A Skywatcher Remembers
Did you catch my last blog, The Warminster Thing Part One? If so, you’ll know all about the crazy phenomenon from the days of The Warminster Thing. If not, head back and have a quick catch up here. It’s worth reading before you hear David’s account. He is one of the original sky watchers from up on Cradle Hill and gives us a unique view of those heady days, (well nights!) that made Warminster the centre of the UFO universe.
The Scene
I’m one of the Old Guard who skywatched from Cradle Hill at Warminster in the early 70s but can’t claim to have been in at the beginning of the Thing – I never heard the Hum. I was one of the scores of rubber-neckers and truth seekers from all over England who joined locals on the Hill at night thinking we might actually be on the brink of contact with another world.
Your first question is probably – ‘OK, what did you see. Did you end up believing in UFOs?’
Emma of Weird Wiltshire sees me as a sceptic because I’ve written debunks of a couple of her mysteries. But I see UFOs in a different category from witches and ghosts and when you’ve finished reading this, you will see that as far as UFOs go, I’m anything but a sceptic.
The best thing is just to list exactly what I saw. This list contains one thing I can’t explain and several things I thought at the time were real, which turned out – humiliatingly – to be very down to earth. But the one sighting on its own went against all the laws of nature and all it takes is one real UFO.
Before that – a bit of background – how Warminster and Warminster folk struck me at the time. For a start they didn’t strike me as trying to cash in on the Thing as if it was a Loch Ness Monster that would bring in tourists. And people in a garrison town with the Army next door are the last people you’d expect to start imagining airy-fairy things like UFOs. When the Thing started in 1964 with a noise like branches being dragged and strange lights, there was obvious consternation but not panic. In fact, I think they started to be quite proud of it as if the town had been singled out as special by some outside force, even to feel they ‘owned’ it.
It was given a boost and people began to do the first sky-watches when local reporter Arthur Shuttlewood featured it in the Warminster Journal. He became such a believer that he claimed that he saw two or three UFOs a week and that anybody who skywatched would see a UFO between 9 and 12pm. So a big question for sceptics is – to what extent if any did Arthur create the flap? I’d argue he kept it going when the ‘hum’ stage fizzled out and it was certainly Arthur who got Cradle Hill established as the viewing spot from 1966, almost to the point of leading guided tours. It was in1971 or 1972 that a group of us who’d been regulars at BUFORA meetings in London began to hire a car and came onto the scene.
UFOs and Crop Circles
Side by side with the UFOs there was the second mystery of the crop-circles appearing in fields of corn round the town, but they were so obviously man-made they didn’t interest me. And maybe because they appeared further afield all over Wilts as well, they weren’t as proudly ‘owned ‘ by Warmnster as the UFOs. Some ufologists claimed they were made by UFOs swirling the corn but they were clearly made by dragging rollers to flatten it in patterns. In fact, you knew that if you went into the right pub you’d probably find local yokels guffawing at the reaction to their latest art work. These went on appearing long after the UFOs had died out and the later ones are so beautiful and elaborate that art school-trained neo-hippies must have got in on the act.
A Night on the Hill with Arthur and Arthur’s Glass Eye
At 9pm cars would drift up from the town in single file along the little tarmac lane onto the Hill with Arthur in the lead car. A group of about 30 people – half local, half from as far away as London like us – would gather round Arthur, trusting his claim that if we stood there till 12 we were guaranteed a UFO. Some of us would look straight up and others would stare out across the army range which stretched to the horizon on the other side of the fence. WE genuinely felt we were on the brink of some huge contact between us and aliens from another world. You could actually FEEL them as if the air was gently buzzing with their presence. Then the promised sightings started to happen. A flare would drift across the range about a mile away and somebody would shout ‘There’s one!’ Or stare vertically overhead – ‘There’s one!’ Arthur’s job was to decide if it was a real UFO or not and he would check it out by peering sharply in that direction.
One night I was watching him adjudicate like this when I noticed the moonlight glinting in an odd way on his specs. At first I thought it was just a reflection from one of the lenses, then I realised it was coming from his eye itself. I pointed it out to a local and he said,’Yeah – Arthur’s got a glass eye. Didn’t you know?’
Towards midnight it thinned out as the locals went home, but there had usually been enough ‘yeses’ from Arthur to keep them happy and the town’s reputation intact. A hard core of us were left and either stayed watching or got in our cars for a kip, often switching between a bit of skywatching and a bit of kip. Towards 3am it got very cold and the atmosphere changed and became genuinely spooky. The presence of the aliens which had been weird but basically benign before, changed into something much more convincing and quite frightening and not necessarily friendly. From the watching spot a track led even higher to the ‘Field Barn’, but in the pitch dark I was always too nervous to go up to it.
Flying Saucers on Toast
Then dawn would break and we would climb groggily into our cars and drive back down the track into Warminster to get some breakfast. We were an odd sight – I wore a giant overcoat from Oxfam that dragged behind me in the dew and other people wore other bizarre gear to keep warm including Jack the Ripper type deerstalkers and flying helmets. Away from the Hill, after the strain and discomfort of watching all night, a sort of childish humour took over. We found a workman’s caff and UFO-ised everything on the menu – poached eggs on toast were flying saucers on toast and bacon baps were Motherships. We ordered them with a straight face from a long-suffering woman and found it screamingly funny.
The Witches’ Sabbath
We’d usually do a two-night watch, driving a hired car from London on a Friday, sky watching Friday and Saturday night, and back on Sunday. It was always a toss-up whether it would be rainy or cloudy when we got to W and often we took a chance and wasted the petrol money.
One night we had been rained out on Cradle Hill and there was nobody there – just empty ranges thick with mist and rain. A skywatch being out, we drove to Cley Hill instead. Cradle Hill is embedded snugly in the landscape of Scratchbury and Battlesbury hill forts but Cley sticks up like a pimple in a flat landscape 3 miles from the town. It was now raining heavily and hard to see through the windscreen. We found a spiral track that could just take the car and drove up it. Halfway to the top we found ourselves in the middle of a group of naked figures dancing round a fire. Rather than try to turn round we drove on to the top and sat in the car till it got light, on the alert in case any of the ‘witches’ ventured up. When we drove down the figures had gone but they’d left the smouldering remains of their fire. We’d come to Warminster for UFOs but this out-spooked anything we’d seen so far on Cradle.
My Sightings – The Impossible Spiral
That is, until a few weekends later when I saw the thing I can’t explain. I was on Cradle Hill with about 30 people. I was looking straight up and I saw a satellite moving across the sky, following its usual slightly wobbling course. When it reached a spot directly overhead it did something IMPOSSIBLE. It paused then flew in a tight spiral with about six turns as if it had been drawn with a compass, then it resumed its course and flew on. I knew I’d seen something extraordinary and scientifically impossible and told a local next to me. He just said, ‘They’re really moving for you tonight, mate.’
The Silver Craft
The following night I was watching flares on the range, which were usually orange and used to drift sideways in the wind and fool a lot of people. I saw a silver flare. Having been fired vertically it began the usual drift sideways as if it was being piloted.. I drew someone’s attention to it casually, then forgot about it. The next night I arrived to find the Hill buzzing with excitement. There had been a major sighting the night before and I had missed it!
Even though I’d been there the whole time. Apparently it had flown so close that details of fuselage and flashing lights on top were visible. It had flown from L to R like my flare and that of course is what it was.
The Luminous Disc
One night I bivvied in the dark with other people on a grassy bank at Upton Scudamore. At about 4 am, we were so cold we couldn’t sleep and we just lay groggily in our sleeping bags staring ahead in the half light. We saw a large luminous disc hovering in mid air about 50 feet away with strange symbols on it. It hadn’t been there the night before. Somebody said, ‘the symbols are numbers’, and somebody else said, ‘it says 50’. It was so close we were nervous it might move towards us and zap us. As it got lighter we saw that we had camped on a rail embankment and the sign was an m.p.h limit sign for trains.
Amber Gamblers
When the Warminster Thing hit the town in 1964, it took the form of the humming sound I have described and orange lights which the locals called ‘amber gamblers’ (named after jumping traffic lights on orange). The Hum had stopped by 1966 but the amber gamblers were still on the go. They were different from the orange flares one saw on the range and were referred to by locals as if they were bobbing about everywhere. Sadly, I didn’t see any.
End of the UFOs
Skywatchers on the Hill began to thin out in about 1975 as the phenomenon ran out of steam and was over by 1977. During it, most of us had clocked up a convincing sighting like my spiral satellite that made us feel there had been a sort of tug between us and another world. But the BIG contact that we dreamt of was never made. Looking back I start to see Warminster as just part of the heady 1960s, when so many of us got high. And in the case of Warminster, maybe a whole town got high as if LSD had been put into the water supply. Warminsterites would stoutly deny this and insist on the reality of The Thing and I can’t pooh pooh it because I missed that first phase. As far as the second phase went, enough of us outsiders saw things we couldn’t explain to make that pretty convincing too.
I went back to Cradle Hill a few years ago to see if any of the old atmosphere was left. No cars drove up. Nobody turned up, Arthur had died in 1996. That electronic buzz in the air as if aliens were close at hand had gone. I didn’t even see a mundane flare over the range. Next day, I plucked up courage and asked a middle-aged woman in the street if she remembered the UFO wave. ‘Oh yes’ she said, a friend of hers had seen one that landed in the car park of a nearby pub. Down to earth – UFO’s as a fact of life – just like in the old days. No saying apologetically…’Oh that was a mad time that was’.
It WAS a mad time and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
David Aneurin Morgan
With my sincerest thanks, as always, to David for taking the time to write up his account of his sky watching days. 🙂
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