IT HAPPENED TO ME...

First-hand accounts of strange experiences from FT readers

Mystery over London

As far as my memory allows, the following aerial sighting happened in the summer of 1983 or 1984, when I was working as a car mechanic for a garage in Perivale, Greenford, west London. We had a customer planning to take his car abroad. Two days before his departure, his car randomly wouldn’t start. We fixed that, but then it failed to start again, diagnosed as a bad battery. Although I was not involved in the initial repair, we arranged for me to come in extra early, 6am. I would drive to his home in St Catherine’s Dock and replace the battery in time for him to catch the ferry.

I started off from my home in High Wycombe about 5.30am. It was a beautiful morning with a crystal clear blue sky. I took the M40 to Uxbridge where it became the A40, known as the Western Avenue. I could see a band of cloud/smog over London, back-lit by the rising Sun turning it a brilliant orange red. There was no other cloud about. As I drove nearer I noticed a hot air balloon to the left, roughly to the north-east and at an elevation of about 10 degrees. I guessed it was over Greenford or Harrow. I thought how nice it would be to do that. At the bottom of the balloon there was a bright light, which I assumed was the reflection of the Sun on a metal part like the burner. It was still some miles away.

To my shock and horror, the balloon started to deflate and collapse. I thought I was witnessing a terrible accident and expected it to drop out of the sky – but the light didn’t move at all. The balloon part, now slack, dropped slowly down till it hung underneath the light. The light (or shining object) appeared to suck this envelope in, along with whatever it contained, till it disappeared, leaving the light only, as far as I could tell in exactly the same position. By then I was a mile or so away. There was traffic about and I looked at other drivers, but couldn’t tell if they had seen it too. I reached work and the light was still there in the same place, now at an elevation of about 80 degrees to the north-east. I thought it was maybe hovering over Wembley or Neasden, but it could have been further away and at greater altitude, possibly above the atmosphere.

I duly loaded up the van I was using with the battery and my tools. Joined by another employee, I pointed out the light to him. I told him what I had seen, but he just shrugged his shoulders.

The light was small but bright and seemed slightly oval. It could have been something metallic reflecting the Sun. It was still there as I set off to docklands, but in the van that part of the sky was no longer visible. I did the job and returned to Perivale about 11.30. By then, it had gone or was no longer visible.

I have thought about it a lot and looked for an explanation, but can’t find anything that fits. Was I mistaking an aircraft vapour trail, a satellite, a hovering helicopter exhaust or jump jet, an actual balloon or something else? I surmise the red colour was due to illumination by the Sun, like the band of cloud low down in the sky. Regarding the ‘balloon’ which started out above the object looking exactly like an envelope of gas providing buoyancy or lift, (the skin under tension and the shape of an upside down onion), then collapsing and hanging limply down to one side, this would be the opposite of lift, assuming it had weight. The oddest thing about the light was how it resolutely stayed in place, my observation lasting about 45 minutes. It could have been a small reflection on part of a larger object; there was no way to tell.

I’ve never reported this sighting, only ever telling a couple of friends and my wife. I’ve never seen anything reported about it, although it was over a densely populated area; nor have I heard of anything similar. I would love to know if anyone else saw it or anything similar – or, best of all, could tell me what it was and what an idiot I’ve been.

Mick Hennell

Somerset

“To my shock and horror, the balloon started to deflate and collapse”

Dreams realised

For Christmas 1988, when I was 11 years old, my mum bought mea Pop Hits diary. I remember it clearly – a green and white cover featuring Kylie Minogue and other stars of the day. Like many pre-teens, I wrote feverishly for the first few weeks, but by February my scribblings were few and far between, before dying out completely. One record, however, stood out. I’d awoken one morning and grabbed the diary, while still in bed, to jot down my dream from the night before. Unlike the majority of my dreams even to this day, it had been so clear – I was throwing a rugby ball back and forth with a gingerhaired guy I didn’t recognise, on the banks of the River Seine. Having no interest in rugby and never having been to France, it was so odd that I wrote down everything I could remember.

Six years later, I joined some former school friends on a trip to Paris to watch Scotland’s Five Nations match at the Parc de Princes. On the morning of the game, we were sitting on the banks of the Seine with hundreds of other fans, drinking beer and praying for a first win in France since 1969. I felt a small

thump on my back and turned around to find a rugby ball. I looked up and saw a familiar looking ginger-haired chap asking me to throw his ball back.

Lorne Grant

Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Between the ages of eight and 12, I had the same nightmare three or four times a month and would wake up in a total sweat, frightened out of my wits. I would see a vague image of a face looking at me, as if in a smokey reflection, accompanied by a swishing noise. When I looked directly at the face it smiled at me and the noise stopped, but when I looked away the face made all kinds of contorted grimaces and the swishing noise started again. Twenty years later, in 2008, I was a window cleaner. While cleaning the windows of a mental asylum, I saw a face smiling at me, but when I looked away it grimaced in the way I recalled from the nightmare. The swishing noise was there as well, made by my scrim cloth wiping the window. Alan ––

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Plates of shrimp

Alan Murdie recounted Mary Rose Barrington’s theory of JOTTS – Just One of Those Things [FT392:20-22]. My childhood friend Jan and I (pictured below in 1979) coined an analogous term for JOTTS: “plates of shrimp”. Our terminology referenced the 1984 film, Repo Man. In one classic scene, while feeding rubbish into a trash can fire (including the paperback, Dioretix – The Science of Matter over Mind by A-Rum-Bubba – simultaneously spoofing Scientology and Baba Ram Dass), Miller tells Otto:

“A lot of people don’t realise what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don’t realise that there’s this lattice of coincidence that lies on top of everything. I’ll give you an example, show you what I mean. Suppose you’re thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone will say like ‘plate’ or ‘shrimp’ or ‘plate of shrimp’ out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for it either. It’s all a part of cosmic unconsciousness.” A “$2.95 plate o’shrimp luncheon special” sign on the window of a diner can be seen in the background of a later scene. Brilliant. One could write a dissertation on all the fortean Easter eggs nestled in this movie. After watching Repo Man ,JanandI thereafter called psychic perceptions “plates of shrimp”.

In the 1990s Jan and I were both avid second-hand shoppers. One evening when I stopped by her house, she was excited to show me her latest thrift store score. She described it only as “a cool dress” and as she led me towards her closet, I got a vivid mental image of a dress I’d bought several months previously. My dress was a 1960s (?) black cotton Mexican dress with black lace panels in the tiers of the skirt and bell sleeves – a sort of hippie bruja frock (below). As Jan plucked her newly acquired dress from her closet, I was astonished to see her holding the exact same dress that I owned and that had, moments earlier, leapt into my mind’s eye. I was so astonished, in fact, that I burst into tears from the sheer surprise of it (not my typical way of reacting). We had purchased identical vintage dresses months apart and from different thrift stores. What were the odds? But the unsettling thing for me was I somehow “knew” that the dress she was going to show me was this garment.

I got rid of my dress in a wardrobe purge years ago, but Jan kept hers as a “plate of shrimp” artefact. I’m certain that over the course of our decadeslong friendship, we shared many other “plates of shrimp”. And no doubt we’ve all had the experience of, say, hearing a new word or discovering a new concept, then suddenly references to that word or concept are seemingly everywhere. Plates of shrimp – Germans probably have a single precise word for such occurrences. But as Alan Murdie commented, a feature of JOTTS is their inconsequential nature. Thus, these flashes of synchronicity – joyous glimpses of “the lattice of coincidence that lies on top of everything” – soon fade from memory.

Anne Henderson

Tucson, Arizona

Bear on the loose?

I had a fairly weird experience in early June 2020. I woke up in the early hours of the morning (about 3am), as I often do, being a fitful sleeper, and put my head out of my second floor bedroom window to get some air. I didn’t turn the bedroom light on. I noticed to my satisfaction that the resident hedgehog was snuffling around crunching snails on the lawn in the back garden – my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could see its dark shape moving around. I live in a quiet cul-de-sac [in the Vale of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire] and each semi-detached house has its own largish patch of well maintained lawn separated by wooden fencing on each side. There are no major roads nearby and I can see woods and hills in the distance. Anyway, after a few minutes watching the hedgehog, I heard a deep sound in the distance much like the roar of a bear, which instantly set off a number of dogs in the area. I thought “What on earth was that?” and a few seconds later heard the same sound again, which again set off the dogs. I listened for some time, but didn’t hear it again. The dogs didn’t bark again. I am familiar with the local wildlife and have heard foxes many times over the years but this was like nothing I had ever heard before. It was possibly, at a stretch, a big cat – I live near Wendover Woods which has reportedly got big cats living there and elsewhere locally – but it seemed far too loud and deep. The other possibility was a wild boar, and I know they have been sighted in the county, but again this seemed very unlikely. As I say, it sounded much like a bear. It occurred to me that it could have been a Bigfoot, but discounted this fanciful notion at once.

All in all, it’s a mystery. It certainly unnerved me and I was glad to close the window and return to bed.

Nick Smith

Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire