The Charlton Crater

Summer 1963. Manor Farm at Charlton, Wiltshire, was farmed by Roy Blanchard. Which Charlton is still an open question. One later account puts it in the Vale of Pewsey, about four miles southwest of Pewsey. Patrick Moore, writing in 1963, placed the site near Ludwell, close to the Dorset border. Decades later a Dorset newspaper reported an earlier circle on the same farm, in 1951 or 1952.

The early hours of Tuesday 16 July 1963. A local policeman saw something unknown and brightly lit crossing the skies over Charlton. In his words, an "orange light streak across the sky". Several residents noticed strange lights and movement overhead. Leonard Joliffe, a dairyman, heard a loud explosion somewhere nearby. A farm labourer heard it too. A strange explosion, somewhere in the distance.

At daylight, farmhand Reginald Alexander found it in a potato field and told Blanchard. A circular area of flattened soil, roughly eight feet in diameter and one foot deep. At its centre, a deeper depression, some three feet deep by one account. Lines ran out from it, giving the impression of a huge bicycle wheel. Another account described four impressions around it, as if something had stood or landed there, with scorched soil and foliage. Around the crater, the potatoes and barley had completely disappeared.

Blanchard had made up his mind. "I didn't actually see it… but what else could it have been? Obviously some craft from outer space…" It sucked out his barley and potatoes, he said, when it took off. Another farmer asked whether his 40 missing sheep had anything to do with it.

The Army Bomb Disposal Team excavated the crater. No bomb, no explosive. In Parliament, Patrick Wall MP asked what the Army had found. Joseph Godber replied on 29 July: "The Army Bomb Disposal Team which excavated the crater at Charlton have found no conclusive evidence regarding its cause." A suspected meteorite was "a piece of local rock and was not the cause of the crater."

On 1 August, Godber added that the Army had only wanted to know whether the crater held an unexploded bomb. The unit left the site on Friday, 26th July.

Dr F. G. F. Claringbull of the British Museum's Department of Mineralogy ruled out a meteorite. One account says the metal found was magnetite, which occurs naturally in the ground there.

Patrick Moore still argued for a meteorite, on the BBC and in New Scientist. Nearby he had found areas of flattened wheat, one an oval 15 yards long by 4.5 broad, with evidence of "spiral flattening". He blamed the air currents of a falling body. "It would be a remarkable coincidence if these areas were not associated with the crater."

Then came Dr Robert Randall, presented in the press as an Australian astrophysicist. A craft about 150 metres across, he said. 600 tons, a crew of 60, probably from the region of Uranus. It had landed in three jumps. Randall was in fact a medical doctor. A later letter to The Scotsman claimed Moore had invented Randall as a prank. Nobody has corroborated it. Nick Redfern later asked about a missile, an aircraft or a deliberate hoax. None was ever confirmed.

A British Movietone newsreel filmed the field and Blanchard within the week. Today Charlton is remembered as an early "saucer nest", a forerunner of the crop circles, alongside Tully in Queensland in 1966. The Warminster sightings began in Wiltshire the following year. The crater at Charlton was never explained.