The Unsmiling Men of Ranton: Jessie Roestenburg's Saucer at Vicarage Farm

Ranton is a small village about 3.5 miles from Stafford. In 1954 Jessie Roestenburg lived in a cottage at Vicarage Farm with her husband Tony, a Dutch national, and their three children. The next house was about two miles away.

Thursday 21 October 1954. About 4:45 p.m. Tony was not at home. Jessie heard a noise like a crashing aircraft and ran into the garden. Her sons Anthony, 8, and Ronald, 6, were lying prostrate, terrified.

Above them was a huge, saucer-like object with a dome. The front was transparent. In the words of Gavin Gibbons, it hung "very low and completely silent" over the cottage. Dull silver. A revolving outer rim. "About 15 to 20 feet in diameter." In 1977 she called it "a huge Mexican hat".

Inside were two "unsmiling, human-like creatures, with long faces and long hair," in tight-fitting jerseys and transparent helmets. They stared at the children. "They were very beautiful people," she said in 1977. "They had long golden hair."

The craft rose at an angle of 45 degrees, flashing a purply blue light from its front. Jessie went indoors for a pencil to sketch it. Then the boys called out again. It was coming back. It circled the house in an anti-clockwise direction one and a half times and then streaked skywards. The dog fled howling down the track to the village. It was never seen again.

The next day the Wolverhampton Express and Star ran the story with Jessie's sketch. "The boys were so terrified that they would not go out again last night," she said. She later reported a blotchy rash, weight loss and a low blood count treated with iron injections. In 1987 she told Jenny Randles: "Time was suspended. I was also paralysed." In 1955 the family moved to Stafford. There they reported more objects, including a glowing orange cigar in January 1957.

No Air Ministry or police file on the event has surfaced. The investigators were civilians. Gavin Gibbons visited almost three weeks later. He found Jessie "highly strained" and saw "no motive for a hoax". Wilfrid Daniels, a Stafford researcher, wrote about the family in Flying Saucer Review in 1955. A May 1957 report by Daniels on the later Stafford sightings is said to sit in the Project Blue Book files.

No specific conventional explanation has been offered. The debate turned on the witness. In 1991 Loren Gross said the case had "a George Adamski smell", pointing to her psychic claims before the sighting. Curt Collins compared the "fishbowl" helmets with films such as The Man from Planet X. The story also shifted over the years. A crashing noise, or silence. Landed, or hovering. One and a half circles, or three. Collins reads this as memory changing over time, not invention.

The case is often filed under "Nordic" aliens. It reached The Humanoids, a 1975 comic called "The Unsmiling Men", a 1976 Center for UFO Studies conference paper on animal reactions, BBC1's Out of This World and *Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World*. Jessie died on 12 May 2017. She never made money from her close encounter. "This is something that happened to me," she said, "and I'm a practically minded person."