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The Moody Blues 1967 UFO Close Encounter

With 4 or 5 up I think 120 was out of the question. 75 realistic but only on the section of the M6 which was built at the time - no way this could have been achieved on the A6, except for very very short blasts. I might possibly have tried this in my 57 Chevy once or twice :chuckle:
I wasted a considerable fraction of my misspent youth crammed into some 60s Detroit roadboat with four or five other kids, doing all sorts of stupid things that make me certain we all have guardian angels, and also pretty sure I'll have to put in some overtime to balance the books when my time comes. 100 mph was easy. 120 would be possible in some of those tanks that come to mind, but it's really hard to imagine doing that in that place and time for more than a minute or three. Yikes! I'm sure they were going way too fast for the headlights, tires, and brakes a '64 Impala would have, but that would be about 70 or 80 at night.

Yank tanks on UK motorways must have looked ginormous. I had an in-law who was in the air force. He could have shipped his Monte Carlo over at gummint expense, but he was going to Germany and heard there was an inspection and some strict rules about making the cars legal there. He bought a German car from someone shipping out, and sold it to someone arriving a few years later, as he was leaving. We all were surprised he did something so sensible.

It's mentioned in the Pinder podcast interview, quoted by BS3 earlier in this thread.
Thanks, EG. I missed that one. He did say 120 mph. I think he said 85 in the podcast. That's plausible.

This all reminds me of Dad's silver '64 Riviera. He said one time he was in a hurry to get somewhere, and a close friend was riding along. Larry was funny and quick, and also was not enjoying the ride. He told Dad to slow down. "If we run off the road, they'll think a 707 crashed."
 
I wasted a considerable fraction of my misspent youth crammed into some 60s Detroit roadboat with four or five other kids, doing all sorts of stupid things that make me certain we all have guardian angels, and also pretty sure I'll have to put in some overtime to balance the books when my time comes. 100 mph was easy. 120 would be possible in some of those tanks that come to mind, but it's really hard to imagine doing that in that place and time for more than a minute or three. Yikes! I'm sure they were going way too fast for the headlights, tires, and brakes a '64 Impala would have, but that would be about 70 or 80 at night.

Yank tanks on UK motorways must have looked ginormous. I had an in-law who was in the air force. He could have shipped his Monte Carlo over at gummint expense, but he was going to Germany and heard there was an inspection and some strict rules about making the cars legal there. He bought a German car from someone shipping out, and sold it to someone arriving a few years later, as he was leaving. We all were surprised he did something so sensible.


Thanks, EG. I missed that one. He did say 120 mph. I think he said 85 in the podcast. That's plausible.

This all reminds me of Dad's silver '64 Riviera. He said one time he was in a hurry to get somewhere, and a close friend was riding along. Larry was funny and quick, and also was not enjoying the ride. He told Dad to slow down. "If we run off the road, they'll think a 707 crashed."

60s and 70s American cars do look truly enormous on UK roads, even more so compared to the usual UK cars of that era, which were small by today's standards.

Quite envious of your misspent youth and those cars with bench seats and big unstressed engines; we used to cram into a Vauxhall Nova or Austin Metro or something far less spacious / glamorous.
 
I wasted a considerable fraction of my misspent youth crammed into some 60s Detroit roadboat with four or five other kids, doing all sorts of stupid things that make me certain we all have guardian angels, and also pretty sure I'll have to put in some overtime to balance the books when my time comes. 100 mph was easy. 120 would be possible in some of those tanks that come to mind, but it's really hard to imagine doing that in that place and time for more than a minute or three. Yikes! I'm sure they were going way too fast for the headlights, tires, and brakes a '64 Impala would have, but that would be about 70 or 80 at night.

Yank tanks on UK motorways must have looked ginormous. I had an in-law who was in the air force. He could have shipped his Monte Carlo over at gummint expense, but he was going to Germany and heard there was an inspection and some strict rules about making the cars legal there. He bought a German car from someone shipping out, and sold it to someone arriving a few years later, as he was leaving. We all were surprised he did something so sensible.


Thanks, EG. I missed that one. He did say 120 mph. I think he said 85 in the podcast. That's plausible.

This all reminds me of Dad's silver '64 Riviera. He said one time he was in a hurry to get somewhere, and a close friend was riding along. Larry was funny and quick, and also was not enjoying the ride. He told Dad to slow down. "If we run off the road, they'll think a 707 crashed."
Peter Paget stated that the Welsh called them "Yank tanks" and they weren't exactly suitable for the narrow Pembrokeshire lanes.

So where are we with this case...? I feel it has been demonstrated that this encounter did actually happen (more than can be said for some UFO cases) but with some confusion over the year which, in fairness, can be attributed to the passing of the years. We don't have been an approximate location from the actual witnesses, not even an "it was near to XXXX". This is frustrating and stalls any progress on finding possible earthly misidentifications. Denny Laine wasn't too fussed about what he saw and hints he may have seen the 'light' since on a regular basis whilst travelling to and from gigs. To my mind this suggests a misidentification of ariel masts with their dull red lights, possibly seen through a bank of fog that appeared metallic from their perspective. HMS Inskip is one possible explanation.

So is that case closed or does this encounter still have legs...? It is a great shame that they scarpered rather than get closer to the 'object', which after all was not threatening them in any way. I know I would eternally regret not taking a closer look but none of the witnesses express a similar sentiment, which strikes me as a little remiss (eg "if only we had gone over and touched it" or similar). Doe this suggest that, yes, at the time it was unidentified to them but on a later at leat one of them later realised they had been mistaken, or perhaps all of them know in their hearts it was the ariels but it makes a cool story...?
 
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So where are we with this case...?

For what it's worth ... I'm still leery about concluding there was a single incident the various self-described witnesses witnessed in a particular place on a particular date.

Inconsistencies among the documented reports (gig site; timeframes; etc.) are a problem here. Until and unless time and place can be nailed down, I can't rule out the possibility one or more of the accounts is based on hearsay (in-group lore) rather than direct experience.

The inconsistencies extend to the sighting itself - what happened; how much was actually seen; and whether or not there was lost time involved. The accounts cited so far don't match with regard to:

- where and for how long the initially sighted light followed the car;
- whether the occupants actually saw that same light land in a field to one side of the highway; and
- whether anyone saw anything more than a light through adjacent trees / foliage.

The level of detail in Edge's account (FSR, 1991) is 'way out of line with the others. Did everyone else have worse memories, or was Edge elaborating a story beyond the bounds of what actually happened?
 
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If you spell his name backwards & add a Y you get Moody Bob. Proof positive..
 
For what it's worth ... I'm still leery about concluding there was a single incident the various self-described witnesses witnessed in a particular place on a particular date.

Inconsistencies among the documented reports (gig site; timeframes; etc.) are a problem here. Until and unless time and place can be nailed down, I can't rule out the possibility one or more of the accounts is based on hearsay (in-group lore) rather than direct experience.

The inconsistencies extend to the sighting itself - what happened; how much was actually seen; and whether or not there was lost time involved. The accounts cited so far don't match with regard to:

- where and for how long the initially sighted light followed the car;
- whether the occupants actually saw that same light land in a field to one side of the highway; and
- whether anyone saw anything more than a light through adjacent trees / foliage.

The level of detail in Edge's account (FSR, 1991) is 'way out of line with the others. Did everyone else have worse memories, or was Edge elaborating a story beyond the bounds of what actually happened?
It is also interesting that his occurred in Jenny Randles' neck of the woods yet I haven never seen her mention it in print.

The interviewer claims to have questioned Edge at length but didn't manage - or even bother - to pin down a location but rather got carried away with the 'mental impression' of the alien drawn several years after the encounter. So can we believe all that has been written in that a article or is this yet another case of a self-styled Ufo researcher manipulating the narrative to fit their own personal beliefs...? Certainly no attempt was made to explore a possible rational/earthly misidentification.

Pete Willsher is/was indeed a musician:

https://www.instantencore.com/contributor/bio.aspx?CId=5169960

This caught my eye:

"In 1966 while playing tuba, he quite literally led the march to save the London-Hastings railway from closure...it worked, it is still currently operational. The power of music!"

This is simply not true, the Hastings line was never threatened with closure and had taken delivery of new Class 33 locomotives just four years earlier (with special narrower bodies due to narrow tunnels). However, his local station at Wadhurst was indeed threatened with closure in 1966, along with many intermediate stations in rural areas up and down the country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_line). But it is a big step from campaigning to save your local station to claiming to have saved an entire railway line, so do we have someone partial to exaggeration and tall tales...?
 
Peter Paget stated that the Welsh called them "Yank tanks" and they weren't exactly suitable for the narrow Pembrokeshire lanes.

So where are we with this case...? I feel it has been demonstrated that this encounter did actually happen (more than can be said for some UFO cases) but with some confusion over the year which, in fairness, can be attributed to the passing of the years. We don't have been an approximate location from the actual witnesses, not even an "it was near to XXXX". This is frustrating and stalls any progress on finding possible earthly misidentifications. Denny Laine wasn't too fussed about what he saw and hints he may have seen the 'light' since on a regular basis whilst travelling to and from gigs. To my mind this suggests a misidentification of ariel masts with their dull red lights, possibly seen through a bank of fog that appeared metallic from their perspective. HMS Inskip is one possible explanation.

So is that case closed or does this encounter still have legs...? It is a great shame that they scarpered rather than get closer to the 'object', which after all was not threatening them in any way. I know I would eternally regret not taking a closer look but none of the witnesses express a similar sentiment, which strikes me as a little remiss (eg "if only we had gone over and touched it" or similar). Doe this suggest that, yes, at the time it was unidentified to them but on a later at leat one of them later realised they had been mistaken, or perhaps all of them know in their hearts it was the ariels but it makes a cool story...?

I don't know if the case is closed - just that we're in a position similar to that with a lot of UFO cases in that one can't really do any meaningful investigation.

On the plus side, three of the people present remember something happening, with two of the accounts having some common elements. I think there is a real experience at the core of it and Edge's retelling seems fairly sober.

On the other hand. Pinder's accounts are not only inconsistent with Edge's, they are inconsistent with each other and show signs of elaboration. Edge must have got the date wrong at the very least. Laine remembers only a light in the sky. No one seems to have thought to fix or make a guess at the location and even if they were to, I'm not sure any memories could be relied on at fifty years' distance. I would quite like to hear what the guy who ran back to the car remembered, though something about it does suggest everyone was quite hyped up about the sighting - UFOs were quite a big thing for mid-late 60s UK 'counterculture'. I do wonder if Pinder, who seems to have had an abiding interest in this sort of thing, might have transmitted his belief in what he was seeing to the rest of the group, causing a bit of a collective panic.

The suggestion of Inskip is a really intriguing one. Perhaps they were seeing the lights on the Inskip masts the whole time; perhaps they saw the masts, pulled over, and then primed by excitement misinterpreted the lights of a farm vehicle, or something like that. Either way without a location it's all very difficult to prove.
 
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