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1289 Unidentified [ 18 JANUARY 1979 J Flying Objects 12S'<O
set of considerations, which augurs well
for his· future in your Lordships' House,
wl1ere I know he is already welcome.
At the risk of capping the ~tories of
the noble Lord, Lord Gainford, I should
like to tell your Lordships about some of
the sightings I have seen. I will order
them in terms of my curriculum ritae,
beginning at the age of six, when I saw
an angel. I do not know whether it was
the noble Lord, Lord Davie3 of Leek,
who mentioned aneels, or \\+ether it
was the noble Lord: Lord Trefgarne, or
the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley; but it
is perfectly true that there was my
guardian angel sitting on the edge of my
bed. Naturally, with the imagination of
a child, I clothed lhis presence in human
form with a large pair of feathery wings.
This presence procec-ded to rebuke me for
initiating a practice which it said would
_get me into trouble if I persisted in it.
Having remembered the rebuke all my
life and acted upon it, I am not prepared
to deny the reality of the presence that
was there with me. This should be a
sufficient answer to the noble Earl-l see
I have put him to flight-who thinks that
if scientists come across something they
cannot explain they are afflicted with a
kind of vertigo. On the contrary, we
welcome something we cannot explain
because it is a new phenomenon which, as
it were, stretches our capacities and brings
out something in us.
The next item came along in year two
of World War I. I was about eight years
old, and the next thing that I sighted
were Zeppelins. I used to go out after
dark into the garden of the house where
we lived and come back reporting the
number of Zeppelins I had seen. What
I had seen, in my interpretation of it, a
Zeppelin-it was a large illuminated
cigar~shaped object. In fact what I was
looking at was the lenticular shape that
the perspective of a searchlight thrown
· on to a cloud~base makes, and I was
interpreting it as a Zeppelin and I was
telling my parents how many Zeppelins
I had seen.
.
f.l The 1nex1
t on~his s1
undohgs and this fits
1 very c ose y Wit w 1at t e noble Lord,
Lord Davies of Leek, was saying about
Macbeth's dagger and the laser holeo~
graphic reconstruction of things which
really are not there. What sort of an
interpretation would somebody who had
H.L.8 Q
never read about these or read about them
put upon sundogs? Most people have
not seen them or read a bout them. I
wa:; fortunate enough to liave read about
them and to have known the explanation
before 1 saw the first.
When you look at a cloud with drops
of water, you are looking at a diffuse
reflection of the ~un but if instead of
there being drops of water in the cloud
there are drops c·f ice, .and if they were
form.:d unJer meteorological conditions
where all the facets of the crystals ha ppcn
to be pnrallcl as they f::;_ll through a rising
stream so that they arc remaining roughly
stationary, the effect is of a rather dilute
mirror, if one can so describe it. Jf the
sun is up there, you see it actually reflected
in this imaginary mirror down through
the cloud, and one does not exnect to
1 see the sun looking down in this direction.
Still less does one expect to perceive it
travelling along beside one. Furthermore,
one is not accustomed to focusing one~s
eyes on infinity in that particular direr:tion.
The only times it would be appropriate
to do so would be if you were standing
on top of a skyscraper where the vanishing
point would be down here instead of over
there, and it makes you rather dizzy.
Seeing a sky dog is a rather uncanny
sort of phenomenon. You cannot focus
on it properly; it does not seem to be
an~where in particular. 1t is flying along
beside you-and what sort of terms would
a person, who had never seen it bl!fore
or read r. bout it, report it in? I think that
they \vould be rather bewildered. They
might report it just as a child would
report the vision of an angel as having
human form and feathery ·,vings. So it
might easily be reponed as anything that
they had read about.
I now come to the green flash. I was
about 20 and a student, and there was
a controversy in the p:ges of The Times
and in the correspondence columns of
Nature about the green flash. What is
it? Under certain rather rare atmospheric
conditions, the last glim of the setting
sun suddenly flashes brilliant emerald
green. When I was a student 50 years
ago, this phenomenon· v:as not realiy
established. It was possible to have a
controversy as to whether there was
such a phenomenon. People wrote to
The Times saying that they had seen it.
I remember one man who said that he
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