UFOs in Reality (24 page)

Fig. 43

I consulted a physicist friend, Mr. John Jones, about this possibility. He said he had no expertise on smoke alarms, except about the principles of their operation, but he remembered an incident in which an overload alarm on an overhead crane had been triggered by the operation of ‘walkie-talkie’ radios in the vicinity of the gantry. The functioning of that alarm would have been similar to that of smoke alarms. (John Jones later decided to set up his own monitoring station, utilising the same kind of smoke alarm, but failed to register anything unusual. We concluded that the controlled stepped-down and rectified mains supply he had used would not have simulated the peculiarities of a small battery under load.)

Having had my hypothesis supported in that way, I decided to contact the manufacturer of the smoke alarm. When I told the technical director of my suspicions of RF interference, he became very concerned. The company had tested their alarms through the complete range of radio frequencies and had found no peculiarities. He wanted me to return my alarm for investigation and to have it replaced. I thanked him but said I was keen to resolve the mystery for myself. He was not a happy man but reassured himself by saying perhaps the measured voltage of 8.6v was too close to the critical voltage to be of great concern to the company. After this, I decided to replace the alarm with another and to install the interesting one in a wooden box with a sliding lid. An on-off switch and a voltmeter were also installed, together with a potentiometer to control the voltage delivered to the alarm. As we were soon afterwards involved in the process of finding somewhere to live in Devon, the boxed alarm was never tested in Cheshire. It travelled with us to Devon and remained inactive for some months after our arrival here. A UFO report in the Torbay area caused it to be put into action during 1994.

Monitoring began on May 14th, the day after a UFO event had been reported by a person living in nearby Paignton. The spectacular UFO had apparently hung low over the adjacent tree line for over an hour and had been located somewhere in the general direction of Paignton Harbour. The event had occurred in the early hours of the morning of the 13th, which was unfortunate, because that area is visible from our hillside home and the object might have been able to be observed from here, if I hadn’t been sleeping at that time. I visited the witness and afterwards switched on the boxed alarm. Marion and I then proceeded to monitor that box, day and night, for the next 12 months. We took it to bed with us and whenever we went out in the car, it travelled under the driver’s seat. It was never out of hearing range if we could possibly avoid it. Well, our sleep was disturbed on numerous occasions and on several of them Marion told me that either that ‘’thing’’ had to go or she would! However, I persuaded her to endure because the results we were obtaining were intriguingly good. (It was all in the cause of Science!) Throughout that 12 month period I was encouraged further by strange happenings in our area, including loud bangs from the sky, some being like explosions and others more like sonic booms. These booms occurred at times when the Air France Concorde was known not to be decelerating down the English Channel. A mysterious red flare object, a fireball event and another UFO sighting were also registered during our monitoring period.

But the results we obtained were staggering. The times when the alarm had triggered were plotted regularly onto the Torbay timings graph and were found to be usually congruent with the predicted lines. The other surprising element was the large number of times these day and night ‘bleeps’ had occurred. There was always the doubt that I might be deluding myself and that we were losing sleep to no avail, but several things happened to indicate to the contrary. On the night of March 29th, 1995, a loud muffled explosion was heard at 5:50 pm. BST. At 9:22 pm., a bleep from the box coincided with a violent disturbance of the TV reception. Later that night, during a routine nightly check, I discovered that the overload switch serving the motorised garage door and outside lights (which were not switched on) had been tripped. We continued monitoring during waking hours throughout the latter part of 1995 and on November 12th, during the early hours of the morning, a smoke alarm in the hall adjacent to our bedroom bleeped once, on several occasions. At breakfast time the boxed alarm was switched on and placed in the kitchen, some 12 metres away from the hall-mounted alarm. At 2:40 pm. GMT the wall-mounted alarm bleeped once, but only 12 minutes later that alarm and the boxed alarm bleeped
simultaneously
. This seemed to prove that both had probably been triggered by the same stimulus.

Returning now to the outcome of the 12 months’ monitoring exercise, altogether we recorded 330 ‘signals’ within one hour of the nearest predictions and 211 (64%) had occurred within 20 minutes. A set of 330
random
times were then produced and allocated to the same days as the actual signals. These were then processed in the same way by the AT’s numerical checking program and it was found that 62 (19%) of these had not been within even 1 hour of nearest predictions and only 176 (53%) had corresponded to the +/-20 minutes rule. Allowing for the fact that the boxed alarm almost certainly had produced some spurious signals (the voltage supply had had to be checked and adjusted quite frequently and battery life was reduced to 12-13 days), the results did seem to indicate that real signals had been received on many occasions. This indication was given further credence when, during subsequent years, the numbers of ‘signals’ registered during test periods were significantly reduced. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the Torbay area had been targeted for surveillance from high altitude during 1994 and 1995.

CHAPTER 17
M
ORSE CODE REVELATIONS
 

During September, 1991, I had written to The Messenger, a Macclesfield based local newspaper and, in my letter, I had described the scientific investigations I had carried out into the nature of UFOs and crop formations. This had prompted an elderly lady in Wilmslow to write to me, to express her appreciation and to tell me about a remarkable happening which had occurred in her home some 20 years earlier.

She also had things to tell me about the reasons for the crop formations and to warn about the ecological crisis the earth was entering. These two phenomena were linked, she asserted. She had tried to arouse the interest of several famous scientists, but unsuccessfully.

I feel it is important that the story of that happening of August 9th, 1971, in her home, should preface the other remarkable things I had yet to learn from her.

At 6 pm. on the evening of August 8th, whilst preparing dinner in the kitchen, through the window she had seen two large UFOs, partially obscured by “their own cloud formation”. She had grabbed her binoculars and had run outside to get a better look at them. The binoculars had seemed to have been knocked out of her hands. She had called her husband who arrived in time to see the objects fading away into invisibility.

It was the lady’s practice to sit up late and to always say her prayers in the lounge before retiring to bed. After midnight, at 1 am., on Tuesday, August 9th, she had been engaged in that way, kneeling beside the settee with her back to the patio window, when her neck “was penetrated by a hot stinging sensation which travelled upwards to my brain and down my spine”. She turned towards the window and saw a disc-like UFO hovering on the other side of the window. She estimated they would have been no more than 60 inches apart. A brilliant beam of light shot into her forehead and, as she expressed it, “I was given the heat treatment”. She claimed she still had marks on the back of her neck and for two years after the event she experienced a burning sensation every Tuesday. I arranged a visit to her home to discuss her experiences in greater detail.

On arrival, I was made very welcome and ushered into the lounge. The rear garden was on view from the patio window. It was not a large garden. My attention was drawn to a corner plot some thirty feet (10 metres) away (if my memory serves me correctly), in which bushes and conifers were growing. Two conifers were quite tall and there was a gap between them. I was told there had been a third conifer between those two at the time of the happening, but the next morning the one in the middle had been found to have been bent through 90 degrees, towards the window!

Already impressed by this lady’s experiences, I was eager to know more about the information she had been given and about the means by which she had received it.

With my notepad on my knee, I jotted down the information as it was given to me.

As a girl, she had lived in Manchester. When she was 12 years old, her mother had been seriously ill with pleurisy. As she awoke one morning, she had heard a gentle voice saying to her, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that, this day, your mother has passed to a higher life”. Next, I heard about her spiritual conversion on June 24th, 1970, at 1:45 am. During an ‘out of the body’ experience she was “taken into the Light of Christ and shown the meaning of books of the Bible”. She had become a devout Christian and a ‘seer’ after that experience.

Getting back to the topic of particular interest to me, I was handed a list of things she had been told about the UFOs she had seen. The list, which I copied, was as follows:

1. [They] Sail on the currents of Space;

6. Made in transmuted metal in one piece, like a balloon;

7. Central power column and control system;

8. Geisler tubes round outer periphery;

9. Red emission during low speed and hover;

10. Become invisible at higher frequency;

11. Fly in a vacuum with full atmospheric pressure behind;

12. 200,000 miles per second speed capability;

13. Gravity, heat, light, the vertical component of magnetism and energy that exerts pressure.

On considering this list, I asked my hostess whether she had a scientific background. This caused her great amusement. Nothing of the kind. She’d had to leave school early, when only 13 years old, and had received no further formal education whatsoever. Most of the information in her list she might have picked up from various speculative UFO books, but one item stood out from the rest. “What’s a Geisler tube?”, I asked. She laughed, said she didn’t know and had hoped I would know. I was baffled. “How have you received this information?”, was my next question. Her answer rocked me in the chair. “In Morse code”. When did she become acquainted with that code? She had been a member of the Royal Observer Corps during WW2 (attached to the Alexander Park balloon barrage) and she had become a very proficient sender and receiver of messages. I was still puzzled and asked how she had received the information on her list. Once again, I was going to be left open-mouthed by her reply.

She told me that, after that event in her lounge, the telephone had developed a habit of ringing late at night. This occurred three nights per week for a period of several months. Sometimes when she’d answered it, she’d heard an indistinct mystery voice. Then the Morse code messages started. They were received in her left ear. At first, combinations of E, U and sometimes V, like call signs, were received – and then came the messages, which she wrote down.

When I left that lady’s home, promising to let her know how well her leadings were tying up with all I had collected and deduced from my other investigations, I was a very bemused man.

* * *

On my arrival back home, I could hardly wait to discover what a Geisler tube was, if such a thing ever existed. I began a search through my motley collection of science books, but after spending considerable time doing that, I was none the wiser.

So, I decided to ring our son, Paul, who has a physics degree and, during his days as an undergraduate, he had gained experience within the nuclear industry. Once again, I drew a blank. He couldn’t remember ever seeing reference to such tubes. Another search of my bookshelves then bore fruit. In The Penguin Dictionary of Science (left behind by Paul) I found this:

GEISSLER TUBE. A tube for showing the luminous effects of a
discharge of electricity
through various rarefied
gases.
Consists of a sealed glass tube containing platinum electrodes. Named after H. Geissler (1814-79).