Fifty long years have passed since the mysterious events surrounding England’s first ‘recognized’ mass UFO event reached a peak . The sleepy Wiltshire town of Warminster lies in ‘crop circle country’ and sits just 15 miles from Stonehenge.
During the 1960s, whilst the USA was witnessing its very own “British Invasion” a very different British Invasion was occurring in Warminster. It slowly became the epicentre for some truly weird happenings. Happenings which eventually fascinated and terrified many members of the local community in equal measures.
By 1965 the reports and rumours had become so widespread that the chairman of the town council, called a public meeting ‘to allay fears that the happenings were a danger to the Earth’. This strangest of UFO flaps has no defined beginning nor any real end. This isn’t a regular mainstream UFO story and may seem particularly odd to our close cousins from across the Atlantic and Down Under.
The Warminster tale is very peculiar in places and certainly does not cover the well worn topics of abductions, UFO crash retrievals and government cover-ups that have dominated major UFO lore since the 1980s. It does involve encounters with strange humanoid aliens, disappearing livestock, strange objects in the sky and some very interested, puzzled and terrified people.
Now let’s start at something like a beginning....
In The Beginning.....Let There Be ‘Sound’
There is no real agreed start date to the story of the “Warminster Thing”. Some supernatural reports exist from the 1930s.
Warminster on UK Map
In December 1930 a driver on the Salisbury-Bamford road recalled his vehicle being enveloped by a black mist. He said a grey looking hand grabbed him from out of nowhere but then released him as the mist cleared.
On New Year’s Day 1936 there is the tale of a man driving to collect his wife from friends. He picked up a woman hitchhiker in a green suit. She sat in the back seat of his car but had vanished by the time he next looked behind him.
A group of four witnesses allegedly saw a strange UFO leaving a trail of sparks in the night sky as it passed over Warminster in November of 1961.
However, a current day consensus of books and web pages, places the unofficially accepted date of the “Coming of the Thing” as Christmas Day in 1964.
Unusually for a UFO wave there were no ‘UFO sightings’ just an unexplainable noise at first.
In the early darkness of Christmas morning 1964 local resident , Mildred Head, was awoken around 1:25am by a sound she later described as like twigs and leaves being drawn across her roof. This morphed into a sound like giant hailstones falling. But when she peered out from her bedroom window she was somewhat confused by the dry and clear conditions outside. There was also a disconcerting ‘hum’ which slowly increased in volume and receded into a low whisper. But there was no clue as to where the sound was emanating from.
Sometime before daylight on Christmas morning around 30 troops, based a few miles from Warminster at Knook camp, were also awoken by a loud noise.
The duty Sergeant reported a sound like a large chimney stack had been ripped down from a building and scattered across the camp. The military guard was alerted but nothing was found to substantiate the source of the sounds.
At just after 6:00am on Christmas morning a loud, piercing, high-pitched, sound was heard by Marjory Bye as she made her way to church. The menacing sound became so intense that she could feel it pounding in her temples, neck and shoulders. But she also saw nothing to indicate where it was coming from.
Warminster's head postmaster Roger Rump, heard very similar, intense sounds to Mrs Bye. He described the noise as a ‘huge clatter’ like roof tiles being rattled and plucked off houses then slammed back into place by a powerful , unseen force. He also noted an odd humming tone that faded away after a minute or two.
Reports of these sonic disturbances came in from all over Warminster throughout the winter. Witnesses began calling it the “Thing”. No one had been able to locate the source of the strange sounds. Some folk had even reported being so stunned by the ‘Thing’ that they were knocked to the ground from the noise.
Sound and Vision
In February of 1965, scientist David Holton from nearby Crockerton, sent a letter to the Warminster Journal. Holton claimed the mysterious noise had been manifesting for years. He claimed it was frightening local children and that the ‘Thing’ was even responsible for the deaths of pigeons in the area.
"A flock of pigeons was killed in flight when tangling with the ‘Thing’. They brushed into fatal contact with paralyzing sound beams in Crockerton woods, near Warminster...
Stiff-winged, they plummeted earthward... The Thing in its most stunning guise was directly responsible... a number of people testified to a high-pitched droning..."
Local TV interviewed Holton who declared that he believed ‘The Thing’ came from outer space and it would only be a matter of time before the source of the noise would reveal itself.
Throughout the spring further reports from local people were of bewildering, droning, and metallic like sounds and their rooftops and windows shaking. Pets were also disturbed by these bizarre sonic events in some cases becoming violently ill.
By late spring of 1965 reports of UFOs over Warminster were multiplying rapidly.
Hilda Hebdidge a local resident reported to the Fleet Street UFO Group she had witnessed strange objects in the sky three times in the middle of May.
The objects were cigar-shaped and 'covered with bright lights which winked and blinked... They were various shades of gold and yellow..."
The Phillips family reported on 3rd Jun 1965:
The cigar-shaped glow... hung, a brilliant spectacle in the sky for a good twenty five minutes or more; she thought it did not change position at all. There was a distinct dark circular patch or aperture at the base of the fiery object, which threw off a halo of red-orange light. The craft was horizontal, not vertical, she insisted.
.... Seventeen people were either fishing or bathing [at] Shearwater... Crockerton. All witnessed the cigar-bodied extravaganza. 'It was obviously huge but high up,' said ... Colin Hampton, so surprised he fell into the lake. Some thought it to be orange-mauve...others... orange-red. Apart from these slight colour variations... the main descriptions agreed [with Mrs Phillips]."
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