FT262/263

A CHESHIRE ENCOUNTER
On a warm spring night in April 1975, an electrician and former RAF engineer was walking across an old railway bridge in Stockport, Cheshire, close to the large brickworks at Adswood.

Suddenly, as ‘Keith’ reported later: “I saw this green streak of light heading along the railway track and, before I knew where I was, there was a very strange thing right next to me on the path illuminated by a nearby streetlamp.”

The ‘thing’ was about 2ft long, sleek and black and rather akin to a cruise missile. On its side it had an aperture like a large eye; a slit over this opened to reveal a greenish glow that seemed to be staring at Keith. He stood transfixed; forever afterwards he would regret that he didn’t walk underneath and reach up to touch the UFO, as he believes he could easily have done. Instead he merely gaped in shock as the ‘iris’ closed and the now barely discernible small object shot away across the brickworks heading south towards Macclesfield.

In an interview with our Manchester UFO team, Keith told us he had a strong feeling that he was being observed, possibly photographed, and wondered, wearing his engineer’s hat: “What was powering and controlling this thing?”

Of course, these understandable responses show the human tendency to presume order behind a UFO sighting and seek the intelligence within. But there cannot have been any ordinary alien at the helm of the Adswood UFO – not unless it was a very little green man. However, as you will see, this baffl­ing case is not unique, and other miniature UFO cases do exist.


A FEELING OF BEING WATCHED
Though she was completely unaware of the above case, a woman who’d seen me being interviewed on television contacted me and wanted to describe what had happened to her and her husband (a civil engineer) on the Spring Bank Holiday weekend of May 1980.

It was a bright sunny day with high patchy cloud, she explained, as they scrabbled about some rocks on the Cumbrian fells between Langdale and Coniston, close to a spot called Wetherlamb. Suddenly, the woman felt as if someone was watching them, and had the urge to look upward. She also experienced a sensation of heavy press­ure, as is sometimes felt when a thunder­storm is nigh – but there was no such weather that day, only the still calm air.

However, on the slope above them was the presumed source of the sensation – a small object about 2ft in diameter, plainly visible in the bright afternoon light. It was, she said: “like a steel kettle in colour and shaped like a ball bearing but with striations on the surface”.

No pattern was discernible but “It looked as if someone had gone over the surface with steel wool.” The thing was a dark bluish grey and very definitely solid and heavy – yet apparently flying just above ground level heading straight for the couple. At close proximity, they could even see what looked like a heat haze encircling the object to the depth of an inch or two, but it was not hot enough for this to be caused by the weather.

During the encounter, the object stopped still and hovered and the couple heard a “very low almost sub-audible humming” coming from it, below the threshold of normal sound and almost a feeling rather than a noise; it seemed to trigger a sense of apprehension that stopped the witnesses from approaching the object. After seeming to watch them for two minutes, the thing accelerated rapidly upwards and disappeared.

“I was extremely glad when it was gone,” the woman added. Her husband confirmed that he too had seen it, but the matter was not discussed until she contacted me eight years later.

As an interesting aside, the hill slope in question has iron ore beneath, and when she lived in the area as a child the witness remembers it was struck by lightning several times, with the ore being locally blamed for this frequency.


BLOWING BUBBLES
These two cases have fascinating similarities and appear to describe miniature ‘metallic objects’, but these are not the only type of mini-UFO in the records.

The next episode happened on 26 August 1989, and I interviewed the witness a few months later. It was a fine evening and he was out beside a nature reserve in Sedgeley, West Midlands. The reserve had just closed for the day, but he was exercising his dog in a sloping field alongside, with the surrounding area otherwise deserted and clear views in several directions over uncultivated land. The object first appeared in the near distance looking, in size and shape, like a floating golf ball. It was perhaps 12ft off the ground and floating with the wind, even dropping down at one point as if caught in a downdraft.

Curious as to the origin of what he guessed to be a “soap bubble” – there was no other person for hundreds of yards in any direction – the man clambered onto a style for a better view. Suddenly, the thing changed direction, sped up and headed straight into the stiff breeze, coming right for him. It did not deviate and seemed very controlled, climbing over a wire fence and stopping just inches from the man and giving him a perfect view as it appeared to study him. “It was looking at me – surveying me – there’s no two ways about it,” the witness insisted to me later.

He describes the ‘bubble’ as opaque with a white surface residue resembling a feather or cotton wool. Its surface was reflective and he could even see his own image as a dark patch as he bent forward. At that point, he felt the urge to try and ‘burst’ it. However, almost as if sensing his thoughts, the object kicked up to top gear and shot away at great speed; it covered 40ft in about a second and was soon lost to view.


THE PONG FROM SPACE
For sheer strangeness, this case is hard to beat. It occurred on the evening of 2 March 1988 near Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire.

Pauline, then 14, was mucking out her horse while listening to music on the radio. Suddenly, this cut out and instead of music she heard a faint vibrating noise that grew in intensity.  It was accompanied by a vile smell – like rotten eggs – filling the air.

Moments later, an object approached from a roughly south-easterly direction and continued north-west. It was about 3ft long and square but extremely thin and jet-black in colour. Little “antennæ” emerged, one from each corner, and the whole surface was covered in small “perforat­ions”. The noise was boring into her skull as it passed over, and at that point Pauline ran screaming indoors.

Her parents attested to her hysterical state as she appeared. They had not seen a thing, being indoors, but had heard the noise and although the radio was working again the terrible odour was still lingering inside. They added that the house shook briefly as if hit by an earthquake and that they also felt the air being sucked out, making it hard to breathe for a few seconds. Going outside shortly afterwards, they found the horse was cowering by the wall in obvious distress.

Pauline was so upset that she was treated by her GP and even spent a few days in hospital after her hysteria intensified and she refused to go outside. She also suffered blurred vision and enlarged pupils. None of this was helped when the media picked up the story and made jokes about her seeing a flying tea bag!

This teenager was so deeply affected that she remained off school for weeks. I later talked to her education welfare officer who was asking for advice on what to do. Everyone involved with this case was of the opinion that Pauline was a sincere and genuine witness and had been deeply traumatised by a genuine experience.

While it was quickly noted that RAF Alconbury – rumoured to be the first UK home of stealth aircraft – was only three miles away, and something connected with that airbase was always viewed as a possibility, precisely what was never clear.


HAT-TRICK
These four very different cases appeared to share some interesting features, and yet it was frustrating to find so many witnesses physically so close to these mini-UFOs, yet not quite close enough to reveal what they were.

But then on 2 July 2000 I received a call from south Manchester via the Jodrell Bank science centre, which then, as now, put witnesses in touch with me when they report a UFO. A young man taking the air on a warm night after watching a football match claimed to have seen a red mini-UFO come from the sky and hit him on the side of the head, sett­ing his baseball cap on fire. He rushed inside, put out the flames and next morning went into the garden to seek the cause. He found a small rock that was very heavy and seemed sulphurous.

Did we have the Holy Grail of an actual mini-UFO to investigate, as well as the phys­ical traces on the cap? To cut a long investigat­ion short, the answer is no. After numerous tests by scientists at Manchester University and assessment from astronomers at Jodrell, our initial thought (that the rock might be a meteor­ite) was eliminated. The trade-off between momentum and heat meant that it was very unlikely that the impact and fire were created this way. The damaged cap was assessed, and while it could have been struck by a mini-UFO, similar damage might have been caused in other ways, such as contact with a poker.

As for the rock, it turned out to be lead sulphide, and had traces of gum that sugg­ested it was a sample that had been on display somewhere or attached to something. As it was found near the garden fence, it could easily have been tossed over by a passerby at any time in the past.

However, there were some interesting clues offered by the witness to this case. He described the weather that night as hot and oppressive. There had been a thunderstorm locally, and next day an engineer had to be called to look at the witness’s malfunctioning TV set. The TV engin­eer confirmed that he had visited a nearby house that was struck by lightning around the time of the mini-UFO sighting and where the TV and VCR had been fried.


CONCLUSIONS
According to this evidence, mini-UFOs clearly exist, and it is worth asking what might lie behind them. There are intriguing clues, not least the heavy atmosphere mentioned in several of the cases and suggest­ive of ionisation and local pressure changes. The oppressive ‘sense of sound’ might also be indicative of these forces at work.

Could some of these cases be a form of ‘super ball lightning’, where a natural but unusual atmospheric phenomenon is the source of the UFO? This makes sense in a case such as the Manchester 2000 incid­ent (above) or the Sedgeley 1989 event (FT261:29). Ball lightning has been described as resembling a ‘soap bubble’ by other witnesses and can follow electrical curr­ents rather than air currents, making it seem to travel against the wind.

What about the apparently structured ‘craft’ in cases such as Adswood 1975 (FT261:29) and Godmanchester 1988 (above)? Thoughts here certainly turn to modern-day mini-surveill­ance drones – in which the UK has been a pioneer for some time. Could these witnesses have seen early test devices? One could perhaps envisage such a scenario in the area of an air base such as Alconbury – indeed, in April 1984 such a drone got out of control near the base at Lakenheath, causing at least one UFO report. But a district of suburban Stockport seems a far less likely location. And, of course, some of the extreme effects that seem to be conn­ected with these mini-UFO incidents would be hard to square with 21st-century UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) or surveillance drones, let alone prototypes from decades ago.

It is likely that, as with the rest of the UFO evidence, there will not be a single all-embracing answer to these five cases (or indeed the many others I could have included). There are probably several different causes, perhaps some being triggered by forms of UAP – natur­ally occurring Unidentified Atmospheric Phen­omena – and others being actual devices manufactured for a purpose, of which military applications seem one likely source.

As to whether any of them are UFOs in the traditional sense – supposed alien craft piloted by beings from elsewhere – it would seem wise to eliminate the other possibilities before we start the hunt for those extremely little green men.