Only April Fools rush in to believe these tall tales
In honour of this coming Saturday (April 1), Eugene Byrne has dug out a few tales of some less well-known non-April-Fool hoaxes from Bristol’s past.
The Great UFO Panic of 1967
Monday September 4 1967: Fifteen-year-old Neil Batey of Clevedon was on his paper round when he spotted a curious silver-grey object on Dial Hill:
“It really looked just like a spaceship. It’s about 4ft 6in long and 2ft 6in wide with hemispheres at each end,” he later said.
He told newsagent Robert Seeley, who called the police, who in turn called BAC at Filton, who despatched one of their senior engineers.
As young Neil was making his discovery, Mary Jennings rushed into the kitchen of a farm near Chippenham and told her father: “Daddy, there’s a flying saucer in the field!”
Richard Jennings grabbed his camera, and found an object identical to the Clevedon one. He, too, called the police, who summoned an expert from nearby RAF Colerne.
By the end of the day, six of the flying saucers had been located, all lying on exactly the same line of latitude from the Thames Estuary to the Bristol Channel. All of them made an eerie whining noise if they were moved. Some gave off a quite unpleasant smell.
The year 1967 was probably when UFO-mania peaked in Britain. For various reasons, a lot of them to do with newspapers reporting sightings from all over the country, the UK was obsessed with the idea that we might be being visited by little green men from outer space. At this time there were many who believed that our visitors were from places like Mars or Venus.
The saucers were all investigated in different ways by different police forces. Some called in the RAF, others the bomb squad. The Wiltshire one was opened with a controlled explosion, while the Clevedon one was taken to a nearby engineering works where it was opened with a hacksaw.
“A smell as bad as bad eggs came out. Inside there was about four gallons of an off-white substance that looked like a mass of soft gooey bread,” said Reg Willard, director of the firm.
“I know this sounds silly, but I have read science fiction stories and wondered if this was an alien attempt to establish life on this planet.” The substance was to be sent to Bristol University for analysis.
The other saucers were opened, and aside from the foul-smelling goo there were amplifiers and ordinary Ever Ready batteries for making the spooky alien noises. The goo, it turned out, was flour and water.
The culprits soon confessed. They were apprentices at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, who made the saucers (on their own time, and at their own expense) as part of their annual rag week. It worked out quite well; no criminal charges were brought and they raised over £2,000 (a tidy sum in 1967) for charity.
Soviet delegation
Ever since a bunch of young posh kids put on theatrical costumes and blackface and pretended to be a group of visiting dignitaries from Abyssinia in order to get themselves a VIP visit to a Royal Navy battleship in 1910, people have periodically tried variations on the joke.
So in November 1955 for example, when “goodwill visits” to and from the Soviet Union were all the rage, a group of four young “Russians” – three men and a woman – arrived at Temple Meads station to be greeted by about 80 Bristol University students, some of them waving a banner saying something or other written in Russian, or possibly nonsense.
The four, dressed in suitably drab communist clothing were then taken to Avonmouth Docks and given a tour, shown the cold storage facilities and watched a ship being unloaded before being taken for lunch in the canteen.
It was only then that it emerged that the group were, in fact, Bristol University undergraduates. The official limousine which was meant to take them back to the university was cancelled and they had to catch the bus home.
Smell-o-vision
When it comes to smells, people can be quite suggestible. When on April 1 1965, the BBC featured a “professor” who said he had invented a machine to break scents down into molecules which could be transmitted via the screen, some believed him.
On air, he fed onions and coffee beans into his machine and several viewers phoned in to say they’d been able to smell the smells. Some even said the onions made their eyes water.
In June 1977, Bristol University psychology lecturer Michael O’Mahony tried it again, this time as part of a serious experiment. Appearing on a late-night TV show in the Manchester region, he explained that the then-new technology of raman spectroscopy would allow the station to transmit smells over the airwaves.
He told them he was going to transmit “a pleasant country smell, not manure” over their TV sets, and he asked people to report what they smelled. Within the next 24 hours the station received 172 responses. The highest number came from people who reported smelling hay or grass. Others reported their living rooms filling with the scent of flowers, lavender, apple blossom, fruits, potatoes, and even homemade bread. Two people complained that the transmission brought on a severe bout of hay fever.
A matter of honour
At 5.30am on the morning of Saturday March 20 1897, two carriages arrived at Brandon Hill carrying men who intended to fight a duel.
This, of course was illegal, so it was essential that the “matter of honour” be settled quickly before any witnesses arrived or someone called the police.
Boxes with pistols was produced. Both men and their seconds inspected the weapons and took their pistols. The distance was paced out, the two men invited to stand at their allotted points. The count began.
One … Two … Three!
Both men fired at once.
One man was on the ground, clutching his chest and breathing hard. The doctor rushed over and examined him and said he had been hit in the left lung. He would have to be taken to hospital at once.
The other had evidently triumphed, but the others begged him to disappear as fast as possible, before the law arrived.
As soon as he had gone, the other man stood up, the fake “doctor” closed his bag and everyone else had a good laugh. The pistols were real enough, but had been loaded with blanks. It had all been an elaborate practical joke and everyone apart from the duel’s “winner” was in on it.
They were all actors, currently appearing at the Bristol Theatre Royal. The two duellists had had some sort of falling out, and so there had been a challenge. The duel’s winner – we don’t know the names of any of the men involved – was evidently also unpopular with the rest of the cast. He was arrogant, and always going on about what a hero he had been when he had served in the army.
It was all to teach him a lesson, but he must have taken it in good spirit as the company were back on stage that evening, and would soon go on to the Theatre Royal in Bath.