From Vanuatu to Venus: the fortean side of Prince Philip
DAVID CLARKE highlights HRH Prince Philip’s lifelong interest in forteana
The death of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, aged 99 on 9 April has resulted in many tributes and obituaries; but few mentioned the Duke’s lifelong interest in and curiosity about a range of fortean subjects including UFOs, crop circles and cryptozoology.
Other members of the British Royal family are known for dabbling in alternative beliefs, including the Duke’s eldest son, Prince Charles. The Duke’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Admiral of the Fleet, is probably the bestknown British Establishment figure who had publicly expressed his fascination with the UFO phenomenon. His involvement reached its peak during the first wave of public interest in the subject, between 1950-55 and declined during his time as Chief of Defence Staff at MoD from 1959-63. Mountbatten shared this fascination with his nephew Prince Philip, who served in the Royal Navy during WWII and married Princess Elizabeth in 1947. He became Duke of Edinburgh in 1952 when his wife became Queen following the death of GeorgeVI. It was after the new Queen’s coronation that the Duke’s interest in UFOs, or ‘flying saucers’ as they were then known, reached its height. Both Prince Philip and Mountbatten were subscribers to the English magazine Flying Saucer Review. According to its editor, Gordon Creighton, copies had been sent to Buckingham Palace since FSR’s inception in 1955.
RAF Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley (1921-2001) was equerry to the Duke from 1952 to 55 and became drawn into the informal group of Establishment flying saucerers on taking up his post at Buckingham Palace. In his autobiography Sounds from Another Room (1998) Horsley said that during this period, much like Mountbatten: “Prince Philip was open to the immense possibilities of new technology leading to space exploration, while at the same time not discounting that, just as we were on the fringe of breaking out into space, so other older civilisations in the universe might already have done so.”
In his book, Horsley revealed that reports of flying saucers were enthusiastically discussed at Buckingham Palace throughout his time as equerry. When Andy Roberts and I met Horsley in 2000 he told us that in 1952, following a sighting by RAF aircrew at Topcliffe in Yorkshire, Prince Philip “agreed that I could investigate the more credible reports [of flying saucers] provided I kept it all in perspective and did not involve his office in any kind of publicity or sponsorship.”
As a result of his position in the RAF, Horsley was given carte blanche to read any reports and interview fighter pilots who had seen unusual phenomena in the sky. He told us that he had arranged, with the Duke’s personal approval, for RAF Fighter Command to send copies of the latest ‘flying saucer’ reports made by aircrew for examination at Buckingham Palace. During our
meeting at his home in Hampshire he provided documentary evidence of these investigations, including papers from the informal study he conducted for Prince Philip. During his time as Royal UFO investigator Horsley quizzed two RAFVampire pilots who spotted a flying saucer while on patrol from their base at West Malling in Kent, one afternoon in November 1953. After the story made the front page of the Daily Express Horsley used subterfuge to visit the base and interviewed both men, telling them his motivation was purely out of personal interest. His report to Prince Philip said he was “satisfied that theVampire crew was perfectly reliable”; and the two airmen had seen “a genuine UFO”. One of them, Geoff Smythe, later told us that he was told by the station commander that Horsley was acting on behalf of the Duke of Edinburgh, who was collecting UFO stories.
Perhaps the strangest outcome of this inquiry was Peter Horsley’s role in inviting a number of UFO witnesses to discuss their experiences at Buckingham Palace. These included the captain of a BOAC airliner, James Howard, who witnessed, along with other crew members and passengers, a strange formation of UFOs while flying over the North
Atlantic in June 1954. Another visitor to the Palace was schoolboy Stephen Darbishire, who obtained two photographs of a ‘saucer’ hovering above the slopes of the Lake District mountain, Coniston Old Man, in February of that year. Horsley explained his reason for inviting UFO witnesses to the Palace was partly to “put them on the spot” and test their honesty in the presence of royalty, a method as effective as any truth serum.
Horsley told us the sincerity of the RAF and civilian witnesses he interviewed was evident and this led him to conclude that UFOs were a real and unexplained phenomenon. But he was less impressed by the burgeoning UFO movement and what he described as “the growing body of people promoting sightings for mercenary reasons or selfadvertisement.” Among these less than objective influences he included Desmond Leslie (see FT225:40-47), who was on friendly terms with General Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning. The General, who was the husband of author Daphne du Maurier, led the British airborne forces during the disastrous Operation Market Garden in 1943. In retirement Browning became a private secretary to the Queen and like other former military officers became fascinated by flying saucers. But Browning went further than any other Establishment figure by taking seriously the claims of those who said they had actually met the space people.
It was through a contact of Browning’s that, in 1955, Horsley found himself drawn into a meeting with a strange individual at a London address who wished to discuss the flying saucer mystery. As the meeting progressed, this person, who called himself ‘Mr Janus’, asked him to reveal all he knew about the subject and, when questioned by Horsley as to the nature of his interest, said he wished to meet the Duke of Edinburgh.
“He may not be a crank, but he’s a bit too fanciful for me!”
Horsley said he became increasingly uncomfortable and got the distinct impression that his own thoughts were being read, and scrutinised, by telepathy. Alarmed at the security implications, he drew the meeting to a close and reported the experience to Buckingham Palace. Days later he revisited the address, finding it was shuttered and empty, and all attempts to trace the mysterious man came to nothing. By the time of our interview Horsley had convinced himself that Janus was “an observer” from another world, even though Mr Janus never claimed to be anything out of the ordinary at the time. He would not entertain our suggestion that Janus could have been an MI5 agent who was testing his vulnerability or the possibility that he could leak official secrets. We felt the ET explanation might have arisen as a result of having read Timothy Good’s books on alien contact that were popular around the time he wrote up this story from memory.
Horsley’s involvement in the UFO contactee movement came to a head in 1959 when a plot was hatched to engineer a meeting between Prince Philip and the famous Polish-American author and mystic George Adamski. Adamski had co-authored the 1953 best-seller Flying Saucers Have Landed with Desmond Leslie, a former WWII Spitfire pilot who had his own contacts in the British Establishment. The book contained his personal account of a meeting with the Venusian pilot of a flying saucer ‘scout-ship’ that landed in the Mojave Desert in California and communicated with Adamski by telepathy. According to his account, the space people wished to warn us of the impending threat posed by nuclear weapons. Adamski’s message combined old-fashioned Spiritualism with the new craze for seeing flying saucers, and this appealed to many who feared for the future of planet Earth, including some members of European royalty.
In April of 1959 Adamski embarked on a European lecture tour that included an audience with the Dutch royal family.
Shortly before the 68-year-old contactee arrived in London, Desmond Leslie wrote to both Browning and the Duke, enclosing a personal invitation for them to meet Adamski, in strict secrecy if necessary. Prince Philip clearly realised the danger this could place him in as he annotated Leslie’s letter, preserved in the Imperial War Museum archives, with the words “Not on your Nellie!” In a note to Browning he added: “He may not be a crank but he’s a bit too fanciful for me!”
Despite Royal disapproval, both Browning and Horsley met Leslie and Adamski during his visit at a private address in London. Horsley told us he was not impressed by either. He felt that Leslie was “probably sincere but gullible, sucked into the saucer cult by people who hoped to profit from it such as Adamski”, and he warned Browning against having any further contact with them. Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands also met Adamski, who at a press conference in The Hague on 20 May made the bold claim that the British royal family were also keen to meet him and that “Prince Philip so far has been the most interested.”
Peter Horsley’s direct knowledge of the Duke’s interest in UFOs and other strange phenomena ended in 1955 when he left the Palace to return to RAF duties. But he understood that Prince Philip’s interest continued long after his departure, and stories have emerged that he maintained an active interest in a range of esoteric subjects that he shared with Prince Charles. During the early 1960s he met the former WWII soldier and Conservative MP David James, who had come to believe in the existence of “an unidentified species in Loch Ness”. James used his Establishment contacts, including the Royal family, to push for a funded investigation of the Nessie phenomena. He hoped the Duke’s influence with the Royal Navy would secure backing for an expedition on the loch near his second home in the Scottish highlands. In 1964, Prince Philip advised him to take his evidence to the MoD’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Solly Zuckerman, who was also Professor of Anatomy at the University of Birmingham. According to the Zuckerman archives at the University of East Anglia, the Professor raised the idea with the Navy’s Chief Scientist, Sir John Carroll, arguing that “if a sonar investigation… were to reveal something extraordinary in the loch, it would be of considerable scientific interest”. But Carroll and Admiralty officials blocked the idea for a “full scale scientific investigation of Loch Ness in search of a monster” on the grounds of cost.
The Royal fascination for fortean topics also extended to the crop circle phenomenon. One of the leading promoters of the mystery, Colin Andrews, sent a copy of his 1989 book
Circular Evidence, written with Pat Delgado, to Queen Elizabeth. In August of that year the Times revealed that the book had been added to the Royal family’s ‘holiday reading list’ – which had a heavy slant toward Prince Charles’s interest in fringe phenomena. Shortly afterwards, Andrews received a note from Buckingham Palace asking if he would provide updates “on the latest developments on the Circles Phenomenon” for the Duke of Edinburgh, who had become a paid subscriber to his
Crop Circles newsletter. But the royals turned down Andrews’s offer to provide a personal briefing on the subject, perhaps having learned lessons from the Duke’s earlier flirtation with the UFO contactee movement. No one has been able to establish the depth of the Duke of Edinburgh’s personal interest in UFOs and other strange phenomena as he never mentioned the subject in media interviews. But it is a fact that the Duke accumulated a library of books on the subject; film director John McNeish revealed that he had received an order from Buckingham Palace for a copy of his book Crop Circle Apocalypse in 1993.
In 2017 I wrote to Prince Philip to ask if his files on UFOs and crop circles had been preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. I said there was considerable public interest in its contents and in particular the private study of the subject, completed on the Duke’s behalf, by Peter Horsley in 1955. On 27 June Prince Philip’s private secretary, Brigadier Archie Miller-Bakewell, responded: “I am afraid that extensive searches have not yielded any papers that would be of help to your research. This letter comes with His Royal Highness’s best wishes.”