Shadows in the Sky E-Book

Neil Arnold

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Although the saying, 'Pigs might fly…' may bring a smile to one's lips, even stranger things have been reported as appearing in Britain's skies over the centuries. Eye-witnesses have testified that various terrifying and bizarre forms have appeared in the skies, from ghostly planes, phantom airships and UFOs, to reports of sky serpents, celestial dragons, flying jellyfish, rains of fish (or blood, or metal, or frogs…) – even reports of a griffin seen over London! It also considers reports of haunted aircraft hangars and airfields. Shadows in the Sky compiles hundreds of accounts from the spine-chilling to the downright bizarre, that'll keep your eyes fixed looking upwards!

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated with love to Doris, the nan I never met but miss dearly X

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Nick Redfern

Introduction

1 Ancient UFOs and Flying Dragons

2 Anomalous Airships

3 Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire (and Light!)

4 Pilot Encounters with UFOs

5 Phantom Aircraft and their Ghostly Occupants

6 Monsters from the Sky

7 It’s not Raining Cats and Dogs … Just Pennies, Fish and Frogs!

Select Bibliography

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their help and support: my mum and dad (Paulene and Ron), my sister Vicki, my nan (Win) and granddad (Ron), Jemma, Nick Redfern, Joe Chester, Sean Tudor, John Hanson, Dawn Holloway, Evelyn ’Missy’ Lindley, Corriene Vickers and Jonathan Downes. Thanks to those at The History Press, the Centre for Fortean Zoology, Fortean Times, Paranormal, Encounters, The Unknown, Victor Harris, Karl Shuker, Dead of Night, UFO Magazine, Fate, Paranormal Database, The Why Files, Sightings, Ghost Hunters, Strange But True?. Thanks to all the newspapers mentioned herein, and particularly to the Grimsby Evening Telegraph for permission to reproduce the Schaffner story, and also a big thanks to Simon Wyatt, Alan Friswell and Adam Smith for the fantastic illustrations.

FOREWORD

BY NICK REDFERN

When Neil Arnold asked me if I would write the foreword to this very book – Shadows in the Sky – I quickly and enthusiastically said: ‘Yes!’ Not just because Neil is a good mate who shares similar tastes in music and embraces the idea of living life to the full, but also because – as is the case with all of Neil’s books – his new one is a damned fine read!

There’s often a danger that when compiling and writing a book on countless cases and incidents of a distinctly paranormal nature, the finished product can come across as being overly sterile and encyclopaedic. In other words: highly informative, but as downright dull as dishwater.

Thankfully, Neil is the sort of author who astutely realises that capturing the attention and imagination of the reader is as important as presenting the evidence. And that’s what I like about Neil’s work: he’s a good, solid researcher, but one who also knows how to craft a fine and captivating account that is as factual as it is spellbinding.

And that’s precisely what you get with Shadows in the Sky: a mighty and mysterious tome best devoured by candlelight on a thunderous, chilled night. If you happen to be in some spooky old house at the time, well, all the better!

So, with that said, what, precisely, is Shadows in the Sky all about? Put simply, it’s a first-class study of strange, bizarre and, at times, downright terrifying phenomena seen in the skies of the green and pleasant British Isles.

No one should be surprised to learn that Neil devotes a whole section of his book to the controversy surrounding UFOs – and he does so in a fashion demonstrating that whatever the nature of the phenomenon, it’s a very ancient and mysterious one. But, flying saucers and aliens are not the only things that pop up on Neil’s radar. He also provides us with a fascinating body of data on issues that some see as being connected with the modern era of Ufology, including weird and enigmatic ghostly balls of light, and nineteenth and early twentieth-century sightings of ‘phantom airships’, unidentified balloons and much more. Neil even entertains us with stories of baffling falls of fish and frogs from the heavens above!

Then there are those ominous monsters of the sky – creepy winged creatures that sound like they surfaced straight out of the pages of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Their names include the Brentford Griffin, the Owlman, and the Birds of Death. Truly, they are the stuff of nightmares.

Now that I have given you a taste of Neil’s book, it’s time to read on. Disappointed you won’t be. After reading Shadows in the Sky, however, you may find yourself glancing upwards far more than normal, pondering and brooding upon the many and varied monstrosities and mysteries that lurk above …

Nick Redfern is the author of many books, including There’s Something in the Woods, Body Snatchers in the Desert, A Covert Agenda, The FBI Files and The Real Men in Black.

INTRODUCTION

On 24 June 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a skilled and experienced pilot, was flying in his Callair aircraft in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, Washington, when he encountered something that would change mankind’s perception of life as we thought we knew it. Whilst searching for a downed plane, Arnold was suddenly alerted by a flash of light and then nine boomerang-shaped objects appeared in the sky in a chain-like formation. In 1977 Arnold recalled, ‘They seemed to fly in an echelon formation. However, in looking at them against the sky and against the snow of Mount Rainer as they approached, I just couldn’t discern any tails on them, and I had never seen an aircraft without a tail!’

Arnold’s sighting became known as the first ever official report of a ‘flying saucer’. He hadn’t described a saucer-like craft, but in 1948 Arnold wrote an article for Fate magazine under the title ‘The Coming of the Saucers’, and in 1952 a book Arnold wrote with Ray Palmer had saucer-like craft on the cover. These flying saucers would become more popularly known as UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). In their book UFOs and Ufology, Paul Devereux and Peter Brookesmith wrote that Arnold had initially thought that the objects were of military construction but what puzzled him most was their unusual formation in the sky. Arnold commented that each object seemed to move of its own rhythm and ‘fluttered and sailed, tipping their wings alternately’, whilst ‘emitting those very bright blue-white flashes from their surfaces.’

Since Arnold’s encounter literally thousands, if not millions, of people have come forward to not only report unidentified objects, but to claim to have photographed them, too. Whilst the majority of the evidence supporting the existence of unknown craft is inconclusive, there’s no doubt that people are seeing something in the skies of the world that cannot simply be explained by weather balloons, known aircraft or natural phenomena.

A few years previous to Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, strange objects, which became known as Foo Fighters, were reported in the skies at the height of the Second World War. UFOs, and the sub-genres they have spawned, have made folklore all the more entertaining: from tales of alleged alien abduction, to alien-constructed crop circles, and even cases of UFOs rumoured to have crashed in remote deserts or rural countryside. What is clear is that the phenomenon has embedded itself into our culture whether we believe or not.

The author. (Photograph by John Estall)

Of course, the term ‘unidentified flying object’ has often been misinterpreted over the years. Any mysterious object in the sky can be unidentified until explained, but since the 1947 sighting thousands of sky watchers and investigators have proposed the theory that this planet is being visited by alien beings. This has resulted in conspiracy theories and what might be deemed irrational suggestions. In a sense the term UFO is restrictive, and what you are about to read proves that all manner of strange, aerial phenomena can in fact be considered an unidentified flying object.

Over the centuries the skies of Britain have been littered with unexplainable forms. Flying dragons, angels and other winged beings, balls of light, odd things pouring down from the heavens and even airborne ghostly manifestations had been recorded long before Arnold’s sighting. One person’s UFO could be another person’s ball lightning – it’s often down to perception. In this book I’ve decided not to regurgitate the thousands upon thousands of UFO reports, that would be pointless (and impossible); after all, this is not a UFO book. Instead, whilst touching upon a few unusual encounters over Britain – mainly involving pilots and strange objects – Shadows in the Sky looks at more diverse mysteries of the air.

The abundance of weird cases you are about to read suggests that the UFO phenomenon is only a small part of a very complex mystery that has plagued mankind since the beginning. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever come close to solving the perplexing riddle, but as long as we keep our eyes to the skies, these manifestations will continue to haunt Britain’s airways.

1

ANCIENT UFOS AND FLYING DRAGONS

THE FIRST UFO?

There has always been a sceptical view when it comes to sightings of strange flying objects in the sky. However, for centuries anomalous aerial phenomena has been recorded, and in many cases by reputable people. On 18 August 1783 Thomas Sandby, a founder member of the Royal Academy, was having dinner with a group of friends at Windsor Castle, Berkshire. After their meal they took a break on the castle terrace but were immediately drawn to an object in the sky to the north-east. The phenomenon was recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of 1784 by Tiberius Cavallo, one of Sandby’s dinner guests, who wrote:

I suddenly saw appear an oblong cloud moving more of less parallel to the horizon. Under this cloud could be seen a luminous object which soon became spherical, brilliantly lit, which came to a halt. It was then about 9.45 p.m. This strange sphere seemed at first to be pale blue in colour, but its luminosity increased and soon it set off again towards the east. Then the object changed direction and moved parallel to the horizon before disappearing to the south-east. I watched it for half a minute, and the light it gave out was prodigious; it lit up everything on the ground. Before it vanished it changed its shape, became oblong, and at the same time as a sort of trail appeared, it seemed to separate into two small bodies. Scarcely two minutes later the sound of an explosion was heard.

This remarkable incident, thousands of miles away and 164 years before Kenneth Arnold’s Washington experience, proves that unidentified flying objects, whatever they may be, have been with us far longer than we realise. Thomas Sandy recorded that the size of the object was immense, possibly half that of the moon, and the fact that it changed shape, halted, then changed direction, suggests it was no natural phenomenon. Scientists and sceptics argued that the group of witnesses observed a meteor, but again, this is not how a meteor behaves, and many witnesses to UFOs over the years have come from astronomical and scientific backgrounds so should be able to identify a natural phenomenon.

BEWARE OF DRAGONS!

During the eighteenth century there was no mention of flying saucers or space aliens, yet reports of such anomalous objects persisted under different guises. Devereux and Brookesmith, again from their UFOs And Ufology work, comment: ‘Meteors aside, during the centuries leading up to the Age of Reason one of the favourite explanations for strange lights in the sky was that they were dragons. Even the 1783 objects were referred to by some people as draco volans, the “flying dragon”.’ In my book Paranormal London I wrote of a curious incident which took place in 1882 concerning astronomer Walter Maunder. Whilst gazing into the depths of space from Greenwich Observatory he observed a disc-like object of greenish hue that moved at incredible speed across the sky. The disc headed in a north-easterly direction. Shortly after the incident via the pages of The Observatory, the Royal Astronomical Society, by coincidence, had asked readers to send in their stories of strange aerial phenomena. Walter Maunder responded with his account.

In 1741 Lord Beauchamp was said to have observed a small fireball (measuring only 8in in diameter) over Kensington in London. The following year over St James’s Park a ‘rocket’ was reported by a fellow from the Royal Society.

In the year 1113 a group of French clergy, whilst travelling through Dorset in the south-west of England, recorded a seemingly far-fetched account of an encounter with a five-headed dragon. It had allegedly emerged from the foaming waters of Christchurch Bay, flown about the place and breathed sulphurous flames; the beast even destroyed a ship!

In 764 and 1222 dragons were said to have been seen over London; two years later, on 1 January, it was recorded that several monks in Hertfordshire observed a strange ship as it floated over their monastery; in 793 ‘exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons’ were recorded from the skies of Northumbria; and flaming manifestations were recorded by a Scottish pastor who wrote in 1792 that ‘many of the country people observed very uncommon phenomena in the air (which they call dragons) of a red fiery colour, appearing in the north and flying rapidly towards the east …’.

Looking back at such events, some scientists argue that what people were experiencing was in fact lightning and atmospherics resulting from severe storms.

Some of the first reports of unidentified flying objects described dragons. (Illustration by Simon Wyatt)

BIBLICAL UFOs AND MORE …

In other parts of the world, reports of strange aerial phenomena date back even further. Hilary Evans’ book UFOs: The Greatest Mystery records, ‘332 BC – While Alexander the Great was besieging Tyre, ‘flying shields’ appeared over the Greek camp’. The objects were described as round discs that flew in triangular formation, ‘one larger than the others by about a half’. Both armies watched the incredible objects until the leading disc flashed tremendous light aimed at the city’s defences which were said to have crumbled with ease. The besieging army flooded through the ruins until the city had been taken with success and then the discs, which hovered overhead throughout, zipped off into the sky.

According to Evans, in 66 BC the historian Pliny spoke of a strange incident which occurred in Rome during the consulship of Gneaus Octavious Gaius Scribonius. A spark was allegedly seen to have fallen from a ‘star’ and approached the Earth. The object seemed to be as large as the moon and it hung in the sky giving off a cloudy hue. The object then ascended and took on the form of a torch.

From fifteenth-century BC Egypt, in the annals of Pharaoh Thutmose III, there is mention of circles in the sky giving off a pungent odour; in AD 664a great shaft of light swept across the sky over Barking in Essex; in AD 747 dragons that breathed fire were seen over China; and 153 years later in France a woman and three men emerged from an aerial craft and were allegedly attacked by locals. Then, in 1561 at Nuremberg, Germany, over 200 cylindrical objects were reported as spinning in the sky. From a century later Hilary Evans records, ‘1661 – A Belgian Jesuit missionary in Tibet, Albert d’Orville, saw a flying object shaped like a double Chinese conical hat: silently, it circled the city twice, then, surrounded by mist, vanished.’ Four years later in the Russian village of Robozero, people leaving a church observed a bright ball of light in a clear sky.

Some researchers claim that what could be perceived as UFOs are even recorded in the New and Old Testaments of the Bible. The Reader’s Digest book, UFO: The Continuing Enigma, under the section ‘UFOs in the Bible’, mentions the following examples:

As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming bronze. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had wings. Their legs were straight, and the sole’s of their feet were like the sole’s of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze.

Ezekiel 1:4–7

William H. Watson, writing on Ezekiel’s unusual sighting for UFO Magazine, delved deeper into the incident and also gave a different account from Ezekiel, stating that, ‘According to the bible, in 595 BC, the prophet Ezekiel had a most interesting encounter beside the River Chebar in the land of Chaldea (Mesopotamia or Iraq, if you prefer).’

It seems that Ezekiel saw a whirlwind which came from the direction of the north but this was no ordinary whirlwind. The object resembled a cloud but of some brightness and fire. From this object came four living creatures, which according to Ezekiel had ‘four faces’ and ‘every one had four wings.’

The wings of these beings were stretched upwards, but each creature also used a wing to cover its body whilst another wing was used for the creatures to be joined to one another. Ezekiel claimed that their appearance was ‘like burning coals of fire’ and from the fire came forks of lightning. Ezekiel also mentioned a wheel-type object, of the colour ‘beryl’… some researchers believe these creatures were in fact helicopter-type machines which boasted rings. Ezekiel mentions, ‘As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful’ and also full of eyes.

The wheels lit up as the creatures ascended from Earth and the ‘firmament upon the heads of living creatures’ were the colour of a terrible crystal. The noise of their great wings was said to have been heard, a sound akin to the rush of a great body of water. Had Ezekiel described an encounter with some form of ancient, extraterrestrial craft? Or, over time, has such an account simply succumbed to exaggeration and misinterpretation?

Watson, after citing the verse from Ezekiel, comments, ‘If one didn’t know that the above had been written about 26 centuries ago, one could easily believe that this was the attempt of an intelligent man to describe a flight of autogyros or helicopters, perhaps descending from some kind of carrier ship’.

… And lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy …

Matthew 2:9–10

… Eli’jah said to Eli’sha, ‘Ask what I shall do for you, before I am taken from you’. And Eli’sha said, ‘I pray you, let me inherit a double share of your spirit,’ … And as they still went on and talked, behold a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Eli’jah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Eli’sha saw it and he cried, ‘My father, my father!’ … And he saw him no more.

2 Kings 2:9–12

And he said to me, ‘What do you see?’ I answered, ‘I see a flying scroll; its length is twenty cubits, and its breadth ten cubits.’

Zechariah 5:1–2

As you will read in this book, many accounts of weird balls of fizzing light, fiery monsters and other aerial phenomena suggest that the UFO phenomenon is a sum of many parts and, as with the case of the quotes from the Bible, all down to interpretation. In the modern day we rarely, if at all, record sightings of dragons and chariots in the skies over Britain, but we do record a great deal of flying discs, cigar-shaped craft and the like. As we evolve as a race it appears so do the mysteries around us. Dragons are very much part of British and world folklore, but were they the first interpretations of what we now call UFOs?

One only has to look at ancient paintings and flick through old scriptures and text to read of strange symbols and signs in the sky. Weird lights, peculiar orbs, flaming chariots et al. have been recorded from all over the world. Ancient Roman and Greek texts mention serpents, dragons, gods, angels and wonders of the sky and Britain, despite appearing as a small island (when in reality it is the seventh largest in the world), is not excluded from the weird activity that takes place among the clouds.

In worldwide UFO lore, especially since the 1960s, there have been numerous reports of close encounters with strange objects that have allegedly descended from the sky and landed close to our homes. Vehicles have reputedly been buzzed by UFOs and people claim to have been taken from their beds in the dead of night and taken aboard spaceships. Alien beings have also been blamed for inserting microchips and other foreign objects into the bodies of abduction victims. UFO witnesses claim to have been threatened and harassed by mysterious men in black (MIBs) shortly after their sightings. UFOs have been blamed for making crop circles in the fields of the United Kingdom, and also for mutilating cattle and other livestock across the globe. Some researchers believe that the extra-terrestrial occupants of such craft are working in cohorts with the government. Others theorise that UFOs and those Martians at the wheel are not from outer space but inner space, or some of the world’s deepest lakes. Whatever the truth behind the flying saucer enigma, it is quite clear that such forms are nothing new.

DROPPING IN …

One Sunday afternoon in the Kentish town of Gravesend in the year 1211, as recorded by English chronicler Gervase of Tilbury in Otia Imperialia, a strange ship appeared in the sky over a local church. The appearance of the craft naturally spooked those who had congregated for their Sunday worship, and those in attendance were made all the more uncomfortable when the object released an anchor, which clipped a tombstone on the way down. Moments later an individual emerged from the hovering ship and attempted to lunge towards the anchor to retrieve it. His actions were described as if he was swimming in the air. The church bishop ushered his congregation back into the church and the occupants of the object simply cut the anchor and glided away, leaving the weight in the churchyard as the humanoid clambered back into the safety of his craft.

Interestingly this story, or one very similar, has been connected to other English counties. For example, Robert Emenegger’s UFOs Past, Present and Future comments: ‘During the Middle Ages, similar experiences were recorded around the world. From Bristol, England, in the year AD 1270, comes one such account. A spaceship was seen, and it was said that its occupant scampered down a ladder, and was stoned and asphyxiated in the earth’s atmosphere.’

Some researchers have argued that the story has been confused with another record made by Gervase of Tilbury, which, possibly in reference to Bristol, states:

This port is the one used by the most of those who travel to Ireland. On one occasion a native of that place set sail from that port for Ireland, leaving his wife and family at home. His ship was driven far out of its course to the remote parts of the ocean and there it chanced that his knife fell overboard, as he was cleaning one day after dinner. At that very moment his wife was seated at table with their children in the house at Bristol, and, behold, the knife fell through the open skylight, and stuck in the table before her. She recognized it immediately, and when her husband came home long afterwards, they compared notes, and found that the time when the knife had fallen from his hands corresponded exactly with that in which it had been so strangely recovered.

In the year 1211 a strange ship was said to have dropped an anchor in a Kentish churchyard. (Illustration by Simon Wyatt)

The story of an anchor appearing from the heavens also appears in Irish lore, from the borough of Cloera, where it was said that at the church of St Kinarus in AD 956 (although it has also been recorded as the year 1211) an anchor attached to a rope dropped from the sky. Something unseen above was dragging the anchor, which suddenly got hooked on the church door. A crowd gathered just in time to see the hull of a ship. Then, a man appeared to descend the ladder but panicked upon seeing the crowd and climbed back up the ladder. According to this legend the anchor was cut off its rope by the villagers and put on display in the church. The event was recorded in Speculum Regale.

French chronicler St Peter of Vigeois similarly claimed that an airship of sorts dropped its anchor in the centre of London in the year 1122. Oddly, in the 1857 work Cumberland and Westmorland Ancient and Modern, author Jeremiah Sullivan writes of another event bearing some similarities. Sullivan tells of a Mr Jack Wilson who, whilst walking home in an area known as Sandwick Rigg in the Lake District, observed a bizarre spectacle:

He suddenly perceived before him, in the glimpses of the moon, a large company of fairies intensely engaged in their favourite diversions. He drew near unobserved, and presently descried a stee [ladder] reaching from amongst them up into a cloud. But no sooner was the presence of mortal discovered than all made a hasty retreat up the stee. Jack rushed forward, doubtless firmly determined to follow them into fairy-land, but arrived too late. They had effected their retreat, and quickly drawing up the stee, they shut the cloud, and disappeared.

In the concluding words of Jack’s story, which afterwards became proverbial in that neighbourhood: ‘yance gane, ae gane, and niver saw mair o’ them.’

Another story pertaining to Irish folklore is mentioned in the fifth volume of the book Darklore. In his article ‘Enchanted Islands and Ships in the Sky’, Nigel Watson writes: ‘Early Irish monastic literature has several accounts of “demon ships” in the sky …’

The Book of Leinster mentions that during a royal fair at Teltown, County Meath the High King Domhnall, the son of Murchad in AD 763, allegedly observed a trio of unusual sky ships. Watson also states that according to the Book of Glendalough, the King Congallach, during the tenth century, saw a mystery aerial ship. A ‘sailor’ was said to have emerged from the craft wherupon he speared a salmon, which he then retrieved. Several guards of the king were said to have apprehended the cosmic sailor but he was released and floated back to his sky vessel.

There is another mention of this legend, which Bishop Patrick speaks of in Mirabilia (Wonders):

There was once a king of the Scots at a show with a great throng, thousands in fair array. Suddenly they see a ship sail past in the air. And from the ship a man then cast a spear after a fish; The spear struck the ground, and he, swimming, plucked it out …

Weirder still, in 1897 a similar story emerged from Texas in the United States, where it was claimed that the anchor lodged itself on the railroad track and a man in a blue sailor suit came down the rungs of the ladder, but then became scared by a jeering crowd. An almost identical story comes from Iowa, where it was recorded that at Sioux City a farmer had the garments he was wearing hooked by an anchor, which had dropped down from above. The man escaped by grabbing on to a branch of a tree.

How could such a tall tale, if it was just that, have travelled so far in miles and centuries? Oddly, the legend even connected itself to an eerie airship (or, as some call it, ‘scareship’) mystery, which plagued the USA during the late 1800s, and Britain during the early 1900s. On many occasions witnesses fled in fear from Zeppelin-type ships and other cigar-shaped objects, which on occasion would drop an anchor or grappling hook. The next section looks at some of the phantom airship panics, but it may be worth noting that some researchers believe that such grappling hooks were used by the mysterious crew of the elusive ship to lift up victims. Were these anchors and hooks the earliest form of ‘alien abduction’?

MORE HIGH STRANGENESS

The Milwaukee Journal of 8 July 1947, a couple of weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s strange sighting, reported ‘Queer things seen in skies as long as 150 years ago’, and listed several British accounts. The journal’s researcher Charles Fort stated that ‘… disks were seen in north Wales Aug. 26th 1894’ and that four years later, on 27 October at 6.00 p.m. at County Wicklow, Ireland, ‘an object that looked like the moon in its three-quarter aspect [had] moved slowly, and in about five minutes disappeared behind a mountain’.

In 1718 other accounts tell of an enormous, pear-shaped craft, said to have been bathed in a great arc of light, spotted over Northamptonshire; the object moved slowly and silently across the sky. Then from 6 March 1912 it was recorded that over Warmley, England, ‘a splendidly illuminated airplane travelling at a tremendous rate’ was observed. This strange sky vessel came amidst the airship panic, which you will be introduced to shortly.

The newspapers of the time put forward three main theories to explain such strange aerial objects: 1) that a secret weapon was being experimented with by the army and the navy; 2) that ‘the disks actually come from Mars’; and 3), ‘They are things out of other dimensions of time and space’. All three of these theories are still applied today by researchers keen to solve the so-called UFO mystery. However, as already stated in the introduction, high strangeness involving sky-related phantasmagoria has more than one answer and source. The stories to follow will prove this point. Even so, in many cases of unidentified flying objects, you’ll find it’s easier to blame the aliens!

In his book, The Realm of Ghosts, author Eric Maple wrote, ‘In Elizabethan times the west of England must have been more in the nature of a foreign land than an integral part of the country.’ According to Maple, the county of Cornwall possessed its own language and that the beliefs of the locals were inherited from Celtic ancestors who had fled before the advance of the Saxons

With regards to West Country aerial phenomena, Maple commented that locally there was a deep belief and respect regarding folklore and ancient tradition. Many Cornish legends pertained to the foaming seas, folklore shared with ‘their kinsmen in Brittany across the channel.’ According to Maple, tales of phantom ships frequenting the shores were rife in ancient lore and there were also stranger tales of ships taking to the air.

Why on earth should phantom ships, often connected with wild and stormy seas, be seen in the sky? Or were local folk simply seeing the same flying objects so many others had seen many years before, and after?

Speaking of spectral ships, Maple goes on to speak of another terrifying West Country encounter, from Cornwall to be precise, stating that many years ago, one crisp autumnal evening, a foreign ship had been observed off Cape Cornwall. Maple writes, ‘There, she disembarked a man, not too willingly it may be presumed, for he stood swearing and screaming as the ship put to sea again.’

It seems, that according to legend, the man was a nasty pirate, so vile in fact that he’d been shunned by his fellow pirates and cast out of the boat. Understandably those on land soon began to fear this hideous man who was said to have lured unsuspecting ships onto the rocks by way of striding across the cliff-tops on horseback with a lantern attached to his back – as a way of distracting vessels in distress.

‘What on earth has this got to do with unusual things happenings in the sky?’ I hear you cry. Please bear with the tale and find out! Maple adds that the pirate would murder any seaman who made the shoreline, but his terrible crimes were to lead him to a bizarre death.

Many years later, according to Maple, this villain had an encounter with an aerial anomaly as he lay, close to death, in his remote cottage. The pirate, despite his malevolence, was in the company of the parson, the doctor and two local fishermen when suddenly a strong wind screamed across the marsh and peculiar, eerie voices could be heard swirling in the gales. The voices were said to have cried, ‘The time is come, but the man isn’t come’. It was then that a black ship appeared on the horizon, heading slowly toward the foaming shore, and above it hovered an ominous black cloud. The ship was said to harbour no crew, and somehow seemed controlled by the black mass above it. A black shadow appeared to be cast over the pirate’s hovel and an air of malevolence seemed to seep through the cracks. The parson attempted to rid the house of the evil but to no avail, and as thunder roared and lightning cracked the dying pirate yelped, ‘The Devil is tearing at me with the claws of a hawk.’

At that point a fork of lightning struck the house and the timbers began to burn. No prayers could save the pirate or his home. The parson, the doctor and the two fishermen fled the burning building and as they came out into the night air they could clearly see a small, dark cloud detach itself from the phantom ship and make its way towards the pirate’s cabin. Once it had reached the house, the cloud hovered over the roof and then seemingly sucked up the soul of the pirate before drifting back to the ship which in turn floated back out to sea.

When the companions of the pirate returned to the smouldering cottage they found the corpse of the pirate, staring wildly into space. On the day of the funeral a terrible storm was said to have broken out and the coffin was struck by lightning. Maple concludes, ‘Then all afire, it was lifted up by a whirlwind and conveyed like a great burning log through the sky to the Wrecker’s Hell.’

From 1743 there comes a fantastic tale of a ‘ship’ in the sky at Anglesey, Wales. According to legend a farmer named William John Lewis, aided by a ploughboy, was ploughing a field near Holyhead when they were astonished to see a huge ship, or ‘ketch’, weighing around 90 tons, descend from the heavens. The object reached about a quarter of a mile from the ground but this was no spacecraft, it looked exactly like a ship of the sea. The object had vast sails and flags flying. Mr Lewis rushed to get his wife, but when they came back the ship, which was being mobbed by birds, sailed backwards towards the clouds. Lewis realised that what he was seeing was something extraordinary, but stated he had seen such a thing previously. He claimed that roughly every decade such a ship sets sail through the clouds, from the direction of the mountains.

A SIGN FROM THE HEAVENS

Some things that appear in the sky, whether malevolent or benign, apparently take on a different form depending on who sees them. A hovering black cloud in the sky which plucks someone from the ground could be perceived as a demonic visitor to one person, or as a UFO abducting a victim to another. Author Eric Maple speaks of other anomalous aerial phenomena in the form of symbols and signs. He writes, ‘The outbreak of the cholera epidemic in 1832 was accompanied by the vision of a flaming sword seen by thousands in the sky over London.’ The weird object – considered some type of omen – was said to represent the last symbol of the Victorian Age – the Crystal Palace, which a century later was said to have caught fire. Locals peered from their windows at a red light in the heavens and commented, ‘It is a sign’ – a sign that the old ways and the old world were doomed. The ‘flaming sword’ may sound extremely bizarre, but its appearance wasn’t unique to the skies over Britain. On 13 November 1650 Rector Samuel Clarke recorded:

… being Saint Andrews Day, a little before, or about sun rising, the sky opened in a fearful manner, in the south-west over Standish, a town five miles from Gloucester, and there appeared a terrible fearful fiery shaking sword, with the hilt upwards towards the Heavens, the point downwards towards the Earth; the hilt seemed to be blue, the sword was of a great length, shaking hither and thither, and coming lower towards the Earth: There was a long flame of fire towards the point, sparkling and flaming in a fearful manner, to the great astonishment of the spectators, who were many. At last the Heavens closing, the sword vanished, and the fire fell to the earth, and ran upon the ground.

Strangely, a sword-like object was seen a few centuries later in Manchester during the November of 1961. A Mr Burrows, accompanied by another witness, observed an unusual cloud formation positioned to the left of the moon. In the middle of the cloud could be seen an object resembling a sword. Suddenly, from the hilt of the sword emerged a peculiar submarine-type object. In the modern era, flaming objects in the sky could easily be perceived as UFOs from outer space.

In the November/December 1998 issue of UFO Magazine, a woman named Mrs J. Barnard, from West Sussex, wrote in with an intriguing letter of a strange aerial object. She commented that during 1951 she’d been taking a late evening stroll along a path at Hammonds Hill Farm in Hassocks, Sussex, when she spotted an unusual sight in the sky. Mrs Barnard had her camera with her at the time and snapped the aerial phenomena which she described as looking like a topless cross with arms and leg aflame. In her letter she stated that, ‘…it then rose at a phenomenal speed, upwards, then as quickly shot forwards and disappeared.’

Her letter concluded, ‘At that time, I don’t think UFOs and space ships were part of everyday language, and I certainly didn’t come to think of it as something alien. I haven’t seen anything similar since.’

Mrs Barnard’s letter was accompanied by a small black-and-white photograph showing a blurred cross-like object in the sky. The editor of the magazine at the time, Graham Birdsall, replied, ‘Reports of a strange flying cross phenomena were prevalent across many southern counties of England in the late ‘60s, but Mrs Barnard’s account predates these by almost 17 years.’

Birdsall added that the photo which Mrs Barnard took may well have been the first ever photograph of an unidentified object taken in Britain.

Strange crosses in the sky have been reported since the Sussex enigma. In 1967 several witnesses, including police officers, observed a ‘flying cross’ in the Okehampton area of Devon. The sighting was featured in several newspapers across England under varying headlines, such as ‘PCs chase flying cross’, ‘Police chase white flying light’ and ‘Saucer led us a chase, say police’. Police Constables Roger Willey and Clifford Waycott reported that they had pursued the unknown craft through rural back roads. Despite reaching speeds of 90mph in their patrol car they felt as if the object was toying with them. Willey commented that, ‘It was star-shaped and I would say it was bigger than any aircraft’.

A few days later one newspaper headline commented, ‘Flying cross was Venus, say boffins’, after researchers from the Plymouth Astronomical Society came forward with their observations of the story. They claimed that the object appeared bright due to the fact that the police officers were viewing it through the windscreen, although why on earth police officers would waste their time chasing a planet is beyond me.

The flying cross was also observed in Sussex and then by an Evelyn Robson, from Salcombe Hill, which was reported in the Sidmouth Herald. The London Evening Standard of 27 October 1967 ran a story on the flying cross under the headline ‘Refuelling Clue To Things In The Sky’, with reporter Peter Fairley writing, ‘That ‘fiery cross’ in the sky – seen by nearly a dozen reliable witnesses – may have a terrestrial explanation – aircraft refuelling.’

According to the article the US Air Force had come forward to state quite categorically that the unusual phenomena seen in the skies over south-west England could in fact be explained by several aircraft refuelling operations that had taken place all week. The array of lights, according to the Air Force, could be explained – the white light seen was in fact used as a way of illuminating the tanker, whilst the red lights seen near by would have come from the jets waiting to refuel. The newspaper added that the US Air Force were hoping that all reports of a ‘flying cross’ would eventually tally up with their night-time operations.