Beam me up
JENNY RANDLES finds links between a wartime UFO sighting and experimental military technology
I love meaningful coincidences that point me in interesting directions. That is how this month’s column began, when I noticed that actor Simon Pegg was born in the small Gloucestershire village of Brockworth.
Pegg is perhaps best known for playing Scotty, the engineer of the Enterprise in the recent Star Trek movies, and Brockworth rang a bell from an interesting case investigated by a BUFORA researcher. He inspired my interest in an unusual side of the UFO mystery known as ‘solid light’ – beams of energy that act as if they possess physical attributes. In Star Trek, Scotty controls the transporter device and is associated with the catchphrase ‘Beam me up’. It seemed apt to look anew at that Gloucestershire hamlet.
Mark Brown investigated this case in 1981 and I recall my excitement on first receiving his superbly documented research. A 1939 close encounter is extraordinary enough on its own account, but few were this interesting.
The witness, Fred, was 30 at the time of the incident. It was about 7am on 13 November, and he was heading to his reserved occupation war work, just two months into hostilities. As a building contractor, he was tasked with the rapid expansion of the Gloster Aircraft factory, as it was a vital base for RAF aircraft production with the threat of Nazi invasion looming. He had dispensation to drive from London by car and spend weekdays at Brockworth to get the work done as fast as possible.
Approaching through Birdlip village and descending the hill into Brockworth, he passed a farm where the dog normally reacted noisily as he drove by. Yet that fine morning there was silence. Then, a strange humming noise filled the air – high pitched, like a fine motor. Fred was puzzled but drove on until he reached a gate into an open field. Across the meadow he saw the source of the noise: a strange craft, admiralty grey in colour and shaped like a large bell. There were windows on the edge and from the base a curtain of strange blue-green light emerged that appeared to be solid, a bit like a waving skirt.
Fred stopped his car to watch as the object hovered maybe 20ft (6m) above the field. He estimated it to be 25ft (7.6m) across – as a builder he was skilled at making accurate measurements, even from 100ft (30m) away. He watched, increasingly scared, for about two minutes; then the skirt switched off and the bell shape tilted to an 80-degree angle and moved sideways across the field. But the most extraordinary part was how the skirt ‘retracted’ upwards into the base, taking time to disappear, unlike a light simply being switched off. It behaved as if it were solid.
After about three minutes Fred switched the car engine back on, drove to the airfield and asked permission to return to the farm to investigate. He was allowed to do so, but found no trace of the object. Moreover, there was no sign of life there, and over the next few weeks before he was transferred away he never saw any workers or animals in the fields as he had been used to doing previously.
It was, of course, 20 years or more before he saw stories of ‘flying saucers’. Late in 1958, now living in Loughborough, Leicestershire, and running a pub, Fred heard a similar high-pitched noise and a green glow flew past his bedroom, illuminating everything as it did so.
Mark Brown went above and beyond to investigate this case. He travelled to Brockworth and with local police identified the farm workers from 1939 but found no record of their ‘disappearance’ other than the usual movement of people during wartime. He also enlisted the support of the Ministry of Defence to check aircraft movements and possible explanations, such as barrage balloons guarding the factory, but nothing was discovered. The date was narrowed down to 13 November from weather records matching what the witness had recalled.
While writing this column I discovered that a member of the family who owned the farm where Fred’s experience took place had died in a cottage in Birdlip village just days before the sighting. Whether this is of any relevance or just a coincidence is not clear. However, of more interest is Brockworth airfield itself, the site that Frank was working to expand
in 1939. It had been created in 1915, in the early days of flight – the first in this part of Britain – and was employed by the RAF as an Aircraft Acceptance Park during WWI. Flying circuses used it during the 1920s, but by the 1930s the Gloucestershire Aircraft Company, which had started building metal-framed aircraft at its Cheltenham Factory, took over the airfield as a manufacturing base. Photos taken from planes then show the construction work that Frank was recruited to assist in. The company was renamed Gloster because overseas customers were struggling to pronounce ‘Gloucestershire’. Then, Brockworth was chosen to become the centre of a secret project in the early days of WWII: the building of the world’s first jet fighter.
Initially, only propeller fighters were constructed, and over 1,000 Hurricanes were rapidly deployed before Christmas 1939. This legendary plane, with the Spitfire, proved vital to Britain’s defeat of the German Luftwaffe just months later. The first jet plane made a short hop from Brockworth’s runway in April 1941 – so this location could be said to have given birth to our modern age of global travel – although full testing transferred to Cranwell. However, production Meteor jets were built in numbers at the site from 1943. Sadly, the base closed post war; a motorway was built through part of it and remnants of the runway that once saw tests for the first British were supplanted by a factory. Can we infer from this history that the witness saw and heard something connected with early development? Though the farmer’s field was not on airfield land, my new record search found that the neighbour of the person who died in just prior to Fred’s UFO encounter was designated a Special the time. The inventor of the turbojet engine, Frank Verum Whittle, did fue conduct tests at sent, Brockworth, but seemingly not in 1939. He first met with the designers of Gloster Aircraft to plan a prototype jet seven months
before Fred’s sighting and did agree to secret construction of two prototype jets in 1940 – one built nearby, though elsewhere, in case Brockworth was badly hit by ongoing air raids during construction. No prototype flew before April 1941, but engine testing was continuous before then. Meteors built at Brockworth became the only jet aircraft operated by any of the allies during World War II and the only plane able to catch and stop Nazi V rockets.
So was Fred somehow witness to a secret jet engine trial on land near the base? And, if so, what did he witness? A flatbed field test gone awry? Whittle had first successfully fired his engine indoors in April 1937 and Henry Tizard, coincidentally then coordinating a secret group perfecting radar near Rendlesham Forest, championed its funding. By March 1938 they were working under secrecy in Leicestershire – coincidentally, where Fred saw his post-war UFO.
Can we match what Fred describes to an unrecorded wartime test in a field off the construction site? The sound described by Fred resembles what would have been, for him, a never-before-heard jet engine. But what of the ‘solid light’ that retracted into the craft? Remarkably, there are similarities with a case that happened soon after I began investigating with the local UFO group in Manchester in the early 1970s (see FT295:29).
On 8 October 1972 security guard John Byrne, then 43, was patrolling Cairo Mill, an old factory at Waterhead near Oldham. Although this large building started life as a textile mill it had, by then, been converted by electronics firm Ferranti to develop complex systems for the defence industry, including electronics for jet aircraft and the Ministry of Defence.
It was a clear midnight when Byrne was near the bicycle shed and heard, rather than saw, the object. It was an unusual deep humming noise that bored into his head, not unlike what Fred reported. Byrne compared it to a generator inside a closed room – something he was familiar with, though none was operating. Aware this was odd on a Sunday night, he glanced up to look for the source and saw a huge object parked next to the tower end of the mill with only Pennine moors beyond. The UFO resembled a large glowing bell shape turned on end with the flat base vertical to the sheer wall of the tower – the very same shape, at a similar orientation, reported by Fred 33 years previously.
Byrne noted the object “was giving off a blue fluorescent-type light, but there was no beam. It was 300ft [90m] above and hovering”. This solid light fell like a curtain from the UFO, yet despite this glow it did not cast shadows on the ground.
Byrne watched for some minutes, and then: “It turned very sharply on edge, hovered for a minute and went straight into the sky until it was only a blob of light.” There was no blast of air as this ‘craft’ sped away, nor any noise from its departure. Even the humming did not alter in pitch (as in Doppler shift from a speeding car moving past). A second security guard yards away heard nothing.
If this sighting was not directly linked with the new jet engine we might consider the glowing green fireballs reported in the sky around Rendlesham Forest in the 1970s when experimental long-range radar was being tested there. Given Tizard’s role in both radar experiments and Whittle’s engine, could secret early radar tests have triggered ionisation in the air above Brockworth in 1939?