UFOs in Reality (5 page)

On one of my investigative visits I noticed that a certain road in that industrial area bore the name ‘Camp Street’. Enquiries made, later, by telephone, to Salford
Museum, confirmed for me the area of interest had once been occupied by the Romans. It was further revealed to me that the nearby Bury New Road, one of the arterial routes running north from Manchester, followed the course of an ancient Roman road.

So, there again, were the truly ancient links with the new developments which were then in evidence – a new refuse disposal depot and a large student’s hostel which was still in the early stages of construction at that time. After carrying out a number of studies of that kind,
I concluded that the chance of seeing a UFO (probe) must be greatly increased for people living in any place where large scale construction developments were taking place – and especially so, if the site also had ancient connections
. During that period of great changes in and around Manchester, it seemed to me that the operators of those probes probably knew more about the nature of the developments than the people living in the areas involved.

All this led me to another idea.
Perhaps the automated probes navigated by visual reference to landmarks
. They may have initially arrived here during prehistoric times. When the Romans arrived and began occupying much of Britain , the key artificial landmarks had been theirs and the prehistoric sites, which had been established long before their time of occupation. Throughout that ancient period of surveillance, the available landmarks had been programmed into the navigation systems of the terrain-following probes, and had been referenced regularly by them. It followed that whenever one of the vital landmarks came to be modified by later generations of humankind, the probes’ map references had to be updated with some urgency.

This method of visual mapping for navigation purposes is used by certain wasps and bees, and it has been developed in recent years for military use by terrain-following attack aircraft and stealth bombers. It seems probable that certain extraterrestrials developed the technique a long time ago and are still using it.

To conclude this section, I want to demonstrate that the orderly geographical distribution of UFO events during 1967 were not unique. Another intense outbreak of activity occurred in Britain during 1971. Fig. 7 shows the distribution of those events. Many of them seemed to have been definitely linked to the course of the extended M6
motorway and to the developments taking place in the areas adjacent to Manchester.

Fig. 7

CHAPTER 4
B
ALLS OF COLOURED FIRE (1967 – 1973)
 

The study of British events continued until 1973. During those six years from 1967, I had recorded strange ‘fireball’ events that had been reported from time to time. Typically, they had resembled large balls of glowing plasma (electrified air or gas), red or green or blue and usually of great brilliance, which had been observed during fine weather periods. When seen travelling at high speeds across the countryside, they had never seemed to have any meteor-like tail or trail. At times they flew along very slowly and in a controlled sort of way. Sometimes they were very large, as big as the Moon. I remember investigating a unique report from a man in mid-Cheshire. He had been motoring home on a country road late at night, when a huge example had sped, low in the sky, across his path. He had been severely shocked by the event. The object had disappeared behind a small wood and he had expected to witness a gigantic explosion – which had not occurred. When I interviewed him I asked for some idea of the size of the object compared with something in his room. He pointed to a large brass plaque hanging on a wall only 6 feet (2 metres) away. That plaque was about 18 inches (50 cm) in diameter! Many of us would have died of fright!

Spring Equinox Events, 1973

A set of outstanding events, in daylight, which I investigated, could have been evidence of a near-miss by a sizeable asteroid. I could find no official report on it but it was certainly a very significant event – or rather, series of events. Although I carried out a comprehensive investigation of the eyewitnesses’ reports, I will just summarise my findings for this record, since the happenings were unlike the other cases to be dealt with in this section.

On the morning of 23rd March, 1973 – a beautiful sunny morning with clear visibility, at some time during the period 08:20 and 08:25 hrs. BST, a series of spectacular ‘fireball’ events were reported to have occurred above an area of England extending from Stafford in the Midlands to somewhere north-west of Manchester. A colleague at Woodford airfield in north-east Cheshire, Mr. Cyril Kay, was one of the witnesses. From his first-floor office window he had seen a brilliant green object streaking northwards at high altitude, to the west of his position. Such was the speed of the object, it had given the impression of being a rapidly-moving green streak, progressing horizontally. Reports from two other witnesses located in the Manchester area appeared in The Manchester Evening News that evening. These prompted me to investigate the reports, because they opened up the possibility of establishing the flight path and speed of the object. I visited the Manchester witnesses, took bearings and elevation angles from those sites and combined them with those given to me by my colleague. The result was quite staggering. The estimated velocity of the green object had been in excess of 43,000 mph (69,000 km/hr)! Furthermore, from the elevation angles and triangulations from the three sites it seemed that its altitude had been only 16,000 ft.! So it looked as though the Earth might have narrowly escaped an almighty collision on that morning.

Soon afterwards I was informed that fireball events had occurred in the Midlands, virtually at the same time. This information came to me from Mr. Anthony Pace, co-author of Ref.1 who was, by that time, BUFORA’s Research Director. He had interviewed the witnesses in that area and, subsequently, he supplied me with that information to enable me to carry out an overall study and to produce a report.

It became quite clear to me that several different objects had been seen during a five-minute time interval that morning. In the Stoke-on-Trent region a shower of apparently insubstantial fireballs had been reported. The paths followed by these would have taken them over Newcastle-under-Lyme to descend into fields close to the M6
motorway
.
There had been no reports of explosive collisions and no meteoric material was ever found. This led me to think that they had been balls of glowing plasma and that they may have been produced in the wake of that primary object seen from the Manchester area. That idea was given further credibility by a report of another meteoric object seen overflying Stafford. If a fragment of the primary object had broken away somewhere in the region of Colchester on the East Coast and that fragment had then progressed over Stafford, the division of the ionised wake of the primary object might have produced self-contained balls of spinning plasma, which then slowed and finally descended over Stoke-on-Trent to dissipate their stored energy on collision with the ground.

Overall, I concluded that those Spring Equinox events had been caused by a very rare natural occurrence. My guess was we had been very fortunate that morning, because, to have survived the rigours of a such a hypervelocity pass through the dense layers of our atmosphere, that primary object would have had to have been huge when it first entered our atmosphere! Something the size of Snowdon mountain perhaps?

The Fireball Cycle

During my study of British UFO reports for the period 1967-73, plasma-like fireball events were analysed separately. This was because I suspected that there might be natural explanations for them. One such possibility that came to mind was that they might originate from space, the Sun’s corona being one conceivable source. Would it be possible, I wondered, for a ball of spinning plasma to be hurled out from the Sun and then follow the Earth’s magnetic field lines before being projected into our atmosphere? I did a little exercise of that kind, but as it was outside my normal range of applications, I decided not to persist with it. Instead, I turned my attention to investigating whether there were any date connections with UFO activity of the vehicular kind. In some cases this seemed to be a possibility, but the main pointer came from a very simple exercise, which is reproduced as Fig. 8

After superimposing the occurrence dates for all the years of the British study in the manner shown, it became apparent that the phenomenon was cyclic. Plasma-ball
events had generally occurred within +/- 6 days of 10 equally-spaced dates throughout the year. However, in no single year was a complete set recorded. The dates are shown in Fig.8 and, below, they are listed and compared with the dates of well-known periodic meteor showers.

Fig. 8

Mean ‘Fireball’Dates Meteor Dates Meteor Shower

As can be seen, most of those mean ‘fireball’ dates fitted neatly between the periods of intense annual meteoric bombardment. This observation and the cyclic nature of the events seemed to suggest that the phenomenon might be intelligently controlled and that
the links between it and the vehicular activity might be more than mere coincidence.

The dates of this cycle were serendipitously used to good effect when the SAC study became global in scope. This is the work presented in Phase 2.