Angus Brooks and the Flying Cross, Moigne Down, Dorset (1967)

In autumn 1967, Britain was living through the flying cross. On 24 October, two Devon police officers chased a cross-shaped light through the night. A day later, police crews in East Sussex reported something similar. Over about six weeks, at least thirty cross-shaped reports came in. Most were lights in the dark, but Brooks’s report was not.

Late morning on Thursday, 26 October 1967, on Moigne Down near Holworth. Angus Brooks, 54, a former BOAC administrator from Owermoigne, was out with an Alsatian and a Dalmatian. Taking shelter from a Force 8 gale in a hollow, he noticed a vapour trail high in the sky. It vanished, and from the same area a craft came down at great speed. It decelerated with what appeared to be immensely powerful reverse thrust and levelled off 200 to 300 feet up, about a quarter of a mile away.

Brooks had been to art school and served as a military photographic interpreter in the Second World War. He saw a central circular chamber, about 25 feet across and 12 feet high. One fuselage in front. Three more together behind. Each was 75 feet long.

As it slowed to a hover, the two outer rear fuselages moved out to the sides, leaving four arms evenly spaced around the centre in a cross. The craft rotated 90 degrees clockwise, then stopped and stayed motionless in the gale for 22 minutes. Brooks saw no visible power units and heard "no noise of applied power". The structure was translucent. It took on the colour of the sky above it and changed as clouds passed over.

His dogs were extremely agitated. The Alsatian pawed at him frantically, disobeying his commands to sit. At last two arms moved back in line with a third, and a different arm took the lead. The object climbed rapidly away towards the Winfrith nuclear power station.

Brooks sketched what he had seen and gave the drawings to Dorset police. The British investigator J. J. A. Hennessey sent his account to NICAP, whose newsletter published it in detail. Hennessey noted that the site lay between Winfrith Atomic Station and the Portland Underwater Defence Station, about a mile from a U.S. Air Force communications unit at Ringstead Bay.

The Ministry of Defence sent three men: Dr John Dickinson of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Leslie Akhurst of S4 (Air), and the psychologist Alec Cassie. Their verdict was a vitreous floater, "dead matter in the fluid of his eyeball", made vivid by a near sleep state and dreaming. Some later accounts link this to recent eye surgery, a claim not confirmed from any primary document.

Brooks rejected it. He objected that he could hardly have dozed off in a Force 8 gale with an Alsatian clawing at him. Years later, David Clarke interviewed Cassie, who stood by his report. He had been "satisfied that Mr Brooks did have a vivid experience that made a considerable impression on him." Writer David Halperin found the floater idea unconvincing.

In Parliament, the government put the police crosses down to Venus. That explanation was never applied to Brooks. His is the only report from the wave that describes a structured object, in daylight, watched at close range for so long. Clarke retold the case in How UFOs Conquered the World. It remains the most detailed account of that autumn's crosses.