UFOs in Reality (15 page)

Fig. 28

CHAPTER 13.
C
IVILIAN
E
NCOUNTERS WITH
A
UTOMATED
C
RAFT.
 

Judging from the evidence collected over more than thirty years, it is likely that most encounters with SACs
involve fully automated exploration craft without occupants
. These craft seem to employ
terrain-following
navigation techniques during their mission time within the atmosphere and have built-in
artificial intelligence
, which enables them to investigate interesting events and specimens during their clandestine activities. They also seem able to respond to human attempts to attract attention by the use of light signals. Members of the American
Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(
CSETI)
, with whom the author and his wife had personal contact during the crop circle investigations of the 1990s, appear to have had considerable success in initiating light signal dialogues with strange aerial craft, sometimes at close quarters.

Car Stops.

Similar craft seem to have been responsible for stopping motorcars on numerous occasions, by neutralising the cars’ electrical systems. Typically, during such car-stops, the occupants have found their cars surrounded by a powerful beam of light, which was being projected from a dark object hovering directly above them. During that period of immobility, all the electrical equipment was put out of action, this including radio links used by police patrolmen. But that operational mode was not the only one adopted by the visiting craft. Another commonly used technique involved blocking the road ahead of the vehicle to force the driver to brake, before disabling the car’s electrical equipment. Two examples of the deployment of this technique will be given later. Both events were followed by periods of amnesia experienced by the occupants of the cars, and the timings of these events provide evidence in favour of the witnesses’ suspicions that they may have been abducted for periods of, typically, one hour.

Before leaving this topic, it seems relevant to describe a very atypical car stop investigated by the author during 1978. A full and detailed report was sent to BUFORA, which was later published by the Association in a 1979 compilation of such events with the title
‘Vehicle Interference Project’
. The main features of the case will be summarised here for readers’ consideration.

A local (Bramhall, Cheshire) resident had reported seeing a bright light in the night sky. This light had seemed to be moving above broken cloud. The author visited the witness at his home and received a first-hand account of the sighting. It became evident that the bright light had been the planet Venus, which had been made to appear to be moving by the movement of the broken cloud layer. This is a common problem encountered by UFO investigators. The witness seemed to be satisfied by that explanation, but then went on to tell of a night, some ten years earlier, when he had experienced a car-stop event and he related the story of that happening.

It seemed that the event had occurred on March 4th, 1968, at about 9 pm in the evening, when he had been driving his 1967 soft-top Triumph Spitfire sports car along a narrow country lane, on a hillside on one side of the Longendale Valley, between the towns of Marple
and Glossop. The night had been dry but very dark. He had been travelling in the direction of Glossop with the high ground to his right and the valley to his left and had been approaching a T-junction. Suddenly a small golden object had appeared ahead of him, travelling at high speed, from over the ridge to his right. At virtually the same instant all the car’s electrics had failed. The light from the headlamps had been extinguished, the radio had ceased to play and the car had lurched abruptly to a halt as the engine stopped. The object in the sky had appeared to be elliptical as it sped at phenomenal speed across the valley. Its trajectory had been low and flat and it had seemed to climb in order to overfly the higher land on the other side of the valley. The witness estimated it’s time in view as being about
two seconds
. As soon as the object had traversed the windscreen, the headlights had blazed out again and, after the startled driver had collected himself enough, the engine had been re-started without problems. However, the radio had been completely silenced and had never played again.

In the company of the witness, I travelled out to view the site of this amazing series of events. From compass bearings, the measurements of angles indicated from the author’s car by the witness and the distance between the high ground on both sides of the valley, the following conclusions were arrived at:-

1. The flight path bearing (measured some distance from the car) had been 345° Mag.

2. The object had been approximately 0.6 mile ahead of the observer;

3. Directly ahead of the car’s position, its flight altitude had been 730 ft. above the level of the observer (ie. 1,480 ft. above sea level)

4. It had cleared the high ground to the observer’s right by about 1000 ft. and the higher ground across the valley by about 700 ft. and had seemed to have curved downwards before disappearing from sight. From these indicators, the object had appeared to have been
terrain-following
.

5. The speed of the object across the valley was calculated to have been about 7000 mph., or Mach 9 at low altitudes, but there had been no shock wave heard or felt.

(The witness had repeatedly emphasised that he had never witnessed such transit speeds, even during air show high-speed, low altitude, passes by fighter aircraft.)

(6) From indications given by the witness, using the ‘fingers-at-arm’s-length’method, and from the estimates of distance from the observer, the length of the object was able to estimated to have been about 30 ft.

The witness had stored the unserviceable radio after the event, hoping to get it repaired, but had not succeeded in this. On our return to his home he handed it to me for further investigation. Two members of the Avionics Department of Hawker Siddeley Aviation, Ltd., Woodford, (our employer at that time) had always shown interest in my UFO investigations and very obligingly consented to check out that radio. Some weeks later they demonstrated that they had found the fault and repaired it. Two PNP transistors had been overloaded and had simply been replaced, but they were puzzled by the fact that the damaged items had been on the aerial side of the circuit and they were unable to explain that. When the full circumstances were explained to them, they then became opened to the idea that an external powerful electrical impulse, through the aerial, might possibly have been responsible.

This possibility set me thinking that a similar pulse effecting the flow of electrons through the car’s bodywork (the common earth) might have also accounted for the other electrical failures. That hypothesis is still the best one the author has yet come across to explain the car-stopping phenomenon in all its forms. But the stopping of a car by a distant and high-speed object was then (and perhaps still is) a unique situation. In view of the very transient duration of the headlights’ failure, it seemed that any external electrical impulse of the sort suggested would have had to have had the nature of an electrical shock-wave, analogous to the acoustic shock-wave one would have normally expected, but which was not evidenced. This aroused the suspicion that the SAC may be capable of controlling the acoustic pressure waves and converting the energy within them using powerful electrical fields. (Not a stupid suggestion if such fields could be generated within an aircraft.)

As ten years had passed between the event and the investigation, the witness had been unable to give an accurate time for the happening, so it has not been possible to conduct a correlation study using the UFO timings software. Even so, it seems that the features of this sighting reveal a lot of information about the SAC operating all over the world.
Their ability to fly silently through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, one way in which they can induce sudden power failures, both in motor vehicles and power distribution lines, and their ability to fly fast and low, using terrain-following techniques, have been adequately demonstrated.
Wherever they were contrived, we can be sure that it was not in any manufacturing facility set up by humans.

The Livingston Encounter.

A bizarre encounter with a hovering SAC occurred during 1979. It became headline news in
Scotland
and led to a full investigation of the event by a leading
BUFORA
investigator, astronomer Steuart Campbell. Campbell subsequently produced a very full report for BUFORA
[12]
. Being a member of the Association at that time, I was able to obtain a copy of that document, to which I have referred, to ensure accuracy in the summary presented here.

It seems that on the morning of November 9th, 1979, a 61 years’ old foreman forester, Robert Taylor, had driven out to inspect young trees in a plantation situated alongside the M8 motorway. (This links Edinburgh and Glasgow.) He had taken his dog along with him and the two of them had left the vehicle to walk the narrower path that led to the site to be inspected. As they rounded a bend in the path leading into a clearing, at about 10:15 am GMT, they were confronted by a surprising sight. There, hovering low over the ground, was a large hemispherical craft, the base of which was surrounded by a narrow rim or brim. This rim had a number of strange antenna projecting from it. The shape of the craft below the rim could not be discerned clearly, perhaps because it was heavily shadowed. The object’s colour was dark grey and the surface texture seemed to be rough, but becoming smooth in patches, in a random fashion, over different parts of the surface. The craft’s diameter was guessed to have been about 20 feet (6m.) with an overall height of about 13 feet (4m.). Suddenly, two dark grey spheres, each about 2 to 3 feet in diameter and equipped with about six (a number not clearly stated) long spiky legs with expanded ends, rolled swiftly from beneath the hovering craft. Rolling on their spikes, they moved rapidly towards the witness with plopping noises as the legs contacted the soft grassy ground. After arriving one on either side of him, the spheres each attached a spike to a trouser leg, just below the pocket, and began to drag the witness towards the large craft. He tried to resist but was overcome by a choking odour. He lost consciousness and fell forwards.

When the witness had come back into consciousness, still lying on the ground, his first remembrance was of his barking dog, madly chasing round him. He had been unable to speak to her because he had lost his voice and, at first, he was unable to stand. This had meant crawling, on all fours, almost all the way back to his parked truck. Being still unable to speak he had not been able to contact his employers by radio and had then failed to turn the truck round when it sank into soft soil during reversing. Feeling stronger, he had decided to set out to walk back to his home, located more than a mile away across woods and fields. He had arrived home at about 11:15 am.GMT with a headache and feeling very thirsty. His thirst had lasted for several days and he had felt nauseated by the taste of the overpowering odour still lingering in his mouth.

Campbell’s excellent report details all the subsequent developments. From all the known details, he estimated that Mr. Taylor had been unconscious for about 20 minutes. A local doctor had conducted a physical examination, the Head of the Forestry Department had visited the site and arranged for it to be fenced off. On seeing strange ground markings, he had informed the
Police
who then went to the site and took measurements and photographs. They later visited the witness and took away items of clothing for examination. Very quickly news of the happening reached the Scottish and then the national Press. In fact, Campbell had become involved on the night of the event as a result of a telephone call he had received from a reporter employed by
The Glasgow Herald.
Many tests were carried out on Robert Taylor, but none gave any cause to doubt the man’s integrity or fitness. Examination of the torn trouser legs showed that the tears were consistent with the circumstances described by the witness.

Back in the forest, strange markings impressed into the grassy surface seemed to link with the position of the hovering object and, furthermore, these marks were surrounded by forty deep (10 cm.) circular holes impressed in a sloping manner into the soft surface. No other damage to the surface was in evidence. Even soil sampling revealed nothing about the nature of the reason for the observed damage.