The Mince Pie Martians of Rowley Regis

Thursday, 4 January 1979. Rowley Regis, near Birmingham. It was still dark, and snow lay on the ground. Jean Hingley, aged 43, lived in a council house on Bluestone Walk. Her husband had just left for his job at a cement works. Only she and the family's Alsatian, Hobo, were home. Around 7:00 a.m., by one account, she saw an orange light in the garden.

One retelling describes a large orange sphere hovering close to the garage roof. It turned white and moved over the back garden. The craft was an orange, glowing thing, eight to ten feet long and four feet high, with round portholes, a shiny plastic-looking surface and something like a scorpion tail at the back.

Then came the beings. Three of them, about three feet six inches to four feet high. Silvery-green tunics, silver waistcoats with silver buttons, pointed caps. Each wore a transparent "fish bowl" helmet resting on its shoulders. Their faces were waxy white, with black diamond eyes. Their thin mouths never moved. Large oval wings glowed red, violet, gold, blue and green. They seemed to float about a foot above the floor. A light from their helmets left her paralysed.

They made a sound like "Zee... zee... zee." To speak, they touched the buttons on their chests. A beep, then a voice from the chest. "We shall not harm you." "We come from the sky." "We know all about Jesus."

They shook her artificial Christmas tree and bounced on the sofa. They handled newspapers, cassette tapes, Christmas cards and a picture of Jesus. She offered mince pies and whisky. They took the mince pies, turned down the whisky and asked for water. Then she lit a cigarette. They became terrified. They flashed their lights twice, as if to say goodbye, and took off over the fence towards Oldbury. About an hour had passed.

Police officers came and told her she looked pale, as though she had had a shock. Accounts differ on whether they came from Oldbury or West Bromwich. The case passed to a UFO investigation group in Birmingham. A deep impression, 8 ft by 4 ft, marked the back garden where the craft had settled. Soil samples were taken. No published results have been found.

Her eyes were sore for about a week, so she wore dark glasses. Her jaw ached, she developed a stutter and she spent weeks off work. Hobo swayed as if drugged, then lay stiff with his eyes open. The clock and the radio had stopped. The cassette tapes the beings handled were ruined.

Eileen Morris interviewed Mrs Hingley and her husband several times. Her article, "The Winged Beings of Bluestone Walk", appeared in Flying Saucer Review. No official conclusion is known, and no Ministry of Defence file has surfaced. Albert Budden later suggested that electromagnetic fields in the environment can trigger hallucinations. Stuart Millard of Frantic Planet, openly speculating, raised a seizure or a religious vision brought on by stress. Others saw fairies in the beings, citing Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia. Hingley herself said: "I don't know what to think."

The Mince Pie Martians live on in blogs, in podcasts such as Astonishing Legends and in The Night Monitor's track "Dance of the Mince Pie Martians". On 19 March 1979, television students at West Bromwich College of Technology filmed her telling her story. That film has not been found online.