from the form is on the cover, too.
Not having connected it with the PC Perks case - despite the weather described on the form establishing quickly to me it was on the same night - BUFORAs investigation team of the time had evaluated it on its own. On 24 November 1966 it was concluded by them as ‘Insufficient information - such as there is perfectly consistent with meteor.’
So it was officially filed as solved and as a ‘Bolide’, or fireball meteor, some of which are known to be green and which is not at all an unreasonable conclusion when seeing this report in isolation.
Or, indeed, even in conjunction with PC Perks. Apart from the lack of hundreds of other reports beyond Wilmslow that surely would have resulted if this was the answer. I searched hard for these but could not find any apart from a brief account in Flying Saucer Review of a shipboard sighting from the Irish Sea several hours earlier that night.
However, there was a very definite meteor event two weeks earlier - on Christmas Eve, 1965, when the biggest (to date) meteor to hit land in Britain struck the village of Barwell, in Leicestershire at tea time. One of the largest pieces was retrieved from a hole under the local park the very week that the PC Perks story broke.
All told many pieces were recovered but the majority of the rock that shattered on passage through the atmosphere and on impact is still lying in pieces locally unrecovered in that Leicestershire village.
Amazingly nobody was hurt on the ground, despite one smashing a window in a house and the fragment landing in a vase where it went undiscovered by the homeowners for weeks. Another damaged a car and the poor owner was denied the cost of repairs as the insurance company deemed it an act of God. So the owner asked the local Church to pay up and they refused also!
Many witnesses out carol singing saw the fall over the space of a minute or two and some even walked over the fragments on the night unaware what it was. Even the poor car owner thought it was a rock tossed by vandals.
Only a very brief white flash of light was seen before impact. Certainly nothing like PC Perks or Mrs Walker described.
A bolide as large as the one this case would have to be would surely have been recorded by astronomers but I cannot find evidence that it was.
So in 1975 I grouped these two reports together as soon as I saw them and wrote on the file ‘This report appears to be a backp-up witness to PC Perks and the story is very consistent with his description’.
I classified the whole case as Green so potentially unexplained.
Tony Pace at Newchapel Observatory, when later preparing the files in a future BUFORA case reshuffle (28 Jan 1980) noted below my assessment: ‘See above - if you refer to the PC Perks case - this one may be more significant as corroborative evidence? ‘
This was, as far as I know, the extent of what BUFORA did with this case file - although it is possible they have re-evaluated it again since I left any official job with the group 20 years ago as I have, of course, not seen their files during that time.
Interestingly when I traced the 1966 Mirror report cited above I found that their ‘science reporter’, Arthur Smith, had offered what I today recognise as a pretty good stab at explaining this case - one we would today term a UAP. He pointed out that: ‘strange electrical conditions of the atmosphere sometimes lead to sightings of this sort’.
Indeed, this is interesting because of two clues that emerged later when I and also ex policeman Gary Heseltine managed to actually talk to PC Perks. He reported then that a few yards from where he stood watching the object there was an electricity sub-station. However, he was adamant that the humming noise that emerged was nothing like any faint hum he ever heard from that facility. But, of course, seeing an unusual atmospheric phenomena of an electrical nature near to both a then new electric rail line and a sub station is something we have to at least consider might be related.
I would really wish someone in UFO research had asked the science writer to say more about what he meant about ‘strange electrical conditions’ (ball lightning perhaps?)and to cite other examples he must have known about to say what he did. Unfortunately this will have been seen as an offhand sceptical dismissal by UFO researchers. A UFO was a UFO was a spaceship back then, not something boring like a UAP.
One other thing appears to be reported from PC Perks, but I do not know where or how, as - so far as I can tell - he did not say this to Gary Heseltine and did not to me either, is that a US catalogue of UFO related animal disturbance cases reports that PC Perks said dogs in the local area were seemingly reacting to the high pitched whine he heard.
If true, that is most interesting as it may tell us something about the frequency of the whining sound. But I can find no source for it.
UFO researchers of 1966 will have been happier with what PC Perks told the press conference. He told me this was set up by his boss, a sergeant (but the Mirror did not quote this part). Perks said: ‘I have always been sceptical about flying saucers and life in outer space but there is no other explanation.’
Yet recall his BUFORA report form 7 weeks later describes the object as a ’flying craft of the future.’
The next step takes us to January 1997 when the 30 year rule allowed the MoD to release onto the Public Record Office in Kew all the remaining UFO files from 1966 and, from then onward, all future years in annual batches. Until the Freedom of Information Act of the early 2000s led to the more rapid release of all subsequent files up to 2010.
After that point the MoD stopped collating UFO data altogether and closed their 'X Files'. The process of that file release programme has only recently ended.
UFO researcher Nick Redfearn was the first person to visit Kew in 1997 and find the MoD file on the PC Perks case. I accessed it a few months later and then set about trying to find and interview him. I did so , eventually, but he was extremely reluctant to talk at first. I only discovered why when he agreed to say a few things two years later.
He told me that just like Alan Godfrey after his 1980 sighting PC Perks had been reminded that he was a signatory to the Official Secrets Act and so should not talk about the incident once there was an MoD investigation. Yet just 8 weeks later the police openly asked him to give a press conference to tell his story!
What’s more they allowed the police to report that the case was ‘secret’ and under investigation by the Ministry.
Readers of Who or What Were They? will see the pattern here was repeated and how it confused Alan Godfrey and led him to suspect someone was trying to get him out of the force. It was certainly a very contradictory act in both cases - sign the official secrets act, keep quiet, but here go and talk to all these reporters and tell your story to the tabloid press.
The MoD file on release in 1997 reveals that this report was forwarded to them by Manchester Airport after PC Perks called them to ask if they knew what it was the next day. He confirmed to me that they told him they would be sending it on to the Air Ministry. Which was standard practice.
Perks explained that on return to the station other officers present said he looked like he had seen a ghost. But they soon realised he was deadly serious. In fact so persuaded was his sergeant that at first light after his shift was officially over Perks, his sergeant and another PC went to the sighting location and discovered some shards of glass on the area of the deserted car park. They considered it might be car windscreen or lamp fragments but on a subsequent visit the debris had ‘disappeared’.
On the day of the press conference two months later resulting in the Mirror story his station superintendent, Hugh Kenworthy, had, Perks said, referred to him as a ‘reliable’ officer and a ‘trained observer’ and that this was why he involved the Cheshire chief constable - who in turn also contacted the MoD, triggering them to investigate. The Mirror omitted that part too.
At that conference Supt Kenworthy told the reporters (only one of whom mentioned this and just in the local paper) ‘I am reasonably satisfied that this man (PC Perks) has seen something very unusual.’ He added (again ignored by the national press) ‘ The Ministry investigated….The sighting has remained a secret.’
When I called Perks he was surprised that the details of what the MoD did once they began to follow up his case had now been revealed, because, he told me, he had been reminded that he should not talk about that part.
Consequently he never told BUFORA and expected never to do so as he took the secrets act seriously.
Despite several attempts he was reluctant to go any further than the above with me at that stage and sadly died before I got chance to ask him again about the content of the MoD file released.
As for that file, about 20 pages on the case - referenced National Archive file: AIR 2/17983 - this carried his report and sketch, seemingly identical with the ones given to BUFORA, the tick form filled in from his call to Manchester Airport and forwarded to the MoD, again adding nothing, and a letter from his Superintendent supporting his status as a respected officer in terms much as noted above from Kenworthy.
But what was interesting was that four copies of these reports had been sent to DI 61 - a defence intelligence unit.
Even more remarkably it was from here that they sent an officer to visit the sighting location and search for the glass like shards the three policemen said they found in the area hours after the sighting. The MoD men interviewed the policeman in considerable detail. They clearly took this report seriously enough to do that.
Questions asked included: ‘a number of points arising from the statement (PC Perks) made on the 8th January," said the DI 61 supervising officer in the file.
These questions were : "What sort of noise did the UFO make?" "What was its speed when it began to move?" "What was its altitude?".
That visit from the MoD to Wilmslow occurred on 1 February 1966 and included the site of the discovery of some traces of the ‘glassy’ substance on the ground, as described. This was on the open land over which Perks had seen the UFO hover 4 weeks earlier. As seen in the Google scene on the cover.
The Man from the Ministry did not seem convinced the debris was relevant to the case but DI 61 were sufficiently puzzled to ask for radar files to be checked for the time of the event. Nothing was observed by Manchester Airport radar at the time, and nothing seems to have been reported back for the date and time as far as the file indicates.
The DI 61 officer who assessed this case file, we presume after visiting Perks, was Flight Lt Mercer. On 18 February he concluded the report by saying that the ‘single witness nature’ of the case made it ‘difficult to evaluate’.
Sadly they never seem to have been aware of the back-up witness from Morley lurking in the BUFORA files. Though it is not likely it would have made much difference other than establishing the UFO itself was actually real. Which I think the MoD had accepted anyway.
Mercer did conclude that had some scientific observer been present during the event ‘it would probably be quite easily explained.’ Though did not suggest in what way that might be. But he said that he was satisfied with the sincerity of the account and that something happened that puzzled PC Perks.
As for Flight Lt Mercer believing that someone scientifically trained on site could have identified the event. Perhaps they would or perhaps not, and the actual nature of what was seen is certainly open to interpretation.
Of course, concluding that it was a flying craft from the future, as Perks had put it in his BUFORA report, or from space, as I think the BUFORA investigators of the day hoped, would clearly be pushing it.
But what this case reveals with total clarity is that the events reported by Alan Godfrey in his new book are not at all unprecedented - as pretty much the same thing happened to this young copper who saw a UFO in similar circumstances but 14 years before Alan.
Indeed he was then also paraded in front of the media, reminded of the Official Secrets Act and visited by a Man from the Ministry (in this case department DI - as in Defence Intelligence - 61 - which appears to have been involved in following up other UFO cases that might involve physical evidence of some sort reported by public servants).
That link alone is evidence for the potential veracity of both a cover up of sorts and the many other cases where witnesses claim they were visited and ordered to stay silent following a close encounter by people claiming to be from the MoD.
I have investigated half a dozen such cases myself in the UK - which obviously poses one very big question.
How many other such visits occurred to witnesses who NEVER came forward and told their story out of reverence to the request for secrecy?
Indeed, we can ask further - are these all highly respected witnesses such as police officers, military officers and the like?
Just as a quick experiment, I took a small batch of MoD cases from the two year period between 1964 - 1966 and endeavoured to trace witnesses once those files were released onto the Public Records Office after the 30 year rule.
As names and details are usually redacted this was very hard and with the passage of time most were impossible to find. But I did successfully contact half a dozen through clues on offer and, remarkably, two of them told me they had been also advised ‘by someone from the Ministry’ to not speak to anyone else about what they saw as it was a ‘secret’.
One was an ex RAF pilot. The other was an ordinary citizen who could not be forced to sign the Official Secrets Act or reminded of their allegiance. Yet someone was still trying to use persuasion to stop them talking about their UFO encounter. They said they had been reminded that it might not be ‘wise’ to talk to others as they might find it damaging their credibility to do so.
The implication being that someone at that time wanted to investigate UFOs and try to deter that fact being widely known.
This poses new questions - notably how often did they do this? Why did they choose certain cases to risk visiting the witness when, as Nick Pope says, in his day running the ‘UFO desk’ (during the 1990s) this was never the case?
Were these visits even sanctioned by the UFO desk in the first place? Or was that just a kind of public relations shop window with real decisions occurring elsewhere? And were just this defence intelligence division digging into certain UFO cases and ordering silence without that fact necessarily finding its way back to the person manning the public interface desk like Nick Pope was?
If so then, why, and why just a few selected cases?
Answer that and we might know what is going on behind some part of the UFO mystery. Or at least what the MoD at that time THOUGHT might be going on.
Which might not necessarily be the same thing.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
19 MAY 2018 Woodbridge, Suffolk
Rendlesham Forest Incident Presentation 2018 with John Burroughs, Brenda Butler and Ronnie Dugdale Saturday May 19, 2018, 7.00pm
Following on the success of the 30th anniversary Rendlesham Forest Incident Conference December 28, 2010 we are able to announce presentations by witness John Burroughs, USAF (Ret) the only person to be involved on two separate nights, Brenda Butler original investigator and co-author of Skycrash and local researcher & one of the most knowledgable RFI investigators Ronnie Dugdale. Ronnie has been working on a timeline of events for a number of years that has involved talking to a number of witnesses and will present this detailed analysis at the event.
This event will be held at: Woodbridge Community Hall, Station Road, Woodbridge, IP12 4AU. Saturday 19th May, 7.00pm till late.
Seat numbers for this event are limited. Further information including additional guests or activities may be confirmed at a later date.
We are able to offer the following 2 ticket options:
1) Evening Presentations Ticket: £11 per person.
The entry price for the evening presentation is £10 per person + £1 to cover paypal fees. To order your e-ticket using paypal please hit the paypal button below. We will issue you an e-ticket number via Paypal in notes and you will be admited entry to the Community Hall upon arrival following check-in at the door. Please make a note of your e-ticket number and your Paypal transaction ID number.
2) VIP Ticket: Dine w/guest speakers on Friday 18th May followed by personal event & to entry to evening presentations on Saturday 19th May: £16 per person.
We are also offering the opportunity to dine in a local Pub with the guest speakers on Friday 18th May followed by a personalised talk through the events that occurred. The dinner will start at 6.30pm and is sold at an additional price of £5 per person + £1 to cover paypal fees. (Total cost £16 per person). Please note we have a maximum of 20 places and this is offered on a first come first served basis. Please note this does not include food. We have reserved the dinning area of a local Pub and we will notify you during April the menu on offer. Although food is not required to be paid for in advance we will require details of what you wish to order from the menu during April. Meeting at the pub around 4pm for drinks, mees and greet followed by dinner at 6.00pm Full details including name and location of the Pub will be emailed upon purchase.
There will be a question and answer session to close the evening. Questions call us on 07811 021230, email info@spaceportuk.com or visit the event facebook page. Everyone is welcome.
OCT 6 - 7 October 2018 St Annes, Lancashire
LAPIS CONFERENCE 2018
This will be a two day event in St Anne's, Lancashire on the 6th and 7th of October. Our venue is The Lindum Hotel, a lovely family owned venue situated on the seafront.
Speakers confirmed:
Alan Godfrey
Alan Godfrey had a good career as a policeman in a Yorkshire town. Then he was called upon to investigate a body on a coal heap.
Who was this man? Why did he die?
Within weeks PC Godfrey had a close encounter of the weirdest kind.
What was that UFO above his patrol car? Why did half an hour just disappear?
Alan will be talking about his encounter and the repercussions that followed. This will be primary source evidence about one of the most significant UFO cases that have been documented. A lecture not to be missed.
Alan will also be selling and signing copies of his new book "Who or What Were They?"
Ann Winsper
Ann Winsper is a ghost hunter and Parapsychologist, and co-founder of Para.Science psychical research and investigation. Ann has been investigating hauntings for nearly 40 years, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire researching the psychology of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Ann is a regular speaker at conferences, giving giving talks on EVP and the paranormal in general.
Jenny Randles
Jenny Randles was born in the Pennine hills on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border – a region that has for decades had the highest percentage of alien abduction and close encounters in the UK.
Over a million copies of Jenny’s books have been sold since 1979 with editions in more than 20 countries.
Her books have been about UFOs, ESP, precognition, time slips, spontaneous human combustion, and even the paranormal experiences of actors from soap such as Coronation Street and Dallas.
After her last book - Breaking the Time Barrier - about the race to build the first time machine - Jenny went on a 15 year hiatus to be a full time carer but has started writing again after working with Alan Godfrey to help him publish the untold story.
Jenny has spoken at previous LAPIS conferences but this will be her first presentation in person anywhere since bookstores on the Isle of Man in 2003 and we are delighted that she is able to be part of this event.
Juliette Gregson
Juliette W Gregson is a Heritage Photographer, taking pictures of derelict buildings, art deco, small toys in hedges, Preserving the Past for the Future ! She loves to go out and catch iconic images of our town and the surrounding areas. Local historian Juliette has written for the BBC, provided research for ITV and many other publications, local & national over the years. Juliette has always had an avid interest in the paranormal and weird happenings in her local area and will be talking about this at the LAPIS conference.