PC Colin Perks's Wilmslow Sighting

Friday 7 January 1966. PC Colin Perks of the Cheshire Police was working the night shift in Wilmslow. It had begun at 10 p.m. the evening before and would run until 6 a.m. He took a refreshment break at Wilmslow Police Station at 1:15 a.m. and was back on patrol by 2 a.m. It was a cold, clear night, and a full moon made visibility good.

At about 4:10 a.m. Perks was checking the rear of a large block of shops off the main A34, Alderley Road. Then came a high-pitched whine. He later said it was not like the noise of the nearby electric railway lines or the transformer stations. He turned and saw a greenish grey glow in the sky about 100 yards away. Inside it was a solid looking object, stationary, some 35 feet above the grass of the meadow beyond the car park.

It was elliptic in shape, with a flat bottom. It was about the length of a bus, 30 feet, about 20 feet wide and about 15 feet high. The upper surfaces glowed steadily, but the glow did not hide the definite shape. He saw no vents, no portholes, no places of access. There was no impression of rotation.

For about five seconds it simply hung there. Then, without any change in the whine, it started moving at a very fast rate to the east-south-east. It travelled lengthwise, with the 30 foot length to the front and rear. And then it was gone.

Perks wrote a three-page log report and drew a diagram of the object. The report went through police channels to the Ministry of Defence in London, which passed it to DI61, a branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff. An intelligence officer came to see him. Nick Redfern dates the interview to 1 February 1966. David Clarke says the visit came within two weeks. The officer asked about the sound, the speed and the height. On the ground below where the object had hovered he found "some glass like substance", but he could not link it to the sighting.

His conclusion was plain. "There is no reason to doubt the fact that this constable saw something completely foreign to his previous experience." As Clarke later put it, "The man from the ministry was convinced the policeman was telling the truth."

In March 1966 the story reached the newspapers. The Daily Mirror photographed Perks at his home on 2 March. The press version added new details: an object "built up in three sections with the top looking like a dustbin lid," and an admission, "I was paralysed. I just couldn't believe it." Those details are not in his log. The PRUFOS police database also gives the hover as five minutes, not five seconds.

No one has made a hoax claim against Perks, and no one has offered a conventional explanation. Because of the claimed trace, PRUFOS classes the case as a close encounter of the second kind.

In 2010 Redfern asked whether this was "A British Socorro?" He set it beside Lonnie Zamora's 1964 encounter in New Mexico and beside egg-shaped objects reported in England, including one seen near London on 4 February 1966. In 2006 investigator Derrick Wood, a retired safety consultant from Sale, launched a fresh appeal for witnesses. No results have been reported. The file is held at The National Archives as AIR 2/17983. The case was never explained.