UFOs in Reality (10 page)

On Monday, 2nd July, 1990, I received a call, at the office, from a reporter for BBC Look North TV, asking if I could spare a few minutes for an interview in the Lower Peover ring during my lunch break. This I managed to arrange and drove the 20 miles to the site. There I was met by Mrs Burton, reporter Steve Taylor and a video cameraman. I explained very carefully why the ring could not have been formed by an electrically-charged whirlwind and went on to share my thinking about an advanced technological explanation. Jill Burton also featured with her newly produced survey map of the formation. Then I left to drive back to the office. No fee had been asked for, nor was any paid to me for that excursion. That evening Marion and I watched the Look North programme and we were horrified by the ‘send-up’ we were being given. What was described as “
the investigators’ preferred, more imaginative, solution”
was being set against a young ‘armchair’ physicist/astronomer, filmed impressively in front of the Jodrell Bank Telescope who, rather nonchalantly, said that scientists believed that such happenings were caused by electrified whirlwinds, which descended into the fields and produced effects such as those at Lower Peover. I leapt out of my chair to call the BBC immediately. Of course no one associated with the programme was available to talk to me.

I have related the details of this series of events to demonstrate how the British media have successfully hidden the facts about crop-circles and UFOs from the general public over the years. In fact, I am now inclined to believe they have received orders, from someone in a position of high authority, that they should not give any credibility to anything but mundane explanations of the strange things I, and others, have been seriously investigating for many years.

Throughout the 1990s, Marion and I spent at least one week of our annual holidays down in Wiltshire and Hampshire, keeping abreast of developments.
We met interesting people
and investigated some very challenging crop formations. Early in the 1990s the formations began to become more complicated, but some of them did not have the signs of genuineness and suggested that hoaxers had been at their mischievous work repeatedly.

Celestial Meaden !

Soon after the Cheshire crop-ring event I read carefully through Dr. Meaden’s recently published book
[5]
.
I was intrigued to discover that the events he had considered were a mixture of crop-circles (7), vortices (2), sudden whirlwinds (2), glowing balls of light (5), tubes of light (2), hovering lights (1), a bell-shaped object (1) (later supplemented by a similar sighting reported by Colin Andrews), car stops (2) and a close encounter with an unlit aerial object in darkness. All these events, he claimed, could be examples of his ‘plasma vortex’ concept.

This was just too much for me to accept and I was inspired to check those events out against the UFO timing predictions, as the timings model, at that point of development, defined them to be.

Firstly, I created a graph of Mean Solar Time vs. Day of the Year and then superimposed the times of the Meaden events at the corresponding dates. Immediately I could see that the plotted points were running from top left to bottom right on this graph, in two, possibly three, distinct groups. So I linked them by straight lines and discovered that they could be regarded as having followed constant sidereal time lines (as defined previously). Fig. 20 shows the graph I produced, with different kinds of events being identified by different symbols. As can be seen
, a wide variety of phenomena seemed to have occurred when the same stars were overhead
and it was difficult to see how naturally occurring plasma vortices could possibly have been linked celestially in that way.

Fig. 20

My next step was to create a hand-drawn timing predictions graph for the Wiltshire and Hampshire area, by selecting those ground tracks from the global collection that could be considered to pass over that area. I selected four definite tracks and two other possible ones passing over the east and west extremities, respectively. Next, the celestial orientations, as established provisionally (at the close of Chapter 7) were used, together with the sunset and sunrise times, to position the timing lines on the Mean Solar Time vs. Day of the Year graph. This graph was then superimposed over the Meaden graph. It was discovered that by adjusting the position of the predicted sloping lines vertically, they corresponded to the Meaden lines. What this meant was that with celestial orientations of
11:00 hr. RA
and
21:30 hr. RA
, the graphs were then identical. A few floating points on the Meaden graph were found to be consistent with predictions from the 11:00 hr. RA set and the sunset trends.

This was a major step forward in that
it
had demonstrated that the motley assortment of phenomena selected by Dr. Meaden had been shown to be indistinguishable from global SAC activity
and, also,
it had established two celestial orientations for the supposed approach and departure paths in space.
After further confirmation, to be described later,
t
hese orientations were eventually used to produce a series of computer programs with the purpose of checking UFO and crop-circle reports from all over the world. Fig. 21 shows the two fixed celestial orientations superimposed on the Celestial Sphere. Only one representative path is shown for each orientation.

Project ‘Blackbird’.

I think it is worth recording at this point that a major illustrated book on my crop-circles research, which I had been encouraged to write by a leading publisher and which I’d spent much of my spare time during the autumn months of 1991 bringing to completion, was soon afterwards shelved by the publisher. This was because public interest in the topic had waned as a result of the widely trumpeted confessions of two elderly Southampton men
,
Douglas Bowers and David Chorley, who had claimed to have been responsible for all the formations in Southern England. The media had had a ‘field day’ misleading the public yet again. The claims were preposterous, as all the serious researchers knew, but no one was listening to them. One had to conclude “When ignorance is bliss, it is a folly to be wise.”

Fig. 21

Despite such smokescreens, genuine formations continued to occur each year. Another example of material withheld from the public was that collected during another major crop watch held, during July/August 1990, from the ancient Bratton Hill Fort, Wiltshire. This
‘Blackbird’
project had been jointly organised by Colin Andrews, Pat Delgado,
BBC Television and Nippon Television. Marion and I had volunteered to participate during the second half of this venture, during August. Four Low Light Level TV cameras had been planted on the side of the steep embankment beyond the ditch of the hill fort. These were connected to monitor screens and recorders installed in a black caravan located on the upper edge of the ditch. Also, parked outside the caravan and similarly connected, was an IR (infrared) camera which needed to be kept covered over during daylight hours.

Prior to our arrival on site a major hoax had been perpetrated., which had been leaked to the media before the formation had been fully investigated and this had caused the project to be derided and ridiculed publicly. Fortunately, the project had been continued with the co-operation of the army, who provided two soldiers for night duty and a telescopic night sight on a tripod to reduce the chances of another hoax being undetected. We had booked in at the farmhouse situated on the other side of the road at the base of the hill fort’s ditch and embankment and had been allocated a bedroom with a window facing towards the caravan. Our watch duties would be during the daylight hours.

The BBC had hired a helicopter to take aerial video footage of all new formations in the surrounding area, after Andrews and Delgado had first examined them and declared them to be genuine. Some of these formations were situated outside the Bratton area, but there were formations formed in that area, two of which occupied a field about three quarters of a mile away in the direction of a large cement works. The larger of these looked like a coiled rope and when I analysed the aerial footage later, I found my PC graphics model reproduced it exactly. But the most amazing events during our period there occurred in the early hours of the third day.

The TV set in our room was always in the standby mode, so a faint transformer hum was discernible in the quietness of the room. At about 2 am. BST I awoke to hear a transformer-like hum which was very loud and pulsating at a low frequency. I found it difficult to get off to sleep again but, I was so tired, eventually I did. I was awakened again at about 5 am. by loud twittering and chirping noises, which made me think that martins and swallows were having a big argument on the roof above. I crept past the still-sleeping Marion to the window and opened it. Immediately the noise ceased! I looked out into the greyness of the pre-dawn light. Everything seemed very peaceful and there was no sign of a flock of birds. With a shrug of the shoulders, I crept back to bed. At breakfast next morning we received a telephone call from the caravan site asking for our presence as soon as possible, because circles had been formed just beyond the area scanned by the hillside cameras and the validity of the formations needed to be checked out by the Andrews/Delgado team.

En route to the caravan we passed the field with the new formations, about half a mile from the farmhouse and close to the village of Bratton. We decided to stop and take a quick look at the formations without going into them. There were two circles, placed some distance apart and they looked as if they might be genuine ones. We then continued on our journey up the hillside to the caravan. I asked if anyone had seen anything suspicious that might have been associated with the circles. A young woman told me she had seen
two columns of mist
over that field at about 5 am.

When I talked with the two soldiers later, they told me they had returned along the ditch edge at about 4:30 am. and they’d not seen anything unusual in that field below them. So it seemed there was a circumstantial link developing between the twitterings and chirpings I’d heard at 5 am. (Grasshopper Warblers perhaps?). I consulted the hand-drawn timings graph I had produced for Wiltshire and Hampshire (as described earlier) and discovered that happenings around 2 am BST and 5:30 am BST might have been predicted for that day.

Later on, another resident at the farmhouse, a member of the public (who had been keeping a lonely watch on the hillside above the caravan) and I were interviewed by the BBC team and asked to recount our experiences of the early morning. The other resident, unable to sleep, had been watching TV at 2 am. when the picture had begun to contract and expand fairly rapidly. This had continued for several minutes. The man who had been sitting alone on the hillside had a fascinating tale to tell. At about 2 am. he had detected a low humming sound approaching from the West, apparently from an unseen source progressing at low altitude. As the source seemed to get closer, the sound level rose quickly. When the source seemed to be over the cement works it seemed to stop and the noise then became so intense that the observer felt that it was filling his head, so that it seemed to be about to burst. As panic began to overtake him, the unseen source began to move away towards the North and the noise gradually faded out. Immediately, he ran down the hill to the caravan shouting, “What was that noise?” and was astounded when he was met with blank stares and the question, “What noise?” No one in the caravan had heard it.