• Forums Software Updates

    The forums will be undergoing updates on Sunday 10th November 2024.
    Little to no downtime is expected.
  • We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.
I agree, the noise is key to the experience and the noise suggests some earthly piece of machinery.

The 'vacuum cleaner' type noises did suggest a hovercraft to me but there is one additional possibility I'd like to put forward, bearing in mind the other characteristics reported by the witnesses (including the cylindrical shape of the object, red light on top and the presence of a 'telegraph pole' type of object alongside it briefly).

View attachment 69608

Perhaps a culvert, or some drain or septic tank associated with the pub, was being cleaned or emptied.

Of course pumping tankers don't fly, but it may be the case this bit was filled in afterwards by the imagination of the frightened witnesses.

Not coincidentally a similar sort of thing is my favoured explanation for Broad Haven.
Agree with as regards Broad Haven school (the UFO that was Unidentified but never actually Flying) and have discussed this on that thread. You might also be correct with this case and was the "telegraph pole" humanoid actually the arm that swings out from the machine and then down into the drain?

The railway by then had been closed for some years and thus the drainage system maintained by British Rail (Scotland) would have been neglected since the track was lifted and flooding was probably already a problem in the old cuttings.
 
For me, the most significant feature of this case is the noise that the incident is associated with. It gets described variously as like a helicopter and a vacuum cleaner. It was loud - and penetrating enough - to be heard by the adults in the same environs, one of whom was hard of hearing. Now most UFO reports famously claim that the objects are noiseless or enit a low hum of some kind - not the type of significant din that is implied here. This fact alone does incline me to believe that a mundane explanation is just around the corner somewhere.

To me,the best fit, so far (in terms of sound and shape) is the Cyde Hovercraft Ferry mentioned above. I doubt the girls had a memory of this, but could a similar device have been tested in the area at that time? Bit of a long shot....

But then there's the annoying and silly humanoid! It had short arms, it had long arms...Yeah, but no but, yeah... Then there's that perplexing description of it resembling a `telegraph pole`. Can anyone here envisage a human being in anyway resembling a telegraph pole? I can't. It's just such an odd image to use and it makes me wonder if we're missing something in terms of what the comparison was meant to be - although I can't think what.

It's sounds a bit boorish to say this but, children of that age are not always reliable witnesses: they make misperceptions of the kind that even someone just a bit older would be less inclined to make. They are also good at telling adults what they want to hear (and knowing what this is).

The two writers for The Flying Saucer Review - Randles and Donaldson both unintentionally skew their reportage in favour of a literal, and probably ETH based view of the event. Randles overstresses how remote the location was (yes, in the seventies Scotland was - geographically and culturally - more remote than it is now, but it was hardly North Alaska). Donaldson, considering the fact that the witnesses didn't report the event until a day later, jumps straight onto a `post-hypnotic command` theory before looking at much more obvious reasons. Note also how the illustration (in the postscript of the story) is that of a classic `flying saucer` whereas what the girls described (and this is tio their credit as to its veracity) was something cylindrical with rounded ends.

I'm open to a Paranormal Manifestation take on this case but, as with the Rainford Humanoid, let's exhaust the all earthly answers first.
Agree with all your points raised, especially the "hypnosis" claim and yet another FSR/BUFORA illustration that has employed artistic licence rather than stick to the witness's description
 
Agree with as regards Broad Haven school (the UFO that was Unidentified but never actually Flying) and have discussed this on that thread. You might also be correct with this case and was the "telegraph pole" humanoid actually the arm that swings out from the machine and then down into the drain?

The railway by then had been closed for some years and thus the drainage system maintained by British Rail (Scotland) would have been neglected since the track was lifted and flooding was probably already a problem in the old cuttings.

It all seems possible. In this case I wonder whether the tanker was tractor-hauled, with the tractor itself partly hidden by bushes, making it appear a bit more like a purely cylindrical object. And yes, the arm and vertical pipe might be misperceived as a 'telegraph pole' entity particularly if there were intervening bushes (as appeared to be the case from the Randles account). Alternatively, you might have had an operator in protective overalls.

The rotating red band is puzzling but maybe it really was just a red, but non-rotating, band.

Again we come back to this issue of the object taking off, but there's room to suggest that the children (who were, by their own admission, running away) imagined this bit or elaborated it amongst themselves. More to the point, their delay in reporting it (and then the further, longer delay in the report coming to the attention of ufologists) meant that there was very little chance of anyone confirming the actual cause of the sighting.

I'm not saying this is a definite solution, but it does provide one way of approximating what was recorded.
 
Directly behind the Cottar Hoose pub is an old, abandoned railway line. (The Great North of Scotland Railway, butchered by Beeching in the Sixties.)

Linkwood Road headed out of New Elgin towards the SSE. Although the railway line is defunct, this path heading parallel to, close to, and in the same direction as Linkwood Road, shows a wee humpback bridge running over the old line:

Cottar-Elgin-Fortean.jpg


Cottar Hoose at right of picture

This screen grab from the 25"/mile OS map of the locus shows the Cottar Hoose circled in red; Linkwood Road highlighted in green; and the footpath shown in the pic above highlighted in yellow:

Cottar-Elgin-Fortean-2.jpg



https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=18.8&lat=57.63828&lon=-3.29304&layers=168&b=1

The girls were "400 yards away" from the questioned object, and were in a state of fright at the time of its alleged three-stage takeoff because the "telegraph pole" entity was apparently approaching them. Is it not possible that they saw an entirely conventional terrestrial object - a silver petrol tanker with flashing warning lights, for example - apparently "rise up" (as it passed over the humpback bridge), then disappear from view "into the sky" from their viewpoint, but in fact below their horizon behind the bridge?

maximus otter
 
Last edited:
The girls were "400 yards away" from the questioned object, and were in a state of fright at the time of its alleged three-stage takeoff because the "telegraph pole" entity was apparently approaching them. Is it not possible that they saw an entirely conventional terrestrial object - a silver petrol tanker with flashing warning lights, for example - apparently "rise up" (as it passed over the humpback bridge), then disappear from view "into the sky" from their viewpoint, but in fact below their horizon behind the bridge?

maximus otter
I go to Elgin quite regularly and am happy to go and take a look. :bthumbup:Streetview is good but setting eyes on the site properly might help to get a better idea of what might have happened. I can't go for 2 or 3 weeks though so it won't be quick!
 
I do wish that 'hypnosis' could be banned for the purposes of 'recovering lost memories'. All it really seems to do is cause a witness to subconsciously embellish a story beyond the point where it's useful.
Couldn't agree more. Take the 1992 Tarbrax UFO incident as researched by Malcolm Robinson (https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/best-in-edinburgh/terrifying-tale-a70-incident-edinburghs-18655557). As much as I like Malcolm, the UFO encounter was dramatic enough in its own right and the later hypnosis only served to damage the case in my opinion, with one witness essentially describing and drawing Spielberg's E.T. and also 'borrowing' great chunks of the 'Fire in the Sky' Travis Walton movie. What they encountered seemed to be much more time-slip in nature that anything alien, the 'craft' essentially being cloud-like (i.e.a black shape against the night sky with no lights, windows or structural features) and the shimmering curtain of mist another common time-slip feature.
 
I go to Elgin quite regularly and am happy to go and take a look. :bthumbup:Streetview is good but setting eyes on the site properly might help to get a better idea of what might have happened. I can't go for 2 or 3 weeks though so it won't be quick!
Please do.

It is an intriguing case but also given the age of the witnesses, brevity of the sighting and delay in reporting the case one that is rather weak as regards the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. I feel @maximus otter may be correct in saying the unusual 'take-off' of the UFO was in fact a tanker navigating away from the site after engaging in drainage work of some sort. I can't help but feel the girls saw the oval shape of the rear of the tanker, with the chassis hidden from view (e.g. the light catching the silvery metal oval tank but not the black chassis) and the red band the livery of the owners - in fact, could we find out which company operated this tanker?

Another thought, I have lived on a property with a septic tank and the draining was a complicated process as the tanks are situated away from the house, so it is possible the tanker driver was issuing their initiative to get closer to an awkward location.

Or did they witness a crane lifting a septic tank out of a location:

https://www.premiertechaqua.com/en-gb/wastewater/cesspool-vs-septic-tank

A silver cylinder and the 'take-off' seems very much like a crain lifting an object, in which case was the 'telegraph pole" humanoid was actually the jib of the unseen crane...?
 
Last edited:
Incidentally, here is pretty much everything we know about the aforementioned 1978 Llanerchymedd UFO events and subsequent military activity coated into one blog post (thanks!):

"September 1st 1978 was a Friday. On the Maes Athen estate in the village of Llanerchymedd, Anglesey, a group of children were playing football at about 8:15pm. David Hesketh, aged 12, spotted a strange light in the sky - initially he thought it might be a helicopter attempting to land. He and some other boys ran over to a gate leading onto Oldsmith field to get a closer look."

Continued...

https://www.babiafi.co.uk/2021/02/llanerchymedd-ufo-landing-1978.html

Is this one worth its own thread or has it effectively been explained even though no-one will own up to the military activity...?
 
Down here in deepest West Cornwall we are used to seeing and hearing helicopters, with Western Europe's largest military helicopter base at Helston, the Search & Rescue helicopters that shuttle between the coast and Royal Cornwall Hospital at Truro (training and emergencies) and the Cornwall Air Ambulance that sometime lands on the rugby pitch near where I live. It is a wet and overcast morning and I heard from close by what sounded like the Air Ambulance when it is hovering/flying slowly prior to landing. However, when I looked out my window it was the Council's Scarab vacuum street sweeper passing by:

https://www.scarab-sweepers.com

As a result I am more convinced than ever that there was some drainage work taking place that involved vacuum tankers and this is what the girls saw and then reimagined as a UFO; partly due to their heightened state, the brevity of the sighting but also the huge publicity given the recent sightings in Wales that included John Craven's Newsroud, a children's tv programme. I appreciate that this belief can be challenged as vacuum tankers can't fly but then you have the other factors such as the delay in reporting their encounter, their ages, the unusual take-off, the short duration of the sighting, distance from the object, fear and so forth...

Furthermore, I can still hear the vacuum tanker some ten minutes after it passed back and forth along my street, it must be going up the side roads but it isn't in sight. These forums lead me to strange places and I have had a look into the history of the vacuum road sweeper and there is evidence to suggest they were quite new to the scene in the late-1970s.
 
Last edited:
Incidentally, here is pretty much everything we know about the aforementioned 1978 Llanerchymedd UFO events and subsequent military activity coated into one blog post (thanks!):

"September 1st 1978 was a Friday. On the Maes Athen estate in the village of Llanerchymedd, Anglesey, a group of children were playing football at about 8:15pm. David Hesketh, aged 12, spotted a strange light in the sky - initially he thought it might be a helicopter attempting to land. He and some other boys ran over to a gate leading onto Oldsmith field to get a closer look."

Continued...

https://www.babiafi.co.uk/2021/02/llanerchymedd-ufo-landing-1978.html

Is this one worth its own thread or has it effectively been explained even though no-one will own up to the military activity...?

The good thing about Llanerchymedd is that we have Norman Oliver's article based on an apparently quite thorough, sceptically-minded investigation by the Crewe-based FUFOR. While they couldn't prove military activity, various aspects of the sighting (including sightings of military helicopters in the surrounding hours, despite RAF Valley's denials) seem to point towards it.

It's interesting to compare Martin Keatman's write up in FSR, which pushes the UFO / occupant angle from the start.
 
Down here in deepest West Cornwall we are used to seeing and hearing helicopters, with Western Europe's largest military helicopter base at Helston, the Search & Rescue helicopters that shuttle between the coast and Royal Cornwall Hospital at Truro (training and emergencies) and the Cornwall Air Ambulance that sometime lands on the rugby pitch near where I live. It is a wet and overcast morning and I heard from close by what sounded like the Air Ambulance when it is hovering/flying slowly prior to landing. However, when I looked out my window it was the Council's Scarab vacuum street sweeper passing by:

https://www.scarab-sweepers.com

As a result I am more convinced than ever that there was some drainage work taking place that involved vacuum tankers and this is what the girls saw and then reimagined as a UFO; partly due to their heightened state, the brevity of the sighting but also the huge publicity given the recent sightings in Wales that included John Craven's Newsroud, a children's tv programme. I appreciate that this belief can be challenged as vacuum tankers can't fly but then you have the other factors such as the delay in reporting their encounter, their ages, the unusual take-off, the short duration of the sighting, distance from the object, fear and so forth...

Furthermore, I can still hear the vacuum tanker some ten minutes after it passed back and forth along my street, it must be going up the side roads but it isn't in sight. These forums lead me to strange places and I have had a look into the history of the vacuum road sweeper and there is evidence to suggest they were quite new to the scene in the late-1970s.

The fact Broad Haven was on Newsround would have made a huge impression on children, who regarded the programme as completely authoritative. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the witnesses at New Elgin, or Llanerchymedd for example, had watched the report in question (and with only three channels at the time and very limited children's programming there's a very good chance they did see it).
 
The good thing about Llanerchymedd is that we have Norman Oliver's article based on an apparently quite thorough, sceptically-minded investigation by the Crewe-based FUFOR. While they couldn't prove military activity, various aspects of the sighting (including sightings of military helicopters in the surrounding hours, despite RAF Valley's denials) seem to point towards it.

It's interesting to compare Martin Keatman's write up in FSR, which pushes the UFO / occupant angle from the start.
I feel we can learn learn a lot from a 1970s UFO and humanoids report that does seem to have been Cold War shenanigans by the military. The circle-within-a-circle UFO sounds very much like a military parachute seen from above or in this instance at an angle affording a view of the topside. That two humanoids were then seen in what read like pilot or paratrooper jumpsuits coming from where it landed suggests something military seen in poor light.
 
The fact Broad Haven was on Newsround would have made a huge impression on children, who regarded the programme as completely authoritative. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the witnesses at New Elgin, or Llanerchymedd for example, had watched the report in question (and with only three channels at the time and very limited children's programming there's a very good chance they did see it).
I watched it and had a vivid nightmare in which three giant silver-suited humanoids were walking single file (like DR Who cybermen) across the fields towards our house
 
I feel we can learn learn a lot from a 1970s UFO and humanoids report that does seem to have been Cold War shenanigans by the military. The circle-within-a-circle UFO sounds very much like a military parachute seen from above or in this instance at an angle affording a view of the topside. That two humanoids were then seen in what read like pilot or paratrooper jumpsuits coming from where it landed suggests something military seen in poor light.

The parachute suggestion is a good one. Other aspects of the sightings sound like flares.

One thing that struck me was one of the 'entities' waving his arms side to side over his head, an internationally understood gesture for "over here!", and I'd suggest they (if paratroopers for example) were about to be picked up by some vehicle that the children maybe hadn't noticed.
 
The parachute suggestion is a good one. Other aspects of the sightings sound like flares.

One thing that struck me was one of the 'entities' waving his arms side to side over his head, an internationally understood gesture for "over here!", and I'd suggest they (if paratroopers for example) were about to be picked up by some vehicle that the children maybe hadn't noticed.
Or if the person in quesition had to be cut free after a hurried landing in poor light conditions, perhaps the waving was actually them trying to discard parachute cord and material wrapped around their torso...? That the other 'humanoid' was "walking stiffly" suggests an injury following an emergency landing. That the craft changed shape so significantly from a bullet shape to concentric circles suggests they were not the same object.
 
Last edited:
I watched it and had a vivid nightmare in which three giant silver-suited humanoids were walking single file (like DR Who cybermen) across the fields towards our house

Interesting, aren't there several British CE3 cases where the entities were seen walking single file?
 
Fortean side note - I looked up Radio Highland as mentioned in the Patricia Donaldson report in post 11 as I wasn't familiar with it (though it might not have reached my area)

And found that the building in Culduthel Road, Inverness was haunted!

After the station opened, William Carrocher used to regale guests with tales of a ghost which haunted the building. The back stairwell which it inhabited was demolished in around 2006. A few years before that a psychic investigator was brought in and she confirmed that a certain part of the stairwell was "very cold" and that the phantom was that of a woman who had experienced some kind of emotional trauma.

https://wiki.scotlandonair.com/index.php?title=BBC_Radio_Highland
 
Incidentally, here is pretty much everything we know about the aforementioned 1978 Llanerchymedd UFO events and subsequent military activity coated into one blog post (thanks!):

"September 1st 1978 was a Friday. On the Maes Athen estate in the village of Llanerchymedd, Anglesey, a group of children were playing football at about 8:15pm. David Hesketh, aged 12, spotted a strange light in the sky - initially he thought it might be a helicopter attempting to land. He and some other boys ran over to a gate leading onto Oldsmith field to get a closer look."

Continued...

https://www.babiafi.co.uk/2021/02/llanerchymedd-ufo-landing-1978.html

Is this one worth its own thread or has it effectively been explained even though no-one will own up to the military activity...?
Have been looking back through the West Wales humanoid and humanoid with UFO encounters and many of them feature sightings of an airborne object similar to the glowing Llanerchymedd bullet-shaped UFO, in particular the Stephen Taylor and Mark Marsden humanoid encounters. The details are found in this online copy of 'The Dyfed Enigma' which unfortunately lacks page numbers, however look for the illustration of a map of Herbrandston to find the Mark Marsden case and the Stephen Taylor was eis just below the illustrated map of the location of the Haven Fort Hotel:

https://www.babiafi.co.uk/2022/02/the-dyfed-enigma.html
 
Have been looking back through the West Wales humanoid and humanoid with UFO encounters and many of them feature sightings of an airborne object similar to the glowing Llanerchymedd bullet-shaped UFO, in particular the Stephen Taylor and Mark Marsden humanoid encounters. The details are found in this online copy of 'The Dyfed Enigma' which unfortunately lacks page numbers, however look for the illustration of a map of Herbrandston to find the Mark Marsden case and the Stephen Taylor was eis just below the illustrated map of the location of the Haven Fort Hotel:

https://www.babiafi.co.uk/2022/02/the-dyfed-enigma.html

Mark Marsden's figure, interestingly enough, has an aerial sticking up from the shoulder - just like the Nantycaws Hill 'entities'.
 
Mark Marsden's figure, interestingly enough, has an aerial sticking up from the shoulder - just like the Nantycaws Hill 'entities'.
Yes, their are definite similarities between the different humanoid encounters and you could argue the difference in build reported is no different to that of thin and broad men. Those orange and red glowing pear drop/bullet shaped UFOs seen in association with the humanoids are a common theme, too.

Have to say the clothing reported doesn't sound very extraterrestrial but rather more akin to heavy duty fire protection suits, however the encounters are just so random, what possible purpose could their activities serve? Also the Stephen Taylor humanoid does have a visible face and it is that of a human but with large "fish-like' eyes and some sort of breathing tube in its mouth.Then you have the two tall, faceless Haven Fort Hotel entities with long legs and "gibbon ape" arms and yet "boiler suit" overalls.

As regards Mark Marsden's humanoid, people can jump five bar gates you need a run up and it isn't pretty;

 
however the encounters are just so random, what possible purpose could their activities serve?

I suppose there's two ways of looking at if we take the hypothesis that a large number of the Welsh UFO / occupant encounters of 1977 - 78 were prompted by "Cold War shenanigans" of some sort.

Either the witnesses, as at Llanerchymedd perhaps (or Pentyrch more recently) were seeing a normal exercise and misinterpreting it as something stranger, triggered by unfamiliarity, a background of UFO related media stories, etc. In this case the apparent purposelessness is due to ignorance of the real nature of the activity. The alternative is that the military were actually carrying out some kind of psy-op where the UFO imagery was deliberately encouraged. Or maybe it was a bit of both.

Either way I'm not sure that the Welsh flap can be explained by hysteria and hoaxing alone.
 
Last edited:
I suppose there's two ways of looking at if we take the hypothesis that a large number of the Welsh UFO / occupant encounters of 1977 - 78 were prompted by "Cold War shenanigans" of some sort.

Either the witnesses, as at Llanerchymedd perhaps (or Pentyrch more recently) were seeing a normal exercise and misinterpreting it as something stranger, triggered by unfamiliarity, a backhand of UFO related media stories, etc. In this case the apparent purposelessness is due to ignorance of the real nature of the activity. The alternative is that the military were actually carrying out some kind of psy-op where the UFO imagery was deliberately encouraged. Or maybe it was a bit of both.

Either way I'm not sure that the Welsh flap can be explained by hysteria and hoaxing alone.
The common thread I can see between these cases is that they took place on or close to farms in beef and dairy country. This might be relevant because seven years later BSE emerged ('Mad Cow Disease') as cattle had been fed the ground up remains of other cattle to improve milk yield (protein gave better results than soy). Always wondered if this possibility of a disease outbreak was flagged up scientists at Porton Down or elsewhere in 1976-77 and there was clandestine testing of cattle taking place at night so as not to alarm farmers (financial losses) and the public (vCJD). We now know that calves born in 1980 were infected with BSE but this wasn't discovered until they were older and the symptoms manifested.

If so, then why the suits? Perhaps they were using an aerosol to sedate the cattle or make them unconscious, especially bulls and mothers with calves. One factor is that the humanoids didn't ever try to hide themselves (well, the ones we know about) but rather seemed to be out to use their appearance to frighten the bejesus out of the witnesses and cause them to exit to scene.
 
This is an interesting angle and also, as I think you mentioned, holds true for the Rainford case (now one of my favourites after we discussed it recently).
 
This is an interesting angle and also, as I think you mentioned, holds true for the Rainford case (now one of my favourites after we discussed it recently).
Arguably also the reason for cattle and sheep mutilations. However, the counter-argument is why not simply buy the cattle at auction and then transport them to Porton Down or wherever for testing...? Certainly a lot more cost-effective and much lower risk of giving the game away. Yet there is strong evidence that cattle mutilations are indeed linked to clandestine testing eg the black helicopters, so i found myself going round in circles with this one...

It is possible that something in the environment of these farms was considered to be transmitting BSE or similar to cattle in much the way some scientists believe badgers transmit TB to cattle. Therefore, taking the animals away from that location would negate the test results. At the end of the day cattle eat grass that other animals such as deer and badgers, to put it politely, urinate and defecate in.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: BS3
Given BSE's presenting symptoms, I guess there could also in theory have been a concern that some sort of nerve agent was involved (either a substance of 'ours' or 'theirs') and clandestine sampling might have been related to this.
 
Danny Robins has a truly bizarre, baffling yet utterly believable UFO case in his 'Into the Uncanny' book and he draws parallels with people being as haunted by bizarre UFO and alien encounters as those who see the ghost of an old woman walk through their kitchen wall and so forth. He doesn't feel these are literal visitations from an alien civilisation making contact but something much deeper and more elusive.

Have to say, reading this has somewhat reinvigorated my belief that these humanoid witnesses will have been haunted by their experiences, too. It is a long time since I have had the belief that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts craft and whilst I enjoy the detective work in trying to fit these encounters into a rational box, I also want to keep the door open to these humanoid encounters being paranormal experiences that deeply affected the witnesses. They were certainly badly frightened by what they witnessed and I do sometimes wonder if seeing a human in an unusual type of protective suit would really generate such 'primal' fear?

What Danny has access to that e don't is the experience of meeting the witnesses in the flesh and not only hearing the details of the cases firsthand but also being able to see how it left its mark on the individuals concerned and how many years later they still don't understand why they were the ones to have been the focus of the event.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: BS3
I also want to keep the door open to these humanoid encounters being paranormal experiences that deeply affected the witnesses. They were certainly badly frightened by what they witnessed and I do sometimes wonder if seeing a human in an unusual type of protective suit would really generate such 'primal' fear?

I agree, these experiences certainly involve some deep, primal responses. The imagery is often an odd mix of archetypal and sci-fi / horror which suggests some of the processes involved, whether we feel the 'humanoids' emerge from within or from without.

In many ways the 1977 / 78 events mirror aspects the flap at Warminster a decade earlier. In both cases, an initial well-publicised event (Broad Haven, in the case of 1977; reports of strange noises at Warminster) seems to have opened the floodgates for all sorts of weirdness; both took a turn into poltergeist and other 'paranormal' phenomena; in both cases a well-respected local professional and ETH believer, while presenting themselves as a mere 'journalistic' reporter of events, was instrumental in shaping the flap from its very beginning (Arthur Shuttlewood at Warminster, Randall Jones Pugh in Wales); in both cases hoaxers later claimed to have substantially inspired a lot of what went on. And despite the hoaxes, prosaic explanations etc, people still claimed to have had some genuinely strange experiences - perhaps Broad Haven really was a sewage wagon, in which case it's interesting what it unleashed from the collective unconscious, or from elsewhere. People started seeing things across Wales or indeed the country, as the Morayshire case shows.

It would also be interesting to compare how the beliefs of Shuttlewood and Pugh and their particular decades might impacted on the respective flaps - peaceful Space Brothers on the one hand, sinister, incomprehensible forces and paranoia on the other.

In both cases, also, there are rumours of military involvement behind at least some of what was seen (secret weapons testing, in the case of Warminster).
 
I agree, these experiences certainly involve some deep, primal responses.
I don't think that level of fear can be taken as an indicator of what was being seen. Terror at the unknown doesn't mean that what is unknown is unknowable, just that the witness cannot identify it in the moment.
 
I agree, these experiences certainly involve some deep, primal responses. The imagery is often an odd mix of archetypal and sci-fi / horror which suggests some of the processes involved, whether we feel the 'humanoids' emerge from within or from without.

In many ways the 1977 / 78 events mirror aspects the flap at Warminster a decade earlier. In both cases, an initial well-publicised event (Broad Haven, in the case of 1977; reports of strange noises at Warminster) seems to have opened the floodgates for all sorts of weirdness; both took a turn into poltergeist and other 'paranormal' phenomena; in both cases a well-respected local professional and ETH believer, while presenting themselves as a mere 'journalistic' reporter of events, was instrumental in shaping the flap from its very beginning (Arthur Shuttlewood at Warminster, Randall Jones Pugh in Wales); in both cases hoaxers later claimed to have substantially inspired a lot of what went on. And despite the hoaxes, prosaic explanations etc, people still claimed to have had some genuinely strange experiences - perhaps Broad Haven really was a sewage wagon, in which case it's interesting what it unleashed from the collective unconscious, or from elsewhere. People started seeing things across Wales or indeed the country, as the Morayshire case shows.

It would also be interesting to compare how the beliefs of Shuttlewood and Pugh and their particular decades might impacted on the respective flaps - peaceful Space Brothers on the one hand, sinister, incomprehensible forces and paranoia on the other.

In both cases, also, there are rumours of military involvement behind at least some of what was seen (secret weapons testing, in the case of Warminster).
Also a direct link between the two as Peter Paget who wrote 'The Welsh Triangle' (and became the only researcher the Coombes family of Ripperstone Farm would confide in) ran the Fountain Centre in Warminster where visiting Ufologists would lodge, as detailed in Kevin Goodman's Warminster retrospective:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/UFO-WARMINSTER-Contact-Kevin-Goodman/dp/190572392X
 
  • Like
Reactions: BS3
Back
Top