Close Encounters of the Royal Kind

JENNY RANDLES celebrates the Queen’s Jubilee by pondering Royal connections to the UFO mystery The reply from the Palace stated that the Queen could not intervene in an alien invasion

Last month Britain celebrated an unprecedented event: the 70th anniversary of a monarch’s ascension to the throne. While in Britain’s constitutional monarchy the Queen has limited say in the actual running of the country, people have long wondered how much she actually knows about any real state secrets – the most relevant here being to do with UFOs as investigated covertly by the Ministry of Defence or other bodies.

In the USA, the President is elected, just as is the Prime Minister in the UK, and each will be briefed on events they may have no prior knowledge of and told why they, like most others, were kept in the dark. But in the UK the Queen has seen off Prime Ministers from Churchill onwards. Regardless of whether any big secrets have been withheld from these men and women across seven decades, the Queen has a continuity of knowledge not otherwise seen in either the US or the UK. So, if there are secrets to be told about an alien presence on Earth, Elizabeth Windsor would probably be in the unique position of being the only person in the world to have known about them for such a long period – most of her adult life. Of course, the Queen being the Queen, is famously discreet; she was hardly going to sell an exclusive to the tabloids.

Do we have any hints of what might have been disclosed? Well, not from the Queen herself, obviously; however, in 2009, when the MoD stopped collating UFO reports, one long-classified file revealed a letter sent to Her Majesty asking her to take UFOs seriously as a security matter; the reply from the Palace stated, rather amusingly, that the Queen could not intervene in such an event as a possible alien invasion.

However, her family are another matter. Prince Charles has a longstanding fascination with subjects that would be at home in FT, so you’d imagine he would be curious about UFO events. Indeed, in 1983, when Arthur Koestler left £1 million to set up an academic study into the paranormal at a UK University, Charles intervened and attempted to persuade the University of Aberystwyth, of which he was Chancellor, to take on the role. Sadly, they did not do so, and indeed many prestigious universities declined the money, which eventually saw a programme set up at the University of Edinburgh (see FT201:32-39, 224:58-59).

So the Royals are no strangers to paranormal matters; I know for a fact that Prince Phillip was interested in the UFO mystery ( FT406:18-19). Half a century ago, I worked for several years for Charles Bowen, then editor of Flying Saucer Review ( FSR) magazine. I wrote articles, did paperwork and was made aware that the Prince had long been interested in the subject and read the magazine – though I was advised that this was kept secret at his request; understandably, as the media would not have used this knowledge in a helpful way.

Philip’s interest appears to have emerged via his Uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who fought in WWII and was the last Viceroy of India before Independence, and who appears to have had a close encounter on his estate at Broadlands in Hampshire on 25 February 1955. That morning, there was light snow on the ground as a worker cycled towards the house and got off his bike to observe a hovering object, like a metal spinning top with ‘portholes’, floating only yards away above a bank leading toward a stream. The witness watched in awe as a tube emerged from the base of the object with a small being on it, heading for the ground. As if suddenly aware of his proximity, a light glowed inside the object and an unseen wave of energy emerged and hit the witness, causing him to drop his bike and fall to the ground. He was left there, weak and unable to move for some minutes, as the object flew away. Slowly, he regained the ability to stand, and then continued to the house to report what had happened.

It was soon after this event that Lord Mountbatten, and eventually Prince Phillip, started to read the then new FSR – which they were still doing 20 years later when I was working there. Indeed, there are some who think this is linked to the story told a few weeks later (23 May 1955) by US journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. According to Kilgallen, she was told at a London society cocktail party that the UK Government had recovered a crashed UFO – and from what they had found it had been manned by small beings less than 4ft (1.2m) tall. One source suggested that the origin of the story – which Kilgallen never confirmed – was Lord Mountbatten. We will probably never know how true any of this is, or if it was linked to the events at Romsey three months earlier.

Ironically, I have my own cocktail party story to tell – although it dates from many years later. I happened to be at an event where a former Lord Mayor of London was in attendance. He had known Mountbatten, who, he assured me, had revealed to him that the UK Government had indeed captured the remains of a downed unknown craft that Mountbatten was told was alien in origin. It had been secreted away to an airbase in Wales for study. I never did find out how true this yarn was. Nor, indeed, if the person telling it to me actually believed it, although he seemed to. But I did get a chance to meet other members of the Establishment in December 1980 when I was invited to give a briefing in Westminster to the House of Lords Study Group.

What was very clear from that remarkable day was the level of interest in the UFO mystery among the Establishment. There were multiple members of both the Lords and the Commons listening to what I had to say, including a party leader and an exPrime Minister. It certainly surprised me, given the niche and controversial nature of what I was talking about. A major defence source was also present, and questions were asked of me that suggested there was at least a suspicion that not everything that was happening out there was being revealed, even to those working within the Ministry of Defence itself. There were no tales of crashed UFOs or the capture of alien bodies – just genuine interest in a subject the media would have considered crackpot had I told of these events.

This session fell in the middle of the four weeks in 1980 that saw perhaps the two most famous cases in British UFO history, both of which I was closely involved with. The Alan Godfrey abduction in Todmorden ( FT325:27, 326:27, 327:29, 328:28-30) was only days old, and just two weeks after I addressed the Lords group there followed an even more famous close encounter in Rendlesham Forest ( FT336:24-25, 337:2829, 338:26-27, 339:26-27, 340:28-29).

Sadly, on 27 August 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten had died in Ireland, killed by an IRA terrorist bomb; so I never got the chance to ask the man himself about what happened in 1955. I was in London with my co-writer Peter Hough doing interviews promoting our first book – UFOs: A British Viewpoint – against the backdrop of ongoing reports about this terrible tragedy.