The following is a rough draft excerpt from my forthcoming book Black Swan Ghosts: a sociologist encounters witnesses of unidentified aerial craft, strange beings, and other elements of our multiverse (Mount Baldy Press, inc., August 2017, ISBN 0-9715863-7-3) Enjoy!
Chapter 8 — Retired police officer sees bright object and “spaceman”
In 2010, as part of my yearly crop circle tour to the U.K., we were able to organize, with the help of researcher and author Colin Andrews, a meeting of UFO witnesses in Wales. Our ten-person group drove out there one day, a three-hour drive from the town of Marlborough where our hotel was, along with Busty Taylor, a private pilot and early crop circle researcher.
A local researcher there had assembled three witnesses in a small meeting hall. The witnesses included a local woman who had observed an incredibly bright, pulsing light over her vehicle, a former aeronautics engineer who saw an ascending luminous disc right over a tree in his backyard, and a retired policeman who observed a unidentifiable “space being” as he called it. It is the latter case I wish to expound on here.
The former “bobby” (the British term for policeman) named Ken, who also had been a member of the Royal Air Force, served in Bristol. He told us that one night in 1976 his son had coming running into the house saying “Dad, there’s a UFO outside, come take a look.” When Ken got outside he saw that all the neighbors were outside looking at a strange orange light coming in over the golf course. It was pulsing and seemed really big. A telescope had been set up, even though the object was not far away, and Ken looked through it: he said the object was so bright it was “blinding”. Ken was off-duty at the time, so when people suggested he immediately investigate he was happy to decline.
Then, the next morning as he was driving back from his shift at 6 A.M. he was passing the local agricultural college. He turned his head and saw a very tall being in what looked like a space-suit. Ken said it was at least eight-feet tall. Its back was to the wall and its hands were down and pressed to the wall. He told us it was clearly not human. He was so shocked he kept driving back home and told his wife “I’ve just seen a spaceman!”
She laughed at him in the most cynical way. Yet later in the day the BBC reported the following: a couple, Joyce Bowles and Ted Pratt were driving the previous night through Chilcomb, near Winchester, when they saw an orange object in the air behind trees along the road, their car then went out of control and came to rest on a verge by the side of the road. They could see a cigar shaped object with three beings in the cockpit area. One of them came out, walked right out on the road and approached the car. He wore a “silvery boilerplate” uniform and had a beard and sideburns. He put his head in the window and looked right at Joyce and then at Ted. He said things to them and made references to fields and crop circles.
He then looked at their dashboard and the car started up again on it’s own. Joyce reported that the headlights were four times brighter than normal. The being started to walk behind the car and then all of a sudden the being and craft were gone.
The Daily Mail reported eight other sightings of a similar looking craft around the area that weekend and one of “a strange man in a silvery suit.”
Joyce and Ted reported a subsequent encounter a few weeks later with the same beings in the same area, followed the next year by an encounter by Joyce and another neighbor, and finally by one that Joyce had by herself. In each case, the beings had messages for Joyce about humanity and the dangers of pollution and warfare for the Earth and its population.
Colin Andrews conveyed to me how he and fellow researcher Pat Delgado visited the site of the Bowles/Pratt encounter the next morning and saw the tire track marks veering off the road and hedge row exactly as the witnesses described.