0310 - UK
In Alien Heat: The Warminster Mystery Revisited
There has probably never been anything like it in UFO history, but the UFO fever that gripped the small British town of Warminster for about a decade is now largely forgotten. It was one of the largest UFO flaps ever to occur. Thousands of witnesses reported seeing the "Warminster Thing." The hilltops around the town attracted a loyal band of followers, all waiting for the magic sighting, the landing, the contact. The authors were themselves among the skywatchers and spent nights on Cradle Hill, the center of the phenomenon, watching and waiting for UFOs, but also watching and listening to the witnesses and ufologists.
IN ALIEN HEAT introduces the Warminster phenomenon to a new generation of readers. It contains a short history of the phenomenon, places it in its social and historical context, and examines the possible mechanisms that initiated and sustained this remarkable UFO flap.
The genesis of the Warminster UFO phenomenon is described in The Warminster Mystery, the first book written by Arthur Shuttlewood on the subject of the Thing. When the phenomenon began, Shuttlewood was a journalist with the Warminster Journal, the local newspaper. It was through this position that Shuttlewood first came into contact with the phenomenon. At first, Shuttlewood claims he was a dispassionate reporter, simply unearthing the facts. Some evidence that Shuttlewood was outside of the ufological mainstream before his own sighting is given, perhaps, in The Warminster Mystery, where he asks, 'Have you heard of "leys" or "orthoteny"? I had not until Gavin Gibbons, an author, came to see me on 29th October, 1965.'[1]
It took nine months - it might be flippant to note the length of time over which Shuttlewood's beliefs gestated - before Shuttlewood 'dared ... join the small band of local folk who are convinced that our visitors are as real as us and believe that they are not flying fantasies but definitely humanoid, coming from distant worlds which may not be so very different from our own planet.'[2] The general public quickly became aware that something odd was happening in Warminster. A local man, David Holton, appeared on TV in March to proclaim that the strange noises were alien spaceships. Warminster UFO sightings were reported in the News of the World in July, and the the Daily Mirror in September 1965. But events in Warminster dated back to Christmas the previous year.
Interestingly, the Warminster phenomenon began not with UFO sightings but with hearings; which is, perhaps, why the phenomena came to be labelled the 'Thing'. It should be noted, though, that the term 'Thing' had already been used to describe UFOs in Britain. The Flying Saucer Review, Volume 10, Number 1, reprints an article from the Brighton Evening Argus. The article, which describes a UFO sighting near Brighton, uses the word 'Thing' quite prominently, repeating the word twice, and printing it in capitals.
The date on which the Warminster phenomenon started is a moot point. Flying Saucer Review reported that, in November 1961, four witnesses near Warminster saw a UFO leaving 'a trail of sparks.'[3] Two of the events reported by Shuttlewood in The Warminster Mystery as occurring in 1965 are also reported by Shuttlewood in the Warminster Journal, in December 1965, as having happened in 1963 and 1964.[4]
The mythological history of the Warminster phenomenon, however, began on Christmas Day, 1964. The order of events given here differs slightly from that given in The Warminster Mystery; here the events are described in the order suggested by their dates and times.[5] Mrs Mildred Head was woken at her home at 1.25 am. 'Our ceiling,' she reported to Shuttlewood, 'came alive with strange sounds that lashed at our roof.' The sounds began as if twigs or leaves were being drawn across her roof, and then changed to a noise she described as being like giant hailstones. Plucking up courage, she got out of bed and looked out of the window, where the night was dry and clear. Mrs Head also noted a strange humming sound, which grew louder and then faded away, except for 'a faint whisper - a low whistling or wheezing.' This story was reported to Arthur Shuttlewood sometime in 1965, possibly around May, after Mrs Head had read in The Warminster Journal of a similar incident.
UFO picture taken by Gordon Faulkner
Sometime later that Christmas morning, over thirty soldiers at Knook camp, about four miles from Warminster, were rudely awoken by a loud noise. A sergeant told Arthur Shuttlewood that the sound was similar to that of a huge chimney stack being ripped from a roof and being scattered in pieces across the whole of the camp. The guard was alerted, but nothing developed beyond the extraordinary sound.
At 6.12 that morning Mrs Marjorie Bye was walking to the Holy Communion Service at Christ Church in Warminster. As she approached the church the air about her filled with 'menacing sound. Sudden vibrations came overhead, chilling in intensity... descending on her savagely, caught her... in a grip of steel, a peculiar droning.' Before she had reached the church wall 'shockwaves of violent force pounded at her head, neck and shoulders and numbed her. Helpless, she was pinned down by invisible fingers of sound. Wailing, whining, droning - frightening!' What happened shocked her greatly, making it difficult for her to reach the sanctuary of the church. Indeed, such a phenomenon would have been most disturbing; at 6am on Christmas morning, Warminster would have been dark, and the roads quiet. '
At precisely the same time,' Shuttlewood claims dramatically, Roger Rump, Warminster's head postmaster, heard noises almost identical to those described by Mrs Bye. His house was not far from Christ Church. He described the noise as 'a terrific clatter ... As though the ... roof tiles were being rattled about and plucked off by some tremendous force. Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being ... loudly slammed back into place ... I could hear an odd humming tone. It was most unusual ... [it] lasted no more than a minute.'
These four events are the true genesis of the phenomenon, all witnessed, in one case by as many as thirty individuals, in one night. Not one UFO seen. The unidentified noises continued on an ad hoc basis from then until at least June 1966. Roughly nine cases are described in The Warminster Mystery in which the only unusual phenomena are noises. Shuttlewood claims that 'Every few days I learned of roofs bombarded by aeronautical amblings of the Thing in apparently malevolent mood.' Shuttlewood certainly loved alliteration. If he was indeed receiving reports every few days, then most of these are not included in his book. It is, therefore, difficult to tell how many how many witnesses reported these mysterious sounds. We do know that, by August 1965, it is claimed there had been at least 49 witnesses to the sounds.[6]Over the course of time the "noise" phenomenon receded and the visual phenomenon took its place, to become the most important element of the Warminster phenomenon; the Warminster Thing became a UFO.
Cley Hill
One of the round barrows on Cley Hill
Cley Hill – Elementals, UFOs and the Devil
The most pyrotechnically spectacular of these noise-events happened on August 17th, 1965. A 'detonation never so far explained', as Shuttlewood described it, rocked the houses on the Boreham Field housing estate. Walter Curtis described ' a huge blast! A whole series of jolts and explosions were felt underfoot ... the biggest explosion I have ever heard.' His wife added that it 'was as though the gas main right opposite us had blown up with a tremendous roar.' David Pinnell, on hearing the explosion, ran outside to see 'a monstrous orange flame in the sky ... it was shaped like an electric bulb ... by its light I clearly saw ... [the] hills.' The light faded, but then what appeared to him as a great ball of smoke with 'a funny yellow core', floated down from the hills, crackling and hissing whenever it touched grass or trees. Percy Westinghall described the explosion as 'one hell of a bang', likening it to the sound of a building being demolished. His wife also noted that minor quakes seemed to follow the explosion. Another, unnamed, witness to the illuminated ball of smoke described its golden heart, and how it was very large and shining. The puffball settled in the road and 'gradually dispersed in straggling wisps, the fiery centre burning out as it did so.' Two houses had some broken windows, but this was the only damage caused by the explosion.
Seeking possible causes for the explosion Shuttlewood talked to officials at the nearby School of Infantry and Battlesbury Barracks as well local aerodromes. All denied responsibility. Hypotheses put to him regarding thunderbolts or meteorites he 'wrote off as highly improbable'. In The Warminster MysteryShuttlewood describes the explosion as the capers of 'the Thing in baleful mood.' Shuttlewood also reports that tangled pieces of a white, light, brittle metal were found at the "Battlesbury site", although the use of the phrase "Battlesbury site" only serves to confuse matters. Did the explosion take place near the Boreham Field estate, or near Battlesbury, a large hill about a mile to the north of the estate? If the explosion took place near Battlesbury, why were the windows of other buildings, such as those of the army's barracks, which would have been closer to the explosion, not affected by the blast? Why were houses in The Dene, a part of the Boreham Field estate closer to Battlesbury, not affected? Of course, a more accurate record might be available from the local papers of the time. In this case, you could not hope to get a more accurate version of the story from the Warminster Journal as, surprisingly, the story does not appear there.
The first UFO sighting recorded in The Warminster Mystery was around May 19th, 1965. Hilda Hebdidge informed Shuttlewood that three times during that week she saw unusual objects in the sky. She first related these to the Fleet Street UFO group[7], who passed the information to Shuttlewood. The UFOs were cigar-shaped, and covered in winking bright lights. They (although it is unclear whether "they" refers to the UFOs or their winking lights) were various shades of gold and yellow and most vivid. The UFOs were stationary, with no beams or rays, and made no noise. They appeared to be high in the sky. They gradually faded as she watched. These sightings, however, are not the first reported in the Warminster Journal. On the 3rd of June, Patricia Phillips phoned Shuttlewood to describe a 'brightly glowing, cigar shaped object,' that remained motionless over the south of Warminster for almost half an hour. Shuttlewood sold this story to the News of the World. On the 19th of June, Kathleen Penton saw 'a shining Thing going along sideways in the sky from left to right. It glided over quite slowly in front of the downs. Porthole type windows ran along the whole length of it. To my eye, it was the size of the whole bedroom wall - enormous. These windows were lit up, the colour of yellow flames in a coal fire. It was very much like a train carriage with rounded ends to it. And it did not travel lengthways, but was gently gliding sideways.'
Although UFO sightings had now commenced, the strange sounds still continued to be heard. And, on the 10th of August 1965, came confirmation that the sounds might be connected to the UFOs. At 3.45 am on that day Rachel Atwill was woken by a terrible droning sound. 'It made the bed and floor shake. I went over to the bedroom window and looked out. Between the two bungalows opposite, about 200 yards above the range of hills beyond, was a bright object like a massive star. I have never believed in flying saucer stories, but I cannot describe it as anything else. It was definitely domed on top and was huge in size, an unwinking light of uncanny brilliance. It hung there in all its glory and did not frighten me, but the awful noise it made did.' Yet despite the noise, which, with the sighting, lasted for some 25 minutes 'not one of my neighbours on this private estate saw or heard anything. I asked each one of them later that day.' The humming began to attenuate and the UFO began to flicker[8]; the noise finally stopped, and the object vanished from sight. As with the reports from earlier in the year, it was the noise that was the disturbing aspect of the phenomenon: 'The noise was most upsetting to me. I felt there was a tight band of steel around my forehead towards the end, a pounding and a hammering at my eardrums.' Throughout 1965, and for the first half of 1966, the noises continued to be reported. On the 17th of March 1965, Mr and Mrs Brown's house was rattled. The Marson household was assaulted by the noises in May 1965 and June 1965.
A very graphic account of the effects of the noise were given by Eric Payne. At 11 pm on the 28th of March, 1965, he was walking down a dark, foggy, quiet country road, when he heard a sound he described as similar to the sound of the wind in telegraph wires. The sound increased in intensity, however, and he was pushed and held down by 'a tremendous racket ... [like] ... a gigantic tin can with huge nuts and bolts inside it, rattling over your head.' He heard a shrill whining and buzzing which 'nearly drove me mad.' He reports that his 'head was pushed from side to side and I might as well have have left my arms and legs at home for all the use they were. I simply could not stop this tremendous downward pressure. I crawled round in the road for a bit and then sank to my knees on the grass verge.' . This report shows how contradictory, or perhaps, how sloppy, many UFO reports, and certainly those of Shuttlewood, can be. If, as Payne reports, he might as well have left his arms and legs at home 'for all the use they were', how was he able to crawl around in the road 'for a bit'. And why - if he was already crawling - did he then sink to his knees on the grass verge? I am not doubting Mr Payne's experience; I merely point out that Shuttlewood's reports could be vague, confusing, even misleading. What is also mysterious is that this event is reported, in an article by Shuttlewood in the Warminster Journal in December 1965, as happening in 1964. Rogers reports this phenomenon as happening early in the January of 1965. In Rogers' account, the only sound described is that similar to the hum one hears from the wind through telephone wires.[9] The more exciting account described by Shuttlewood is omitted. Interestingly, Payne's account is one of a group that came to light after David Holton appealed for reports of the sounds.
As we have seen, from roughly May 1965 onwards, the Thing became a predominantly visual phenomenon; reports were mainly of UFOs. One of the early mass sightings was that of the 3rd of June; Mrs Phillips' report has been described above. The UFO was also seen, from the Philips household, by Mrs Phillips' husband, their three children, and a visitor; by Warminster residents Mr and Mrs Horlock, who described the UFO as 'twin red-hot pokers hanging downwards, one on top of the other, with a black space in between'; and by seventeen people swimming or fishing at Shearwater, a lake near Warminster. One of the Shearwater witnesses told Shuttlewood 'It was obviously huge, but very high up.' Shuttlewood points out that the 'evidence came in before any news of this extraordinary night vision had been published.' Although the UFO was seen by many people, there are discrepancies in the reports: in the colours reported by the groups of witnesses; in the shape of the UFO; and in the way the phenomenon ceased.
It would be pointless to reiterate all of the sightings here; interested readers are directed to The Warminster Mystery.[10] Suffice to say that from Christmas 1965 the reports flooded into Arthur Shuttlewood and the local papers. For those interested in ufology, the Warminster mystery is an essentially 1960s phenomenon. Apart from the unusual sounds, it provided nothing that had not been described for earlier UFO sightings, both in Britain and the US. What marked Warminster out in particular was the sheer number of sightings, as well as the fact that a whole town seemed to be enmeshed in the phenomenon. What was also unusual, perhaps, was that the phenomenon had one prime focus, through which all information flowed. Shuttlewood's position as a respected local journalist helped focus attention on the Thing. It was to Shuttlewood that many of the reports of UFO sightings were made, and it was through him that these sightings were articulated for the public.
[1] The Warminster Mystery, p. 124.
[2] Ibid., p. 22.
[3] Flying Saucer Review, 1961.
[4] The report of another event that perhaps happened earlier than Christmas 1964 is attributed to David Holton. He reported that a flock of pigeons appeared to have been killed by the sounds on April 11th, 1964. Note, though, that there is some confusion, unsurprisingly, in what happened, and when and where. Ken Rogers, who appears to be quoting directly from a letter of Holton's published in The Warminster Journal cites the date above (The Warminster Triangle, page 3). Gordon Creighton and Charles Bowen, in an article in the Flying Saucer Review (Volume 2, Number 4) report this event as being in April after the noises had started; that is, in 1965. Even more confusingly, in The Warminster Mystery (p.31), the first we hear of dead pigeons is in February 1965; again, David Holton had been on hand to examine them. In all three descriptions of the events, the pigeons were killed at Five Ash Lane. So at least there's some consistency...
[5] The sightings/hearings noted in this essay are all described in The Warminster Mystery.
[6] According to Lionel Beer's article 'Curiosity Overtakes The Public at Warminster', in Flying Saucer Review Vol. 2, No. 5 (September - October 1965). Shuttlewood, who quoted this figure at the public meeting in Waminster, was at this time simply referred to as 'a local reporter in the Press gallery'.
[7] Either a UFO group are already poking their noses in, and contaminating the local culture, or Ms Hebdidge was sufficiently UFO literate to know of a UFO group.
[8] The actual words attributed to Mrs Atwill in the The Warminster Mystery are: 'When the hideous humming grew less, the starry Thing flickered feebly.' This description has Shuttlewood's love of alliteration stamped all over it. How accurate, therefore, are his reports? How much extra description has he ghosted in to make the report more interesting? How accurate are the reports we receive of the Warminster phenomena?
[9] The Warminster Triangle, p. 4
[10] The Warminster Mystery, along with Shuttlewood's other books, is out of print.
Timeline
This page lists important events relevant to the Warminster phenomena.
Note: this is a work in progress and will take some time to complete.
Source: http://www.ufo-warminster.co.uk/information/thing_history.htm
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At 1.25 am on Christmas Day morning, 1964, Mildred Head was woken by a strange noise. Her ceiling, she later told local journalist Arthur Shuttlewood, had “[come] alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof.” It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones.
Her husband, who was deaf, had heard nothing and slept on. Thinking there had been a storm, Mildred got out of bed and went to the window. The night was dry and clear; she could see nothing unusual. However, she heard another noise, a humming sound that grew louder before fading to “a faint whisper—a low whistling or wheezing.”
Arthur Shuttlewood reported in his book The Warminster Mystery: "The air was brazenly filled with a menacing sound. Sudden vibrations came overhead, chilling in intensity. They tore the quiet atmosphere to raucous rags and descended upon her savagely. Shockwaves pounded at her head, neck and shoulders."
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Later that morning, around 6 am, Marjorie Bye was walking to the Holy Communion Service at Christ Church in Warminster. She noticed a “crackling” sound coming from the nearby Bell Hill area of the town. At first, she thought it was a lorry spreading grit on the hill, but as the noise grew louder, it came over her head and passed on across Ludlow Close.
She said the noise sounded like branches being pulled over gravel. There was a faint hum, loud enough to be heard over someone talking. The sky was dark but starlit, and she could see nothing above her.
Then as she approached the church, she experienced a “sonic attack. She reported, “Sudden vibrations came overhead, chilling in intensity…Shockwaves pounded at her head, neck and shoulders.” She was pinned down by “invisible fingers of sound.”
Initially, Mrs Bye’s identity was not reported as she feared ridicule. The Warminster Journal Reported that explanations for the incident included static electricity caused by wet power lines, satellites, and even Father Christmas!
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Around the same time, Roger Rump, Warminster’s head postmaster, heard similar noises to Mrs Bye. He reported hearing a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some “tremendous force.“ Rump said, “Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place . I could hear an odd humming tone. It was most unusual ..lasted no more than a minute.”
Shuttlewood also reported in the Warminster Journal that thirty soldiers at Knook Camp, around four miles from Warminster, were woken by a loud noise described as being like a chimney stack being ripped from a roof and scattered about. The guards were alerted, but nothing was found, and the soldiers said the noises were not the same as those of an aircraft.
Later, other "sonic attacks" occurred around the same time in different locations around the town were reported.
The publication of Mildred Head’s story encouraged more than 30 local people from in and around Warminster to write to Arthur, many claiming to have also heard similar strange sounds. The events were named "The Thing" by the locals as, at the time, the concept of UFOs or “flying saucers” was not widely known.
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In March 1965 the Brown family reported that their roof had quivered under an onrush of sounds and their cat had vomited. Others in the area reported that livestock and their pets had been nervous or actually been injured.
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David C Holton told Shuttleworth of a flock of birds being killed inexplicably in flight in February 1965 at Five Ash Lane.
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On Thursday, March 25, 1965, Ted and Gwen Davies were eating breakfast in Crockeryon, a village two miles south of Warminster. They heard a noise like the flapping of birds' wings and a crackling noise near their chimney. Then they heard a metallic grinding noise, causing their roof rafters to shake and windows to rattle with what sounded like gale-force winds. They went outside, but there were no birds, and the air was still.
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On the evening of March 28, 1955, Eric Payne was walking to Warminster after he dropped off his girlfriend in Sutton Veny, 3 miles southeast of Warminster. Near Bishopstrow, 1.5 miles from the centre of Warminster, he heard a whistling noise that turned into a buzzing. Eric described it as “a gigantic tin can with huge nuts and bolts inside it, rattling overhead.”
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In spring 1965, Mr and Mrs Marson were to experience a similar noise three times, twice on one particular night. Mrs Marson said, “It was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads. As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow.” Mr Marson described it as “it seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place.” Furthermore, they said, “It all began with an electric crackling” and heard high-pitched droning sounds. They went outside the house and saw and found nothing. On June 1, 1955, Mrs Marson reported similar sounds and a light of brilliant white intensity so strong that it turned night to day.
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Patricia Philips, wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, reported seeing a cigar-shaped object in the sky visible and stationary for 25 minutes. It then seemed to grow shorter, as if turning, and then it vanished. Her 12-year-old son, watching through binoculars, managed to draw the object. Patricia’s husband, their three children and a visitor also saw the strange cigar-shaped object. Once Shuttlewood had published their story, others came forward with similar sightings, including seventeen people fishing or swimming at Shearwater Lake on Longleat estate near Warminster.
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On June 19, Kathleen Penton reported a “shining thing going along sideways in the sky. Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it. It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall. It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it. It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways.”
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On August 17, a large explosion was heard on the Boreham Field housing estate. A series of jolts and explosions resulted in an orange flame in the sky shaped like an electric bulb. Windows in two houses were broken. The nearby military bases denied knowledge.
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By the end of August 1965, Arthur Shuttlewood had filled eight notebooks with details on the phenomena around Warminster. The Bristol Evening Post reported another sighting of the Warminster Thing at Lulsgate Bottom on September 14, 1965. It allegedly emitted an “unearthly blue light” and a “shrill whine” as it passed overhead, pausing briefly over Bristol Airport's boundary. Kenneth Kimberley, a 32-year-old insurance consultant, spotted the object while driving home in his Bentley at midnight, “Suddenly ahead of me, I saw a patch of odd greenish-blue light across the road. I suppose it was about 50 yards wide.”
He carried on, thinking what he saw was a patch of mist on the road. But as he entered the area of light, his engine cut abruptly, and his lights went out, “I immediately braked, and the car stopped. Then I heard the sound. It was a shrill, high-pitched noise, like a jet engine. It seemed somehow close, yet distant at the same time.”
As Kimberley sat there, his car began to vibrate. He jumped out, thinking an earthquake was happening, and as he did so, the light disappeared.
Getting back in the car, Kimberley tried the engine. It started, and he drove towards home. On reaching a phone box, he dialled 999 and asked for the police.
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Arthur Shuttlewood’s sighting of a cigar-shaped object and alien phone calls
At 3.42 pm on September 28, 1965, Shuttlewood was in his home and going up the stairs to collect some notes. He saw a huge cigar shape in the sky over Colloway Clump to the Northwest at one of the windows. He went to grab a cine camera to film the object, but at that point, the camera began to jump about in his hands, making it difficult to focus. He felt sharp pricking needles down his right side, including his hand, wrist and face. This feeling and the malfunctioning of the camera convinced Shuttlewood that whoever was controlling the cigar-shaped object was aware he was trying to film it and was deliberately using a concentrated force field to affect the camera. Nothing developed from 25 feet of film; eight feet had burnt right through.
Then a more bizarre series of events occurred. Shuttlewood’s book, The Warminster Mystery, describes a series of strange phone calls with aliens from the planet called Aenstria. The calls were made to a phone box in Boreham Fields, very close to the army barracks and the area where the mysterious explosion had occurred in August. Why advanced aliens would be contacting him using a phone box is unclear.
He believed these calls to be hoaxes, but some of Arthur’s friends persuaded him to include these contacts in an appendix of the book. The Aenstrians told Arthur that humanity should return to simpler, more spiritual, ways and be careful about atomic power and pollution.
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Gordon Faulkner's Warminster UFO photo
The most iconic image of Warminster's UFO activity is a photograph taken by 23-year-old Gordon Faulkner in 1965. It shows what appears to be a “flying saucer” or UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). On August 29, 1965, Gordon was on his way to his mother’s home in Warminster and took his 35mm camera with him as his sister wanted to borrow it. In a subsequent account, Faulkner stated that he was retrieving the camera from his mother’s after his sister had used it. He said he had the film developed and printed at a photographer in Warminster, opposite the Methodist Church.
He became aware of an unusually shaped object in the sky flying low and fast over the south of the town, making no sound. He quickly grabbed the camera, but as the object was traveling so fast, it was virtually impossible to get it in his viewfinder. So he focused some way ahead and pressed the shutter release, believing it was unlikely he had photographed it. He was amazed that upon development, the saucer-shaped object was on the print.
Faulkner sent the picture to Arthur Shuttlewood at the Warminster Journal and told the reporter to "do as he seemed fit with it”. It appeared in the newspaper on Friday, September 10, 1965 in the “Letters to the Editor” column.
Shuttlewood had sent it to the Daily Mirror, and it was published the same day as in the Journal. The picture has been reproduced countless times using a heavy zoom, showing a disc-shaped object with a dome with little detail visible due to the poor quality and grain of the image.
The Daily Mirror’s science and aeronautical editors were skeptical and weren’t sure if it was faked, but Faulkner’s picture is one of the few daytime pictures taken of the Thing.
Within weeks, thousands of people began to travel to Warminster to see the strange phenomenon for themselves. Newspapers as far away as the United States reported on the events.
The unusual events began to receive national attention. Over the August Bank holiday of 1965, an estimated 8000 people arrived in Warminster.
On April Fool’s Day, April 1, 1966, the BBC South and West broadcast a 30-minute documentary covering the events in Warminster. It concluded that the strange reports in the area were most likely related to secret military technology being tested near Salisbury Plain. Whether the documentary was intended as an April Fool’s joke is unclear but the reporter involved in the film seemed genuinely intrigued following interviews with the town’s residents.
However, by the early 1970s, sightings of the Warminster Thing and the number of visitors to the town began to decline.
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The Warminster Thing – An Eyewitness Account published in Weird Wiltshire 2023
Did me and my friend see the Warminster Thing in 1977 at Cley Hill? Some friends of mine were having a conversation about UFOs in 1977, and we decided to visit Cley Hill one night for a vigil. We arrived around 11 pm but I can’t remember what the date was.
We managed to climb to the top in virtual darkness. It was a clear night and from the top we could see for miles and saw all the lights from nearby villages and towns, saw helicopter activity from nearby army bases and watched satellites for an hour or so. Other than that, there was nothing out of the ordinary flying or moving about.
We bought a tent so we decided to scale back down the hill and find somewhere to pitch the tent. Heading back to the car we drove around some local lanes but it’s hard to find somewhere when you are in the country in darkness with no streetlights. I found a gated field entrance which I pulled up to and my friends got out the tent and stuff from the boot, including a couple of torches. I admit I was starting to feel a bit vulnerable being in the middle of nowhere near the bottom of Cley Hill in UFO country.
I stayed near the car while my friends tried to stake out the tent in the field. They were saying the ground was too stoney and hard as I noticed a light coming towards us up the lane, like a swinging latern. There was a house 300 yards or so away so I wondered if it was someone from there. I was trying to figure out what it was when the light disappeared from view going down and leaving a light showing then popping up again at a low level a little closer to her. I shouted to my mates to look, ‘what is it?’ We watched and saw a very bright ‘arc-light’ perfectly formed and round like an orange corona around its circumference. It was now a lot bigger than a lantern size.
It approached us steadily before bouncing up and down, disappearing as it dipped and reappearing again. This must have been sometime well after midnight. I was getting pretty scared but one of my braver mates tried to attract this light thing with his torch. It was already coming towards us, growing larger in size by the second, and noiseless I may add. I remember saying something to my friends like ‘If you want to stay here, you stay. But I am getting out of here.’
With that we picked up our gear, threw it in the back of the car and jumped in. We wheel span out of the gated field like a bat out of hell and sped away from the area and whatever that ‘thing’ was. It was definitely coming our way and we did not want to wait around and find out more.
After a short while we pulled over to compose ourselves, found a track between farm fields and decided to stake out the tent there and brew a cuppa. Surprisingly we did manage to sleep for a couple of hours until the sun came up. It was in the daylight we decided to head back to the field entrance where we witnessed the ‘thing’. In the light of day and using the landscape, we managed to figure out the light was around the size of a house and the reason it appeared to bounce as it moved was because it was following the contours of the land, fields and trees very tightly, disappearing behind copses of trees and popping up over them again.
I know this was not a helicopter. I am an amateur aviation photographer so I am familiar with all types of aircraft and their lights. Plus, it was silent! No noise whatsoever and no flashing lights, just a huge extremely light, pure white and orange-tinged object.
We went back up the top of Cley Hill and could see the field where we had witnessed the ‘thing’. It allowed us to figure out how the light had been disappearing and reappearing as we could see the tree boundaries around the fields. We could also see it would have been quite some distance away at first before moving towards us.
I ask myself if I would have like to see something similar again and I will admit I am a bit of a wuss in the dark. The whole experience terrified all of us. However, I have lived back in Wiltshire for the last eight years and I do still look up in the sky and check, just in case I catch another glimpse of the Warminster Thing!’
I wrote an account of the Warminster Thing, which appeared in Haunted Magazine back in the summer. After a deep dive into the subject, I do feel that although there would have been mistaken identifications within the 1000s of accounts reported and some admissions of fakery and trying to set people up, there was definitely something very strange going on around Warminster back then. Were they visitors from outer space? Maybe! I guess we will never truly know!
This page lists important events relevant to the Warminster phenomena (1964-1965)
Yet another mysterious light in the Yorkshire dales
At the risk of making a fool of myself (once again), I’d like to recount you a somewhat peculiar experience I had while walking along the waterfalls trail by Ingleton in the lovely Yorkshire dales.
The Ingleton Waterfalls Trail. The likely position where we stood while sighting the light was characterised by the red ellipse besides.
First, my eyes were caught by a very intense and large light on another mountain lying beyond the valley of Ingleton, whose name is Mount Inglebourough according to the map.
We were not too far from a farm called “Scar End” as it occurred.
The enigmatic glow wasn’t located on the top of the mountain but a bit under it. It was white or very slightly yellow in colour.
While the size couldn’t be rigorously estimated, it looked pretty large and it is quite plausible it would have covered a whole bunch of trees or even more.
Since it lay in a pretty foggy area, the image given to our eyes was necessarily blurred.
It remained steady in its intensity during at least 30 seconds if not several minutes.
I called it to the attention of my parents. All the three of us looked at it.
My father told me not to stare at it because he thought this was the reflection of the sun on some surface.
It was at this moment or a bit later that the thing began to blink on and off rather quickly and almost perfectly periodically.
I’m sure we witnessed at the very least two such cycles and my mom think there were most likely at least three similar cycles.
No spatial movements were noticed and it seemed to always lie on the ground.
Then, after having watched with puzzlement at the light, we saw it suddenly disappear and we didn’t perceive it again during the next following minutes. We walked further.
I soon started to think on plenty of other things and didn’t pay too much attention to it any more.
Now, on Tuesday evening, four days after the event, I deemed it worthwhile to relate this short story to other people.
Given my own (limited) knowledge of modern technology, I’m puzzled by the unusual character of the sighting:
1) The thing looked first like a large steady light during 30 – 120 seconds.
2) It then blinked on and off at least 2 times, most likely 3 times or even considerably more.
3) It completely disappeared and we didn’t see it again after one or two minutes and probably more.
4) I couldn’t localise on the map or via Google any stationary source of light such as a television tower or an aerodrome.
So, I’d be very grateful to all people reading that if they were to give me mundane suggestions as to the cause of our observation. I’d be particularly interested in learning the opinion of local inhabitants of the region. The spot marked on the map (and my deduction that the location of the “something” was the mount Ingleborough) are tentative and shouldn’t lead anyone to rule out other nearby places where this could have taken place.
No, I do NOT believe that little Grey Aliens who travelled all that way from Zeta Reticuli were just spending their holidays there.
Reticular Grey Alien
But I consider it quite likely that what I saw was the light of playful leprechauns who mischievously mimicked a human technological device so as to better camouflage themselves.
Cute Leprechaun
I will not, however, consider this a definitive conclusion unless all plausible conventional explanations have been ruled out first.
Possible Explanations
Several friendly folks on facebook proposed me some hypotheses.
1) Was the light some reflection?
“What was the weather like? You mention foggy, yet your father was worried about looking at reflected sunlight. Could it have been a reflection with something (e.g. herd of creatures) moving across the path of the light, or something rotating (e.g. mountain bike mirror?) to create a blinking effect?”
The weather was partially sunny, rainy and foggy. During the first phase of our sighting, we thought this was either a stationary source of light or a reflection of the sun on some surface.
We gave up this idea as it started blinking on and off in a perfectly regular manner. From this point onward, it was clear to us that the light was emitted by a technological object.
A reflection on moving surfaces (such as bikes or herds) is ruled out by the fact that the light always remained at the same spot.
2) A ball of luminous gas?
“Sounds like will o the wisp to me. I’ve seen a few of them over the Yorkshire Moorside. Pretty much balls of luminous gas.”
I wasn’t able to understand what this fellow meant by “will” or “wisp”.
The thing seemed to have too regular features for it to be a “ball of luminous gas” of natural origin.
3) Someone testing their car lights under the fog?
“Potentially, Car Full beam headlights reflecting of the fog, Someone unused to driving in those conditions might experiment rapidly with their lights. I have seen something similar near Robin Hoods Bay on a foggy night. Best of luck with your investigation”
The behaviour of the light makes this hypothesis pretty implausible.
it always remained on the same position. People testing their car in such a way tend to move around.
the light seemed very intense and large. It seems akin to that of a lighthouse or a television tower.
It was switched on and off at least two times, probably more than three times. It greatly resembled the light of a beacon.
the fog layer was light and didn’t severely hamper one’s visibility, even there. Such a test would have been of very limited use.
4) Miscellaneous
“So the large red mark on your map was your location, and you were looking east towards Ingleborough? My first thoughts would be someone out on the mountain with a powerful lamp, either hunting, searching, messing around, taking photographs (light painting).”
The light looked really large and was standing out even if we were separated from it by a valley and several kilometres.
What is more, its immobility and the fact it was switched on and off in an automatic fashion during the second phase of the observation do not fit in with it being some sort of powerful torch.
While there were some fog layers hanging besides the mountain, the visibility remained very good so that it is hard to envision anyone feeling the need to use a light having such bizarre features under these circumstances.
Or possibly an off road vehicle (parked stationary, then moving off over a bumpy track causing the flashes).”
After a certain duration, the light completely disappeared and we didn’t see it any more, nor could we make out any vehicle in the aftermath.
The flashes were exactly like those of a lighthouse and didn’t have the irregularities one would expect if they stemmed from someone driving over a bumpy track.
5) Mirage
“The thing was the mirage of a real beacon, lighthouse or radio tower located at some other place.”
Since I’m no optician, I am not able to rule out this possibility, nor to estimate its plausibility.
Conclusion
The four first sets of explanations seem very unlikely to have spawn such a sighting.
The light could have been a fleeting mirage of a pulsating technological device, but without any evidence corroborating this, this remains nothing more than an unverified speculation.
Peakland spooklights
David Clarke
Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night
Condenses, and the cold environs round
Kindled through agitation to a flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads th’amaz’d night-wanderer from his way,
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool,
There swallow’d up and lost, from succour far . . .
John Milton Paradise Lost
Strange lights in the sky hovering over rocky crags, dancing over wooded valleys, playing tag with each other, leading walkers astray. Ghostly rays and beams, will o’the wisp or ‘foolish fire’ in British folklore, have become transformed into Unidentified Flying Objects or Flying Saucers as the Industrial Revolution moves into the space age. Phil Reeder (1986) notes that accounts of will o’the wisp in scientific and popular literature were common towards the end of the last century, but these have decreased at the same time reports of UFOs have increased!
The appearance of mysterious lights above marshland gave scientists a ready explanation during the age of reason. Methane and other marsh gases, they said, created by rotting vegetable and animal matter bubbling up through the bogs, when ignited could produce wispy flames and balls of fire which flit about and, when carried by air currents, startle unsuspecting rustics. Newton connected marsh gas with the ignis fatuus in 1730, and the theory held good for a number of centuries. In 1980 Dr Alan Mills at Leicester University’s Department of Geology decided to scrutinise the evidence and found it wanting (Mills 1980). Using laboratory conditions he consistently failed to reproduce a will o’the wisp type flame using methane, phosphene and other substances suspected as contributors to the chemical soup in marshland. What is more, he could not find any other natural spark which could ignite gasses produced from rotting vegetable matter. Whatever the will o’the wisp was, he concluded, it was not a product of marsh and their gas. And he also ruled out other natural electrical phenomena, like St Elmo’s fire, ball lightning and luminous insects as having any part in the production of the phenomenon.
Few of the reports of spooklights I have collected, especially those from the Peak District, come from marshy areas but rather from mountains and rocky gritstone uplands. The rapid, playful movements of the lights which people see, and their longevity, suggest they are possessed of some kind of low order intelligence, or react to subtle changes in the air, magnetic field or environment which are not obvious to the human observer. In folklore the will o’the wisp often appears as mischievous fairy or evil spirit who misleads travellers from their safe paths into treacherous bogs, a motif well known on Dartmoor where persons who become victims of the lights are said to have been ‘pixie-led’. Turner, writing in 1901, described a region of marshland near Longnor in the upper part of the River Dove, where at twilight ‘there is a flickering light to be seen moving as one moves . . . it has given rise to many tales of belated travellers having been beguiled by it and led into the swamp, where their bodies remain, and from whence their “boggarts” arise at night to caper and dance all over the countryside, to the terror of the inhabitants.’
The Earthlights Theory
Methane exiting from the surface of the marsh would be expected to burn, if ignited, as a flickering, fixed flame, but would hardly move through the air or against a prevailing wind. The marsh gas explanation for spooklights has been superseded by others, some fanciful and others plausible. Popular at the moment is the ‘earthlights’ theory which is a convincing connection between lights and the faulted geology of the regions in which they appear. Although no clear production mechanism has yet been discovered which scientists are entirely happy with, the theory suggests the lights are the product of a build up of electrical charge in areas of geological stress. Rather than being directly caused by earthquakes or tremors, the lights are symptoms of the earth’s internal traumas, springing into life as electrons are slowly released into the air and possibly through the water table as strain waxes and wanes in zones of geological faulting. (Brookesmith and Devereux 1997).
Well-known spooklights
Explanations have come and gone, but the lights remain with us. Attached to particular places in the landscape, they appear and disappear and have become so well known that folklore gives them their own names, or places they are seen regularly are named in their honour. In the High Peak of Derbyshire, there are the well-known Longdendale Lights, better known as the Devil’s Bonfires to residents of the valley. Some believe their appearances over the centuries gave rise to the name Shining Clough, one of the craggy mountain ridges where they love to frolic. Then there is a hill known as the Lantern Pike, ten miles to the south-west above the village of Hayfield. Peggy wi’th’ Lantern was a frequent visitor here, say the old tales, swinging her lamp on the summit of the hill on dark nights. Another light gave its name to Meg o’th’ Lantern Lane, shown on an old tithe map to the south side of the River Derwent near Derby [1].
The traditional explanation, and one I have met with wherever I go in the countryside, is the lights are spirits. Whether they be michievous sprites bent on leading travellers astray, fairies, genius locii or elementals who live in the sky, like the Gaelic Sluagh - that is how the old tradition sees them. A parallel motif is the light or lights as omens of death or disaster, a strong belief in Ireland, Scotland and Wales where the corpse candle tradition features prominently in folk tradition. Liz Linahan (1995) records a story of this genre from Whitwell in Derbyshire, where the appearance of a ‘fairy death lantern’ guides a man lost in the blizzard of 1947 to safety of the cottage where his elderly mother lies dying.
A number of similar stories are found from the caverns and mines of the Peak District and the neighbouring South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire coalfield. Here much neglected mining folklore is rich with accounts of lights in pit tunnels which warn of impending disaster, or lights which haunt mines where disasters have claimed lives (Linahan 1994: 81). Much of this shades into ghostlore, where the lights become the ghostly lamps on miners’ helmets, or in the case of the Longdendale Lights on Bleaklow they are the burning torches carried by Roman soldiers who tramp across the moor every year on the night of the first full moon in spring. On the Staffordshire moors, a dim blue light is said to haunt a hillside near Rushton where the ghost of a murdered woman was laid by traditional methods (Clarke 1991: 65)
Another mining tradition is the ‘fiery drake’, an eerie ball of flame known to lead miners in the Peak. The appearance of this light was said to lead miners to the richest ores, a tradition which suggests links with West Country mining traditions recorded by Paul Devereux. In the Peak District lights are known to frequent stone circles, burial mounds, rivers, caves and rocky crags. Wayne Anthony Boylan (1997) mentions lights seen around Outcrops at Lunter Rocks, above Winster, in the White Peak, and at Harborough Rocks near Brassington, and Liz Linahan (1995: 85) mentions a ‘fairy tree’ on Whitwell Moor, where lights are seen to gather.
There are also lights reported on Stanton Moor, and around the Neolithic megaliths of the Bridestones, a burial chamber, near Congleton (Doug Pickford, pers. comm.). Coincidentally, both of these locations are locations where UFO ‘abduction’ events allegedly occurred, which involve the manifestation of light phenomena before a mystical vision (Pickford 1994: 99-102). Then there are the lights which dance on barrows. Cauldon Low, a notorious fairy haunt in the Staffordshire Moorlands is certainly one of these, but there are others in Monsal Dale, the Weaver Hills, and Chris Fletcher (1993) mentions another spooklight which follows a path between a burial mound called Saxons Lowe near Tittensor and a farm in the same county. Writer Alan Garner, drawing on traditional lore from his Alderley Edge home, mentions another barrow haunted by lights on the Cheshire side of the Peak in his 1968 novel The Moon of Gomrath.
All these motifs neatly fit both the earthlight and spirit theories, as we can surmise that ancient man saw these phenomena too and could have built shrines or holy places to honour the earth spirit which manifested as a ghostly light. Wayne Anthony (1997) mentions a local sighting of a strange blue light which emerged from nearby woods and hovered above the Nine Stones Close circle on Harthill Moor. A nineteenth century writer described the circle as a place where local fairies were known to dance and ‘hold high jubilee’. And we know similar accounts are on record from elsewhere including one good eyewitness report from 1919 of lights hovering within the Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria (Devereux 1989: 77-8).
Dovedale double
Although ghostlights figure strongly in folklore motifs, there are many interesting contemporary eyewitness accounts of their activities. Some of them come from people who see lights in a notorious area haunted by these phenomena but are unaware that others have seen lights there before. A young man called Oliver Rowlands contacted me back in 1994 to describe his encounters with lights which haunt the beautiful limestone valley of the River Dove at Dovedale in the White Peak. At the time he was unaware of Turner’s account and those of others I have collected from this area. Thousands of people visit this Staffordshire beauty spot during the summer to walk along the river, cross the stepping stones and scale Thorpe Cloud which towers above the valley. But how many are there after dark when, according to Mr Rowlands, strange lights dance above the river?
According to the account, the initial experience took place in March 1993 when Oliver was a final year student at Derby University, and living in Ecclesall, Staffordshire. One night, accompanied by a friend called Steve Ashall, he decided to go for a late night drive into the Derbyshire peaks after college. Stopping the car in the carpark at Dovedale they went for a walk by the river towards the well-known Stepping Stones. As they got closer to these stones, two ‘very bright white lights’ caught their attention. Both approximately the same size, they were perfectly round and lit up the surrounding area although they threw no beam at all. Making no noise, they danced in perfect symmetry, both following the other or one moving right as the other moved left. The pair estimated they were between 10 and 100 feet above the river and about double the width of the river away from them. ‘They were moving up and down in crazy patterns far too quickly for them to be the lights of a motorbike; anyway, there would be no chance of a vehicle of any type moving up and down the cliff so quickly or with such turns of speed,’ explained Oliver. ‘The experience, which lasted about three minutes, left us speechless. Then we started talking and questioned what it could be. There was something quite eerie about it. We eventually decided to turn towards the car again, and we too frightened to look back, but just kept walking and eventually broke into a run.’
The following day the pair met with ridicule when they told family and friends at college. But in September that year, Oliver returned with another college friend called Dean Atkins to the valley, this time at 7pm, just after darkness had fallen. They walked two miles past the Stepping Stones, climbed a hill beyond a chain of limestone caves and sat watching the valley from a point high above the river valley. ‘To be honest, I thought that to see such an occurrence once would seem a miracle, but twice?’, he writes. ‘But sure enough, one light (much larger than the previous one) made its appearance from trees to our left, looking back along the river, towards the car park. It seemed to rise, and wobble along before disappearing into the trees. This was below us and again we heard no sound. Later we saw another light, whilst on foot heading back towards the car. Again, it was a large sphere of light, white in appearance.’
At the end of his account, Oliver asks: ‘Can rivers or water emit strange gasses? And if so how can they dance and chase each other in perfect symmetry at speed. Are they ghosts or spirits? I don’t know, but if I could film them then perhaps the peculiar pattern to their dance can be unravelled to reveal some particular meaning, code or language. . .’
Longdendale Lights
Like the luminous phantoms which haunt the river Dove, the Longdendale Lights have been around for countless centuries and the darn things just won’t go away. Teacher and musician Sean Wood lives in an isolated grey stone building whose lounge window fronts directly onto the carriageway of the busy trans-Pennine Woodhead pass high up in the Dark Peak of north Derbyshire. The stark forbidding gritstone north face of Bleaklow - which faces his home to the south - are where Sean and his family have seen pulsating blobs of light which cavort above the fells. ‘Quite simply, there are bright lights which appear at the top end of Longdendale - there’s no doubt they exist but what they are I just have no idea,’ he told me. He was pointing towards Shining Clough, a rugged desolate mountain ridge which at nearly 2,000 feet above sea level dominates the southern horizon outside his home at the head of the valley. Sean and his family first saw the lights there in 1982, the year he moved to aptly-named Bleak House.
‘It was about 9.30 on a November evening, when I walked into one of the front rooms at Bleak House to chastise someone for shining a torch through our window,’ Sean explained. ‘Of course there was no torch, nor indeed any person outside. However, the light filled the room with a chilly, moonlike glow. ‘The effect was heightened by the lack of street lighting at this altitude and when I went outside to investigate I saw a large pulsating ball of light directly above the house, and not too far from the aptly named Shining Clough. With the hair on the back of my neck bristling I went to telephone my near neighbours at the Crowden Youth Hostel. Guess what? They were outside watching the light in the sky too.’
This was just the first in a long series of unexplained luminous interludes which have plagued valley residents for as long as memory can stretch. ‘Two years after that I saw it again, beneath the skyline. In all I’ve seen them more than 30 times over the 16 years I have been living here,’ said Sean. ‘One of the times it was very very big, and between 50 and 70ft from the ridge, it was pulsing again and then stopping, moving back and forth and up and down. I’ve also seen three lights together, much smaller and together, like in a string, moving in an arch. I’ve seen these a few times, and the big ones a few times. There’s no doubt about the fact there are lights out there on those moors.’ Sean Wood is just one of dozens of Longdendale residents who have experienced the phantom lights which haunt Bleaklow mountain and the Woodhead pass which runs below it. Jean Whitehead, the previous owner of Bleak House, saw similar lights hovering over the mountains and reservoirs. Nearly everyone who has lived in the upper part of the valley has either seen or knows someone who has seen them. The lights are just one strand of a rich tapestry of stories and legends associated with Bleaklow - a dark, high rocky plateau covered by a thick layer of peat and heather. The lights are so well-known they have become part of the folklore of the region, just another aspect of the ‘Otherness’ of the valley (see also Clarke and Roberts 1996).
The Devil’s Bonfires
Stories about them go back generations, and in tales handed down through the generations they became associated with the devil, hence their local name, the Devil’s Bonfires. One resident remembers how back in the 1950s his granny would point towards Torside Castle and Glossop Low from their home in Old Glossop and mention ‘the lights’ which flickered and hovered above the Devil’s Elbow. Ten years later, as a volunteer in the local mountain rescue team, he heard about them again when motorists began to report lights resembling distress flares hovering above the moors (John Taylor, pers. comm.)
In tradition, the Devil’s Bonfires were said to hover around a mysterious mound near the summit of Bleaklow known as Torside Castle. Archaeologists believe the mound dates from the Bronze Age, others believe it is a natural lump of mud and rock left in a wake of the glaciers which once cut through the valley. Another tradition links the lights with phantom legions of Roman soldiers who are said to march along the Devil’s Dyke, a Roman road lining the fort at Glossop with the Hope Valley in the east. ‘Devil’ names crop up frequently in this part of the hills, adding to its eerie reputation. Many folktales are concentrated in the area of the Devil’s Elbow, a dangerous bend in the Glossop to Woodhead road above a deep cutting known as Ogden Clough. In folklore the Elbow was a dangerous boundary between the inhabited valley and the moor - a frightening place haunted by burning lights, the fairy folk and the Dark Lad or T’Owd Lad, the local name for the devil or horned one.
In the 1960s, the new Peak District National Park authority built the first youth hostel at Crowden, not far from Woodhead. The hostel was designed to provide an overnight stop for walkers braving the first leg of the newly-opened long distance Pennine Way footpath which crosses Longdendale on its route north into West Yorkshire. It did not take long before visitors and wardens based at the hostel and surrounding cottages soon began to see beams and pulsating balls of coloured lights racing along the rocky gritstone crags on the remote western face of Bleaklow, along Bramah Edge and Shining Clough. On occasions police and rescue teams turned out to search the craggy heights but found nothing. Then one fine summer’s night in July 1970, teacher Barbara Drabble, who was at that time married to Peak Park warden Ken Drabble, was driving home to Crowden past the youth hostel when she suddenly passed through an invisible curtain which led into the Twilight Zone. It was, she told me ten years ago, ‘a brilliant blue light’. It lit up ‘all the bottom half of the mountain, all the railway, the reservoirs and about a two mile stretch of road.’ The lights lasted several minutes and did not resemble daylight. It was ‘brighter, clearer and harsher’ and as Barbara drove into it she felt intensely cold, a sensation which caused the hair on the back of her neck to stand on end as if it had been affected by an electrical charge. ‘It was just all over the whole valley lighting up, with perfect clarity, every single feature. It was certainly bright enough to drive without lights, and I can remember the clarity with which I could see the contour of the stone walling and the features on either side of the hills beside the road. The drive must have taken about five minutes and when I parked, or more accurately hurriedly abandoned, the car on arriving home it had an icy sheen and felt cold” [2].
Barbara was so intrigued that she made a point of visiting local farmers, asking them what they knew about the light. They shuffled uncomfortably when put on the spot by an outsider, and kept what they knew to themselves. ‘I drew a blank from everyone but their attitude made me feel they did see something,’ she said. But one year later, more than a dozen people staying at Crowden Youth Hostel including the warden, Joyce Buckley, were dazzled by the same or a similar brilliant light which shined in through the windows. ‘At first I thought it might be car headlights, but it reappeared on top of Bleaklow and no car can get up there,’ said Mrs Buckley, who now lives in Manchester. ‘It lasted three minutes, 25 seconds and was very powerful.’
The warden was so concerned about the light she called out a Mountain Rescue Search party, led by Mrs Drabble’s husband Ken. He led a team who searched the moor in vain, and said afterwards: ‘When we got to the top there was nothing - no trace of people, lights or even a fire.’ What is more, Ken and the team searched the tops carrying big gas-powered searchlights whose reflectors were the size of a dustbin lid. But high up on the moor, the lightbeams thrown out by the searchlight looked like a twinkling candle to the people below in the Youth Hostel. The mystery light, they said, had filled the whole valley with its radiance. Discussing the events of that night for a TV reconstruction in 1996, Mr Drabble, now a senior Peak Park official, told me: ‘I did not think someone was playing a trick. There were 15 people at the hostel that night and they did see something, and I would not disagree that it was something very mysterious.’ [3]
After the sighting from Crowden Hostel, Barbara once again asked local farmers what they knew, and although reluctant to talk at first, eventually they admitted they were familiar with the lights and had been for generations. ‘One of them said they had known it to freeze young lambs when it came early in the year,’ explained Barbara. ‘Also someone said it had been coming for generations but never so close together as two years, usually about thirty or even fifty years in between. They were still reluctant to discuss it.’
Can spooklights be explained away?
The most common description in recent years is of a string of moving lights which have been mistaken for ramblers lost on the mountains. Others have seen balls of light and searchlight beams. These phenomena have been seen right along the 15 mile mountain ridge south of the valley, from Torside Castle and Bramah Edge on the west, to Shining Clough which overlooks Sean Wood’s home at the head of the valley. So persistent have these reports become that the voluntary Mountain Rescue team have turned out from their Glossop base on numerous occasions when lights and ‘flares’ have been spotted, only to find the lights fade away like a will o’the wisp as they approach. The rescue team’s Commander, engineer Phil Shaw, became fascinated by the lights when he spotted a mystery beam of light on the mountain 15 years ago, and now keeps a log of sightings. ‘Between them, the seven mountain rescue teams in the Peak are called out once a year by people who see lights in the hills and assume someone is in trouble,’ he told me [4]. ‘This has been going on for at least 20 years but no one has ever been found. The reports have become so regular that the police no longer pass on reports of mystery lights to us unless they feel it is a genuine sighting of a red distress flare.’
Jim Exton, of the National Grid, has heard the stories and rules out the pylons which criss cross the valley bottom as having any connection with the lights. He says ‘arcing and sparking’ could be visible in wet weather and polluted air conditions, but the glow caused by it would be very difficult to spot from ground level. Scientist Dr Neil Charman, who has specialised in the study of ball lightning at Manchester University, rules this out as an explanation because it is so rare and due to the long duration involved in some of the reports from the valley. He has pointed towards the will o’the wisp as a more likely explanation, But as we have seen, what is a will o’the wisp? Police and mountain rescue personnel point out that the entire Bleaklow plateau is on a major international flightpath for air traffic landing at Manchester Airport in the west, and it is quite possible that aircraft landing lights could be responsible for some of the UFO-type sightings of moving lights from the region. Others may have mistaken the flashing beacon of the giant Holme Moss TV transmitter to the north of the valley as a mystery light source when there have been unusual weather conditions at work. But none of these theories explain the range of unusual light phenomena witnessed in the valley, or the traditional accounts of lights on the hills before the arrival of aeroplanes, pylons and other man-made sources of electricity.
To Wright Cooper, whose family have farmed the valley slopes at Tintwistle, near Woodhead, for more than four centuries, all the fuss about the lights is just ‘something and nothing’. The Coopers have known about them for donkey’s years, as he puts it. ‘Today there is all this talk about flying saucers but people were seeing these lights above the Devil’s Elbow way back in my grandfather’s day,’ he said. ‘Only back then it was put down to the devil or witchcraft, today it’s all aliens and UFOs.’
Notes:
1: Derbyshire Notes and Queries, Derbyshire Advertiser & Mercury Vol.10 No.505.
2: Barbara’s first hand account of her experience initially appeared in Peak Park News summer 1972; a more detailed account was transcribed by the author in 1988, and Barbara appeared on Strange But True: The Mystery of Dark Peak on the ITV network, November 1, 1996.
3: Interview with Ken Drabble, April 1996.
4: Personal communication from Phil Shaw, 1990.
References:
ANTHONY, W., 1997, Haunted Derbyshire, Beeston Books.
BROOKESMITH, Peter and Paul DEVEREUX, 1997, UFOs and UFOlogy, Blandford.
CLARKE, D., Ghosts and legends of the Peak District, Jarrold.
CLARKE, D. and Andy ROBERTS, 1996, Twilight of the Celtic Gods, Blandford.
DEVEREUX, P., 1989, Earthlights revelation, Blandford.
FLETCHER, C., 1993, letter, Mercian Mysteries, No.17.
LINAHAN, L., 1995, More pit ghosts, pad feet and poltergeists King’s England Press.
MILLS, A.A., 1980, 'Will o’the wisp', Chemistry in Britain, 16, pp 69–72.
PICKFORD, D., 1994, Staffordshire: Its magic and mystery, Sigma.
REEDER, P., 1986, ‘Will o’the wisp’, Northern Earth Mysteries No.30, pp 4–10.
TURNER, William, 1901, Romances of the Peak,London.
Originally published in At the Edge No.10 1998.
Inverted Orange Triangle over the Sea
Date: August 9, 2004
Location: St Agnes Beacon
Source: Cornwall UFO Research Group
Summary: "We both saw an inverted red/orange triangle in the low level clouds out to sea. The object appeared for about 2 seconds and then disappeared. The object also appeared to have small spherical lights on each corner, yellow/ orange in colour."
9th August 2004
22:00 local time
St Agnes Beacon, Cornwall (South approach to St Agnes Beacon.)
Conditions: Full Dark, Clear sky, clouds on horizon, no wind
St - Keverne
2004
About 10 years ago I was driving home from work on the Helston to St Keverene road about 5.30 and it was almost dark.
When I came over the brow of the hill adjacent to the dishes at Goonhilly I was aware of something in front of me and slightly to the right in the sky. It was quite low and moving quite slowly_ I could not make out the shape or outline of 'it'. There were 8 or 9 oscillating lights. I knew it could not be a helicopter and my first thought that it was a plane crashing,
It was still to my right and the lights continually flashing on and off (pulsating) when I reached Traboe crossroads, Instead of turning off, I decided to follow the lights to try and see what it was and headed towards St Keverne. When I came out of the trees before Zoar garage I half expected it to have disappeared but it hadn't. At this point it was heading almost directly towards Coverack. After Zoar garage I again had to to go through trees and it was still there, lights still pulsating and by this time it was quite dark.
It must have turned slightly because I was now following 'it' towards St Keverne. When I passed through the village sign it changed.
I parked up and got out of my car. Looking up I could no longer see the pulsating lights and although the shape wasn't clear by the thing itself, the shape it was making in the sky was triangular. it was not moving. All around I could see stars and clouds and this void amongst them. What I could see quite clearly was that on all three points of the triangle was a very shiny silver disc. I sat beneath it for quite some sometime and then quite suddenly the shape changed and therow of flashing lights appeared again and started moving. I watched it heading towards the sea until it disappeared from my view.
Witnesses: 2
"We were driving towards Chapel Porth beach on the South approach from St Agnes when I saw what I though was a car's headlights coming in the opposite direction. I dipped my lights, but there was no car or other light source. Simultaneously my wife saw a round glowing light slightly to the left and about 100 meters away and 50 meters high.
We continued driving towards St Agnes beacon, just climbing the hill past the Chapel Porth turning when we both saw an inverted red/orange triangle in the low level clouds out to sea. The object appeared for about 2 seconds and then disappeared. The object was in a Westerly direction and about 2-3 miles distant. The object also appeared to have small spherical lights on each corner, yellow/ orange in colour."
1st Object:
Distance: 50 meters
Number: 2 objects, one at ground level directly ahead, one overhead.
Direction: West
Object Size: Two pence piece at arms length
Shape: Spherical
Colour: white
Brightness: bright, like a car headlight.
Duration: 2 seconds
2nd Object:
Distance: 3-5 miles
Direction: West
Object Size: Two pence piece at arms length
Shape: Inverted Triangle with small spheres at corners
Colour: Orange/ Red
Brightness: Glowing
Duration: 2 seconds
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060601000000*/http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case453.htm