On September 22 1956, scores of people in Lincolnshire witnessed something truly extraordinary in the sky. A silent, glowing orb sat motionlessly above the North Sea and was clearly observed by a large crowd of onlookers who had gathered on the promenade at Cleethorpes to view the spectacle. The object also caught the attention of a nearby RAF Station at Manby. It was detected on radar, then observed through powerful telescopes. It was said to be approximately 80ft wide, composed of a glass-like substance and hovering at a height of 54,000ft (10 miles).
Perhaps fearing that the object was some secret Soviet WMD, the RAF scrambled two fighter planes to intercept the strange flying craft. However, as the planes approached the UFO it literally vanished from sight, leaving the pilots and hundreds of other people on the ground well and truly dumbfounded. The event remains one of the UK’s many unsolved UFO cases.
Post-war 1950s Britain produced an unprecedented number of UFO sightings. From the Isle of Wight to the Outer Hebrides, people began watching the skies for any sign of visitors from outer space. This preoccupation bore fruits, with numerous reports describing spacecraft of every size, shape and colour. There were even some claims of close encounters of the third kind. In 1955, a man named Cedric Allingham claimed to have witnessed a strange craft landing near him whilst he was bird-watching in the north of Scotland. Shortly afterwards he was approached by what he described as a “martian”.
Although the post-war period spawned a wave of sightings in the United Kingdom, such reports were not unique to the 20th Century. 750 years ago, Gervase of Tilbury, a medieval annalist, wrote about a curious incident that was said to have taken place in Bristol. A group of locals watched as a bizarre flying craft ducked and dived above the streets and houses, eventually colliding with a church steeple and crashing to the ground. The craft contained just one living soul, who sadly suffocated in earth’s atmosphere soon after climbing from the vessel. The local people were so terrified by the creature’s strange appearance that they feared it was a demon and cremated its body on a funeral pyre.
Whilst it’s certainly true that UFO sightings were not a novel phenomenon in 1950s Britain, the volume and frequency of the sightings was unique and the subsequent elevated level of public interest was also totally new. Many have speculated that this was no more than a fad, craze or fashion. The idea of extraterrestrial beings visiting the earth was, at the time, the subject of many popular Hollywood blockbusters, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It is entirely plausible that the majority of sightings were no more than an over-stimulated mind misidentifying a comet, airplane or weather balloon. However, there is an alternative argument, which to my mind is equally persuasive.
Read More – Visitors From Other Worlds – UFOs in 1950s Britain
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