My friend John and I both had an interest in UFO reports, and in particular, the events of the 60’s and 70’s in the Wiltshire town of Warminster. Cigar shaped objects and bright lights seen in the sky; loud unearthly noises that rattled roof tiles; flocks of pigeons dying in mid-flight; and this… “the wife of a Royal Air Force pilot… [was]… ‘woken by a terrible droning sound. It made the bed and floor shake. I went over to the bedroom window and looked out… about 200 yards above the range of hills… was a bright object like a massive star… domed on top and huge in size, and unwinking light of uncanny brilliance.’”
Myself, my sister and my brother had all seen weird things in the sky. My sister saw what she described as a slowly rotating figure-of-eight shaped light in the sky when she was only 6. I was watching the League Cup Final on the television one overcast afternoon in London, perhaps 1972, when my attention was caught by some lights in the sky. I dashed outside and saw a triangular formation of six lights, diffuse because they were just inside the clouds. They took less than a minute to cross the sky. My brother camping on a beach near St Ives, and along with a number of others, saw multiple point of lights in a clear night sky giving a virtuoso display of high speed formation flying.
Despite these experiences, and like John, another down to Earth sort of person, I was always sceptical of the idea of alien visitations, and thought that most of the sightings had rational explanations. I still do.
Anyway, it was John’s idea in the summer of 1976, that we take a trip to Warminster to coincide with the peak of the Perseids meteor shower on August 12th (yes, the ‘Glorious Twelfth’!), the rationale being that we could watch the meteors whilst keeping an eye out for the odd UFO. So we loaded the car with the makings of an overnight stay, and set off. The skies were not promising during the journey, but by the time we arrived they were clearing. We spent an hour or so looking around for suitable sites with open horizons and away from traffic and street lights. We spotted Cley Hill (sic) from the road, and after checking on access and parking, decided this was where we were going to spend the night, little realising that Cley Hill had been one of the epicentres of the sightings.
There were still several hours of daylight left, so we returned to Warminster and had a meal and a few pints of Wadworth’s 6X at the Mason’s Arms. John had the foresight to bring a gallon container which the barman was happy to fill for us – more 6X of course.
In the fading daylight we found our way back to Cley Hill, and festooned with cameras, tripods, binoculars, sandwiches, flasks of soup and coffee, sun loungers, sleeping bags, extra clothing and the gallon of 6X, we climbed the hill. We reached the top in comparative darkness, and waited until the flashing lights around our vision had receded a little, and set up the sun-loungers side by side, but facing opposite directions so that we could each see half of the sky. We knew that although the meteors ‘radiated’ from the constellation of Perseus (hence the ‘Perseids’), the meteors themselves could be seen almost anywhere in the sky.
Anyway, it was a fantastic evening and I recall counting 110 – 120 meteors, although we’d been smoking dope, so you can’t be too sure. Sadly, no UFOs! I guess we finally fell asleep around 3am, and spent an uncomfortable night with the cold seeping into our sleeping bags as the dew was soaking in.
We repeated these trips to Cley Hill each year, and on one occasion even managed to persuade Lin and Caro, our wives to join us. On another occasion we were joined by our friends Simon and Patricia. Simon I recall had just had a wisdom tooth extracted and was on heavy medication, so would keep falling asleep; until it was his turn with the joint of course!
We again had an uncomfortable night, but whoever was first up in the morning suddenly said “Hey come and look at this!” In the field at the base of the hill was a crop circle that wasn’t there the night before! We took the gear down to the car and decided to check out the crop circle. Compared with later circles, this one was fairly simple… a large circle surrounded by four smaller ones. I imagine depicting the body of a flying saucer, and the four ‘feet’ or ‘pods’.
As luck would have it, I had a tape measure in the car, so we were able to measure the circles and the distances between them. The big circle was 55 feet in diameter, and the four smaller ones 15 feet each. But most striking were the differences of several feet in the symmetry of the circles, so we were forced to conclude that alien engineering was fairly unsophisticated!
But as we stood there, reality quickly kicked-in and we felt for sure that this was a hoax, and decided that two people with a couple of planks could easily do this in an hour or so. This impression was reinforced by the clockwise swirling pattern of crushed stalks. It was some years later, when crop circles were popping up all over the UK, that I saw an interview on TV with Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who admitted starting the craze; and by this time, the crop circles were getting pretty sophisticated.
As a brief aside, some years later, my wife and I were visiting the Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, Nevada, which because of its proximity to Groom Lake Airbase (or Area 51), was the spiritual centre for American UFO nuts. Someone inside, presumably hearing our accents came over and asked what we thought about “all those British crop circles”. I told him I’d stood in the middle of one of them, and they were most likely hoaxes. He glared at me for a second or two, and stormed off muttering to himself… I guess that faced with a rational viewpoint, he decided that he preferred his illusions!
Anyway, back to Warminster… occasionally, in the middle of the night we’d hear approaching footsteps of other (mostly UFO hunting) night owls. You have to bear in mind that Cley Hill has 360 degree panoramas of the surrounding countryside; an awful lot of which is Salisbury Plain, and an awful lot of Salisbury Plain is used by the military. As such, it wasn’t unusual to see landing lights of aircraft and helicopters.
On one occasion, about midnight, we saw what looked like a stationary bright light low in the sky, which suddenly winked out. An hour or so later we heard voices, and saw a group of 3 men. “Did you see that bright light over there?” they asked. “Yes” we answered… “it was interesting, but we decided it was probably a military helicopter on approach with it’s landing lights on, and then it turned away just as it landed”. “Oh no, we’re members of BUFORA, and we’re putting it down as a sighting”. BUFORA is the British Unidentified Flying Object Research Association, and people like this who choose irrational explanations when a much more rational, if slightly less exciting alternative is available, are doing UFO research no favours whatsoever. Occam’s Razor anyone?
My career often took me abroad, and during the next two decades I was probably absent for 6 years, but until John’s untimely death in 2005, we must have done at least a dozen of these trips.
One year (1985?), we got to Cley Hill and found that the National Trust had moved the car park away from the foot of the hill, and much closer to the road. It added a quarter of a mile to our trip, and bearing in mind that: a) this was just to the base of a 300 ft hill which we had to climb, b) we’d had 3 or 4 pints of 6X, c) we were not getting any younger, and d) one of us would often have to return to the car for the dope and anything else we’d forgotten, so suddenly these forays were becoming hard work.
We did enjoy the Wadworth’s 6X, but we hadn’t seen any UFOs, so we decided to give up on Warminster and move our meteor spotting base to Ivinghoe Beacon near Dunstable. By now my brother Rob had begun to join John and I on these trips. We had a few years at Ivinghoe, and then guess what? The bloody National Trust put up wooden posts at the base of the hill, so we had to use the car park a third of a mile away!
For a few years, we were like new age travellers, moving from site to site, but eventually we found a field near Christmas Common. It wasn’t a hilltop but it had good open horizons. It was also a cow field so you had to be careful where you were treading, and occasionally you’d feel the hot breath of a curious cow in the middle of the night, but it had the advantage that it was close to where we lived, and the local pub, the Fox and Hounds had a nice outdoor seating area, sold decent pub grub and a good pint (or three) of Brakspears.
So, no UFO’s, but over the years, we saw several thousand meteors including quite a few ‘fireballs’… super-bright meteors that leave the trails still twinkling several seconds, or even minutes later. And in all that time, there might have been one year where a dubious weather forecast made us change locations, but interestingly, we were never rained on!
And anyway, it beats shooting grouse….
