The Warminster "Thing" UFO flap

Warminster is a garrison town on the western edge of Salisbury Plain. It hosts the Land Warfare Centre and the School of Infantry, and the Plain has live-firing ranges. In the winter of 1964 it became the stage for one of Britain's strangest UFO flaps. Locals called it the Thing.

25 December 1964. About 01:25. Mildred Head heard her ceiling come alive with strange sounds lashing at the roof. A humming grew louder before fading to a faint whisper.

Just after 6 am, Marjorie Bye was walking to Holy Communion at Christ Church. She heard a crackling, like branches being pulled over gravel. Then the vibrations came. Shockwaves pounded at her head, neck and shoulders. She was pinned down by what one account called invisible fingers of sound.

Head postmaster Roger Rump and his wife heard a terrific clatter, as though their roof tiles were being pulled off. Soldiers at Knook Camp said it did not sound like aircraft. More than 30 people reported noises that morning. Through the spring, families described shaking roofs and rattling windows. In February 1965 a flock of birds was reported killed in flight at Five Ash Lane.

In June 1965 the Thing became visible. Kathleen Penton watched a shining object with porthole-type windows, like a train carriage with rounded ends, gliding sideways in front of the downs. Patricia Phillips, wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, watched with her family as a cigar-shaped object stayed stationary for 25 minutes. Then it vanished.

On 29 August 1965, Gordon Faulkner, 23, saw an object flying low and fast over the south of the town, making no sound. He pressed the shutter of a borrowed camera. The print showed a disc with a dome, and it ran in the Daily Mirror. About 8,000 visitors came over the August Bank Holiday. On 14 September, at Lulsgate Bottom near Bristol, Kenneth Kimberley's Bentley lost its engine and lights when he met a patch of greenish-blue light across the road.

Local journalist Arthur Shuttlewood saw a huge cigar shape on 28 September and felt sharp pricking needles down his right side. He later said he had seen about 800 UFOs between 1965 and 1973. Skywatchers gathered on Cradle Hill and Cley Hill, where locals called the recurring orange lights the "Amber Gamblers."

On 28 March 1970, physicist David I. Simpson of SIUFOP shone a purple-filtered lamp at the watchers on Cradle Hill. A confederate set off a fake magnetic-field detector and photographed the light on film that already carried a UFO image. The pictures held deliberate inconsistencies. Experienced investigators declared them genuine anyway. In the 1990s, a man named Roger Hooton claimed he had helped fake Faulkner's photograph, but Faulkner denied it.

Theories followed. They included static electricity from wet power lines, satellites, military flares from the Salisbury Plain ranges, mass hysteria, and secret military technology. The 1966 BBC documentary Pie in the Sky favoured the last explanation. One luminous disc at Upton Scudamore turned out to be a railway speed-limit sign. Some colleagues said Shuttlewood embellished his reports, but he insisted he had built his reputation as a journalist ‘on the bedrock of integrity.’

No government investigation appears in the record. Sixty years on, Nick Pope, who handled UFO reports at the Ministry of Defence from 1991 to 1994, suggested flares and weather effects, but admitted "we still don't know what really happened." David Clarke has called the 1977 West Wales flap at Broad Haven second only to the Warminster Thing in British UFO history. Warminster is still billed as Britain's UFO capital.