Earth (41 page)

Helen had been watching a few meteors when one, larger than the others, appeared out of the constellation of Ursa Major. “It had a long tail and rather than winking out immediately, it arced across the sky and over her head to the southeast,” Don reports. Instead of gradually fading out, however, its progress across the sky was suddenly terminated, “as if it had passed behind something … there seemed to be a black curtain being drawn across it from slightly behind her, from the southeast, [and she] was surprised to discover a straight black line was crossing the sky and blanking out the stars.

“At intermittent moments she could see what she described as ridiculous
and ludicrous tiny white lights at the outer extremities of this black line as they passed over the canopy of trees surrounding her property [and then] noticed that one light was trailing the other two and she realized she was seeing ‘a perfect black triangle of gargantuan proportions' [which] was in the process of crossing directly over the clearing around her house.”

“If there had been a full moon, I wouldn't have been able to see it,” said Helen. “This thing blocked the entire area of sky above me—we're talking football fields in length and breadth. This thing was enormous—too big to be in the air, you would think. It was pitch black, very black. It moved very slowly—ten miles an hour? There was absolutely no sound at all. Everything became very still. And I felt ‘tingly,' like when you get pins and needles, [but] the feeling left when the triangle was out of sight.” The entire event lasted about five minutes as the craft passed from the southeast and then disappeared over the trees to the northwest.

Helen's next-door neighbor kept pheasants in a cage on the other side of the fence and, atypically, they were not making the usual bird noises and remained quite still during the incident. “When I got up the next morning,” she told Don, “I had a headache which remained with me all day, and I felt nauseous and dizzy once in the afternoon.” The headache remained with her until the following day.

“I have to tell you I still feel a little weird about it,” she explained to Don. “It's hard to wrap my mind around the reality of what I saw. But see it I did, whatever it was….”

Don Ledger's extensive inquiries yielded other reports of the craft, including input from an air traffic controller who informed him that “there
was
an unknown target with a strong [radar] return at the specified time and in the specified area, moving very slowly in the indicated direction.

“He also advised that even though Helen lost it in the treetops, the object moved very slowly about that area before moving in over the city. He watched the object [on radar] for a ten-minute period [and] advised that from time to time while over the Cow Bay area it disappeared, then reappeared in and out of the clutter at 1,800 feet—a known floor for radar reception in that area. The tapes were recorded off primary radar returns at Moncton Center, some eighty nautical miles from Halifax. The computer sensor had applied a ‘chicken's foot' to the return … a ‘Y' symbol which
denotes an unknown. There was no transponder code attached to the return, making it a pure primary return.

“With the very real possibility that this object was at 1,800 feet, I re-did the math, coming up with a length—on each side—of [about] 4,600 feet,” reports Don. “How thick was it? Even one foot of thickness gives us 6.48 million cubic feet. For every extra foot of thickness, you add an extra 6.48 million cubic feet. Even at a ratio of 20:1, that would make this object 180 feet high, comprising over 1.6 billion cubic feet of volume….”
27

Aldermaston, U.K.

Alien craft have a long history of monitoring our developments in the field of nuclear weaponry. Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) is located on Ministry of Defence (MoD) property in Aldermaston, Berkshire, and it was adjacent to this area that two witnesses—who prefer to remain anonymous—encountered a large craft on September 11, 2004. One of the witnesses (ML) revealed the details of the encounter to veteran investigator Ananda Sirisena, who reports as follows:

“At around 6:30
a.m
., ML and his wife were returning home after babysitting at their daughter's house when they saw a huge object hovering over a field, to the right of the road that they were driving on. At the time of the sighting, it was a bright dawn with a clear, blue sky. ML had spotted the object first through the trees and, while trying to keep it in sight, nearly drove into the ditch on the left-hand side of the road. His wife [queried] why he was driving in such an erratic manner. He stopped the van and told his wife to look out through his window.” She then spotted the craft too. “It's a spaceship!” she declared.

“ML informed me that the object was, in his estimation, many hundreds of feet in length, with pastel lights all around that appeared to pulsate softly [and] described it as ‘cloud-like,' saying that the colors around the [central rim of the] object were like ‘moving clouds.' … The couple observed the object for a short while, which ML estimated to be a few minutes. He had gotten out of the van and climbed up on the hood to get a better look. I asked ML to sketch the object, [which] shows a classic ‘flying saucer' shape….

“The couple were just past Church Lane, located on Burghfield Road as
it approached the M4 motorway, near the town of Reading. The massive object was hovering over a field adjacent to AWE…. Suddenly, from a hovering position, the UFO started to move directly over the MoD site, then rapidly toward the M4 motorway [and] was out of sight.

“ML is convinced there must have been many other witnesses because of the sheer size of the [object] and its proximity to AWE. He is certain that the object must have been captured on the innumerable security cameras surrounding the site [and] by drivers on the M4 motorway and possibly even picked up by the cameras that monitor traffic on that busy link between South Wales and London….”
28

Tennessee

Some encounters with flying triangles have disturbing consequences. In the early morning hours of Saturday, October 2, 2004, Sidney, a country and western singer, was driving home from work on a rural road in Bristol, Tennessee, when he noticed what appeared to be a fire between the trees some distance away. “As he drove,” reported MUFON Tennessee state section director Kim Shaffer, “he again noticed the ‘fire,' which seemed somewhat brighter and appeared to be moving. He neared an intersection near his home and exited his car [for] a better look. Slowly, from behind trees, emerged a huge triangle-shaped craft. The witness started to run but realized there was nowhere to run to, so he stood in awe and watched.

“The craft slowly came into full view, a perfect triangle which the witness estimated to be some three hundred feet in length and width, and only 100 feet or so high, blocking out all the sky. He noted three large domes, comparing each dome to twice the size of his car, burning brilliantly a reddish orange, lighting the treetops and illuminating the entire bottom of the craft. He also noted ‘rib-like' structures evenly spaced and running the width of the craft. [See photo section.]

“As the object passed over the witness's head, he stated that his skin burned, tingled, and felt really strange. He also noted that the sound seemed to [permeate] throughout his body and, being a professional musician, assured me that he could never adequately reproduce the throbbing hum he heard. The object passed over the witness, made a westward turn
without banking, and was gone from his sight.

“The witness went home and tried to sleep but could not get the object off his mind. He had managed to get some sleep early that morning and awoke to a nosebleed, a metallic taste in his mouth, and his skin feeling sunburned on his back and face. He also noted that when he brushed his hair, strands of it were coming out in the brush. He also has been weak and nauseated since this encounter.”
29

I asked Kim Shaffer for his evaluation of the case. “He is a devout Christian and would not dare to elaborate anything which took place that early morning,” he responded. “Sidney had lost fifteen minutes on his electric watch. He has monitored it closely (with the same battery) since and it has lost no time whatsoever. He has also been having recurring nightmares and been awakened several times by beams of light coming in his bedroom and strange noises (humming and buzzing) outside.

“I might add that he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor (very small—three millimeters) in his frontal lobe just prior to the encounter … subsequent medical tests (MRI and ultrasound) revealed the tumor was gone—I think this was sometime in January 2005.

“I am shocked as well by the extreme interest shown by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the U.S. government to the report on the Web site immediately after the encounter. As webmaster, I am able to see the domains which visit the site. There were hundreds of visits from the aforementioned domains, which have never visited before or since.”
30

Cambridge, U.K.

“Why don't UFOs appear over major cities?” I am frequently asked. To which my response is that they have done so, on numerous occasions, such as over Aberdeen in 1956 and Phoenix in 1997.

Cambridge may not be a major city in terms of size, but for centuries it has remained one of the world's leading centers of academic excellence. In his column in
The Independent on Sunday
in December 2004, journalist Andy Martin reported that while cycling back from a concert on a Friday night in Newton Road, Cambridge—he neglects to give a date—for a couple of hundred yards he “had a clear view of a trio of radiant white lights in the sky, garnered with a few blinking blue and red lights under
neath them. What I couldn't work out was what they were doing there. I was pedaling while they remained perfectly still…. Obviously, they were nothing to do with an aeroplane.

“As I approached the end of Newton Road (where I live), I got off my bike and I was looking—slack-jawed—almost straight up. Had the guiding star turned up early? In fact, it was more of a starship, the bright lights just hanging there in the sky, I would estimate at a height of around four or five hundred feet. There was no noise, not a whisper.

“As I looked more closely, I could see the dark outline of a craft that was nothing like a plane. There was no central tube and a couple of wings poking out at the sides; it was more rounded or at least bulkier. But it was big, definitely Jumbo-sized. And it wasn't going up and it wasn't coming down. It was going neither right nor left….

“A couple of minutes passed by in which nothing—except for this great miraculous nothing in the sky—happened. Then, smoothly, gently, quietly, the UFO—for it was certainly unidentified and it was a flying object—tired of immobility and pulled away from its parking spot, picking up speed as it went over my head and over the house in the rough direction of Girton. There was a faint rumble—a kind of deep purring noise—as it went by. The way it moved had a silky, dancing quality…. I raced around into the back garden, but it had already vanished.

“I should add, by way of confirmation, that my wife and fourteen-year-old son (who had been playing in the concert) were with me at the time. I said to them, ‘Was that a UFO?' ‘Yes,' said my son. ‘Is there any chocolate going?' …

“For at least twenty-four hours I was mentally paralyzed by the conviction that there is, indeed, extra-terrestrial life, and some of it had been visiting Cambridge…. Saturday night found me telling an old friend about my ET experience. A blond woman at a neighboring table leaned over and apologized for butting in to our conversation, but she couldn't help overhearing…. She told us that there is an experimental aircraft facility at Bassingbourn, only a few miles away as the UFO flies, probably run by the Americans.
31

“She had heard that they were experimenting precisely with noise reduction and they tended to fly at night, to keep things hush-hush. But even she, she had to admit, was uncertain about the ability of an extremely large
object to anchor itself in the sky for long periods….”
32

My attempts at communicating with Andy Martin to learn more unfortunately drew a blank. Of related interest, another journalist had an encounter that month. Ian Murray, editor of the
Southern Daily Echo
, was driving along the A31 road toward Ringwood, Hampshire, on December 7, when at about 16:30 traffic slowed down to watch a strange craft as it passed overhead.

“Hovering above us was a triangular-shaped aircraft with a spotlight,” Murray describes. “It was slow enough to be a helicopter but dissimilar. I mentioned it to the news desk here at the paper. But, I was informed by colleagues barely concealing their smirks, checks with Southampton Airport and Hampshire Police brought no reports of ‘strange aircraft' that late afternoon….”
33

The Channel Islands

Located in the English Channel between the south coast of the United Kingdom and northern France, the Channel Islands are an archipelago of British Crown Dependencies. In the spring of 2007, two airliners encountered two huge craft of unknown origin. The report was first published as a front-page exclusive in the
Guernsey Press & Star
on April 26, but the story made more of an impact two months later, following publication of an official report by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) confirming the incident.

On April 23, 2007, Captain Ray Bowyer was flying an eighteen-seat, three-engine Britten-Norman BN-2a Trislander of Aurigny Air Services from Southampton to Alderney, with passengers on board. The flight deck on this aircraft is not separated from the passengers. At four thousand feet, visibility was very good for a hundred miles, with low-level haze up to two thousand feet, Bowyer reported. He first spotted a brilliant yellow light which he thought was about five or six miles away, but changed his mind after another twenty miles, as the object still seemed at a distance.