UFO Sightings At Schools

[yogabbagabba]

Here's a couple of clips I found that I thought were very interesting, I find kids to be much more compelling witnesses than adults, no clue why, just I like to think of them as honest, in the video of the westall sighting those kids are now adults. Interesting stuff.

Zimbabwe:

Australia: (YouTube bTqE805dhOE)
Link is dead. The video is no longer available on YouTube.
The video concerned the Westall / Clayton South incident of 1966.

 

[Ringo]

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend 3 or 4 of years ago. We were picking up his daughter from school and I suppose this coupled with him knowing about my interest in the unusual must have jogged a memory.

He remembered being in his old school yard, all the kids were outside playing so it was probably break or lunch. A large black triangle flew very slowly over the school fields, hovered and then flew away over the children's heads. I asked about the speed and he said it didn't just zip away but it seemed to move off slowly and build up speed.

There were adults present and all the children were hurriedly ushered into the main auditorium. After a while they were all given an ice cream (which in itself makes the day stick in the mind of an Welsh school child).

My friend even remembers seeing sort of openings on the bottom of the triangle which he now presumes were exhausts or vents of some sort. He also remembered that it made a lot of noise and it was this that made the children look out over the fields in the first place.

I also asked if he told his parents or if the school reacted at all but he said he can't remember there being any fuss about it and the kids just carried on as normal.

 

[yogabbagabba]

Cool stuff Ringo, that kid saying it sounded like a Flute struck me as being really odd, not something you would be likely to make up, also reminded me of the sound the tripods made in war of the worlds, bbbuuuurrrrr, scary stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1hURW6Vxqs

Spielberg nailed the books description of the sound.

 

[eburacum]

I'm sure I've given my take on the Westall sighting before, but if not, here it is. Back in 1966 I was a schoolboy too, and I had an experience which closely mirrored the Westall school sighting; a bunch of schoolkids, noticing something in the sky, and gathering adults to watch it for many minutes, perhaps as long as an hour as it slowly descended into Epping Forest near East London.

It was in fact a slowly deflating weather balloon, which must have been quite common back then (you don't see them so often nowadays). I'm pretty sure the Westall sighting was a balloon of some sort, and all the other details are just kruft.

 

[Pete Younger]

It was in fact a slowly deflating weather balloon, which must have been quite common back then (you don't see them so often nowadays)

I'm fairly sure I saw that around that time too.

 

[escargot]

Dunno if this has already come up or where it should go but here it is!

Children at school in Cheshire saw a UFO in 1977 and their teacher told them to draw it.
The pictures ended up at the Ministry of Defence.

UFO files reveal Cheshire schoolchildren's sketches of 1977 'alien encounter'

UFO files released by the Ministry of Defence have revealed children's sketches of what appears to be an alien spaceship at a Cheshire school in 1977.

The pictures drawn by school pupils at Upton Priory School in Macclesfield were made public by the MoD's UFO Desk shortly before it closed down in 2009.


The documents reveal that the sighting occurred in October 1977 when 10 children at the school, aged between seven and 11 years old, had gone out for their lunchtime break.

They came back and told a teacher, Mrs Hindmarsh, that they had seen something hovering around the trees before it vanished into the sky.

The teacher told the children to draw what they had seen independently of each other using crayons and coloured pencils.

 

[Lord Lucan]

I like reports like this and as we know, there have been a number of schoolyard encounters over the years (Zimbabwe & Australia just to think of two others).
The fact that there are multiple witnesses seeing something peculiar has to lend some credence to their story. Although children, young & impressionable, can be mislead or directed by teachers ( not always), I feel they have enough independence to re-tell an encounter, particularly in an instance like this when it is both odd, unusual and unexpected.

 

[Spookdaddy]

Dunno if this has already come up or where it should go but here it is!

Children at school in Cheshire saw a UFO in 1977 and their teacher told them to draw it...

The same year that school children in Broad Haven, South Wales spotted a UFO (this time during an outdoor games lesson, l think). There was another school sighting in the north of Anglesey the same month.

I know bugger all about UFOs, but the year stuck in my mind because when I not so long ago listened to an Unexplained podcast on the Broad Haven case and thought I'd misremembered the former event as taking place further north. A little googling suggested I'd actually just conflated the two stories.

The former story was covered on John Craven's Newsround. I'm pretty sure I actually watched it at the time.

And - believe it or not - said episode of Newsround is on YouTube (the UFO story covered from around 1:48):

Edit: It's worth pointing out that Star Wars - mentioned in the linked article in escargot's post - was not released in the UK until after all three sightings. Although I suppose that there would have been plenty of hype around earlier.

 

[GNC]

"And now from a Welsh school to a school of whales..." Love John Craven. Anyway, actual documentary evidence that 16 kids saw... something, and that something was consistent in its description across them all. Classic old school cigar shape, too.

 

[Spookdaddy]

I recall once at primary school people in my class getting excited about a 'UFO'.

There was a radio mast on the horizon - part of the array being what looked like a large pale upright cylinder shaped thing at the very top. Quite often, this object would be virtually invisible to the eye, but when the sun struck it the reflected light could be quite intense. We were up in the hills, and had lots of weather - on bright days with fast moving cloud (very common in spring and summer) the thing could appear to be flashing sporadically. Also, the way light and shadow travelled over the mast could make that bright spot appear to be moving up and down.

One day someone noticed this bright flashing light and decided it was a UFO. I'm pretty sure most of us actually knew what it was and had noticed it many times before, but I also recall a kind of intoxication with the idea taking over the group, and the classroom processed very rapidly from an initial state of very patchy interest to a point where everyone was crowded at the window waiting for the next flash.

Thinking about this last night I realised with something of a start that it would have taken place in 1977 (I recall nothing much about surrounding events, but know exactly what classroom I was in, and can therefore work out what year). Without wishing to undermine the other events reported that coincidence does make me wonder if UFOs were more of a meme that year than usual for children of our age.

I also recall one pupil (the new headmaster's son, in fact - very clever, bit odd, drank TCP from the bottle, wouldn't be at all surprised if he's done time in subsequent years) describing seeing a small glowing object hovering in the middle of his garden and then rising up and floating to a point just outside a first floor window.

 

[Mythopoeika]

I also recall one pupil (the new headmaster's son, in fact - very clever, bit odd, drank TCP from the bottle...

Amazing that he survived that.

 

[Spookdaddy]

Amazing that he survived that.

Yes. I was never quite sure if he was actually swigging TCP, or had replaced the contents of the bottle with something harmless. (And he did tell at least one teacher who had caught him with a bottle that he diluted the contents with lemonade.)

He was one of that type you are never quite sure is actually eccentric, or is carefully curating an image of eccentricity - or both. He had a quite pronounced cleanliness obsession, but even back then I was not entirely sure it was genuine - or just part of the construct.

We were northerners, and he'd come up from Kent (Sevenoaks, I seem to recall); he was odd, but I think we just assumed that was par for the course down south.

I strongly suspect that chap has had an interesting life.

As in, 'interesting'.