UFOs in Reality (8 page)

Fig. 14

This being so, the spacecraft executing those operations had been literally ‘out of this world’. They would have had to have held themselves in orbit by powerful and continuous thrust-vectoring directed towards the Earth’s centre.
This is a technique well beyond any foreseeable human capabilities.

Another important characteristic of the established tracks was that they represented, without exception
, retrograde orbiting
of the planet; that is, the visiting craft had been moving from East-to-West, against the direction of the Earth’s West-to-East rotation.
Further analysis of the intersections at the equator also showed that three distinct orbital sequences had been adopted and these are shown by Fig.15. But there were, in addition, non-conforming intersections so that the total number of intersections came out to be 101. From each one of these, 10 ground tracks with fixed inclinations to the plane of the equator could be assumed to have been generated, in a north-westerly direction, giving a total number of tracks over the inhabited areas of the Earth of 1010.
All this represented a precisely programmed surveillance activity being carried on by fully automated probes, employing technology well beyond our current understanding.

Fig. 15

Now
, it is important to point out that I do not regard these fixed paths over the Earth to be followed for continuous orbiting, even though three super-orbital sequences have been identified. The evidence suggests that they are analogous to the fixed air-lanes followed by civil aircraft, except that they are followed in space. These ‘space-lanes’ seem to be used for rapid over-flights of targeted locations on the Earth’s surface directly below. An exploration craft/probe may be launched into the atmosphere over the target area from one ‘lane’ and retrieved some time later by a retrieval craft following another ‘lane’ that passes over the target.
This scenario will be seen to be substantiated by the encounters considered in Part 2.

Renewed search for evidence of favoured approach paths from space

At this point in the investigation, an outstanding unknown was whether or not there had been favoured approach paths from outer space. The Fig.13 graph of Mean Solar Time vs. Days of the Year had, in a tantalising way, produced a constant sidereal time line apparently linking a series of points spanning seven of the ten chosen dates. The sidereal orientation represented by this line was
19:50 hours Right Ascension (RA) at the northern-most point on each orbital path
. It was decided to check this out by selecting 75 more recent SAC reports and, by applying to these the accumulated knowledge to that date. For each of these cases, the ground tracks passing through that location were first identified and, then, the time of the event was used to define the orientations of the corresponding orbits in space. Since more than one track and associated orbit could be linked to a given location, the number of possible RA orientations for the 75 events was 103. Fig. 16 shows how these RAs were distributed.

Fig 16

There were two most favoured areas of the sky –— a major one in the 23:00-24:00 hours RA region and another isolated lesser peak between 11:00 and 12:00 hours RA. There was not a significant peak at 19:50 hours RA. Consequently, the puzzle remained unresolved and had to await further inputs, which came, later, from an unexpected source.

PHASE 3:
Contributions from Crop-Circle Studies
 

Phase 3 may seem to be strangely out of place in this book, but, as will be demonstrated, it is very much part of my overall search for understanding of the SAC phenomenon. My involvement in the crop circles mystery provided new insights and resulted in an unexpected refinement of the Astronautical Theory. These contributions to my research are given here in their correct chronological sequence .

CHAPTER 8
A
MEETING OF MINDS
 

As has doubtless become apparent, my path through the UFO pilgrimage has been signposted in some very unusual and totally unexpected ways. None was more fortunate than the encounter I had on one night in May 1987.

That was the night of my lecture in a series organised by the British UFO Research Association
, BUFORA
. It was delivered at their usual venue in the London Business School. The title of that major lecture was
“We are DEFINITELY not alone”
. It took more than of one-and-a-half hours to deliver, because it contained most of the material described in the previous chapters of this book – at least, as much of it as then existed.

After the lecture, I was approached by a group of men, who had obviously been listening very intently and with some enjoyment during the delivery. The leading person expressed his appreciation of my material and then asked if I had heard about the crop markings in Wiltshire and Hampshire. I admitted that, other than having seen a photograph of swirls in a crop on the Isle of Wight some years ago, I knew absolutely nothing about them. The leading man then told me that the kind of locations that I had associated with SAC events could equally-well be associated with the regions in which mysterious crop-circles were persistently appearing. He introduced himself as Colin Andrews (now a well-known author and researcher of the phenomenon), handed me his card and invited me to join in the research which he and his companions were pursuing. Well, it was very pleasing to get that kind of response to a long and demanding lecture –- but those counties of Southern England seemed to be just too far away from my northern Cheshire home to make a link-up seem attractive. However, fate had other ideas on that matter. To cut a long and almost unbelievable story short, during August 1988, my wife Marion and I found ourselves driving through rainstorms to a rendezvous with Colin Andrews and others of his team in Andover, Hampshire. Where that meeting led to, over the years to the present day, will be told in broad outline with occasional detail, in the chapters of this, Phase 3, part of the story. Through the crop-circle phenomenon, everything told previously in this book has been, or is being, vindicated.

Marion and I travelled to the home of Colin Andrews and were given a very friendly welcome. Also present on that night were fellow researchers F.C. (Busty)
Taylor and Don Teursley. Colin proceeded to show extraordinary video footage of crop circles and of other, possibly UFO-related, phenomena. We were suitably impressed by what we saw and heard. Busty Taylor offered to take us into one of the remaining specimens next day– a then-unique circle surrounded by two Saturn-like rings of flattened crop.

We waited for Busty in Stockbridge, Hampshire, at lunch time, in a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain ceased when we met and we piled into Busty’s Metro for what turned out to be an exciting ride on a bumpy and lumpy old green track running into the depths of the countryside. We finally arrived alongside a large soggy field of over-ripe wheat. Therein, some metres from the edge of the field, lay the object of our attention. Wellington boots and waterproof kit were the donned by me while Busty, who was not so well equipped, stood by patiently. He and I then made our boot-clogged way into a large circular pan of flattened crop, crossing two flattened rings en route. I was taken aback by the size of this formation, in which the lay of the crop was clearly spiralled. It had lain there for some weeks and had been well trampled. I remember asking if perhaps someone with a roller had produced this specimen. Busty quickly countered that suggestion by telling me that when the formation had first been discovered the stalks of the crop had been flattened without damage. A 90 degree gentle bend had been produced at the base of each stem and the plant had not in any way been damaged. Given that information, I was clearly at a loss to understand how the formation had been produced. I looked around me and particularly noted that the field was slightly sloping uphill to our right. My next question was, “Is this formation perfectly circular Busty?” His answer was that it was not. The configuration had been measured to be 104 feet long and 100 feet wide. “Which way does the long axis lie?”, I asked. Busty looked at the field carefully and then indicated that it had aligned with the slope of the field. This suggested to me that a cylinder of energy projected from vertically above could have produced such distortion on the ground. But I was baffled by that thought and wondered what had been responsible for the outward spiralling of the neatly-laid crop. As we stood pondering this remarkable happening, an army helicopter flew very low over the formation and then back again. Busty informed me that the army had a base at nearby Middle Wallop. Were we photographed? We’ll probably never know. Beyond the top of the field, I learned from Busty, an ancient earthwork was located, called Danebury Rings. This seemed to provide me with a possible link with UFO activity, remembering my observations about ancient sites during my 1967 investigations in the North West. Altogether, that trip into the countryside was a memorable experience and was the beginning of a friendly association with Busty (and Colin Andrews) that has continued to this day.

The ‘White Crow’ Experience.

During 1989 I participated in a joint investigative venture organised by Colin Andrews, his colleague Pat Delgado and Dr. Terence Meaden, a tornado expert and the promoter of the idea that the circles formations were being caused by natural, but rare, ‘plasma vortices’. These were conceived to be fine weather whirlwinds of electrically-charged air and the concept was being warmly received and promoted by ‘arm-chair’ members of the scientific establishment. The ‘White Crow’ project had been set up in a field in Hampshire to view a low-lying field on the opposite side of the A272 road from Winchester. Formations had appeared regularly in that field for several years. The field was to be observed continually, night and day, for the period 10th to 18th June and I and two new colleagues from the North West, Michael Thomas and Harry Harris had volunteered to share the watches, though Harry Harris and I could only spare the final weekend for our participation. We had also agreed to cover the daylight hours and to return to our hotel at night.

This instrumented exercise eventually produced no evidence in the observed field, but a striking formation was created, on a bright moonlit night, in a field only half-a-mile or so from the observation site. The field involved had sturdy green wheat growing in it and the ringed formation produced in the crop had been beautifully laid down. I visited the site the following morning and there, incidentally, met and talked with Dr. Meaden for the first time. Later, I learned that Colin Andrews, Pat Delgado and several other people had walked up to an adjacent field, soon after midnight, to the site of a formation created several weeks earlier. They had been suddenly assailed by a loud twittering noise which had seemed to circle round them and then settle briefly over the next field, the field in which the new formation had been found the following morning. The twittering sound had been recorded on a cassette tape recorder and it was later analysed. Unfortunately, it resembled the twittering of Grasshopper Warbler birds and so fuelled the cynicism that inevitably followed the issued reports on the event. (On considering the information available, it had occurred to me that a flock of grasshopper warblers could have been disturbed by the commotion in the crop and had taken to the air in fright. No one else had seemed to consider that as a possibility.)