I WAS putting out some milk bottles the other evening just as the street lights went on and as I looked towards Swindon a large pink, glowing spinning ball came vertically straight down towards the town… It was, continued Sheila Matthews in the Adver letters pages, “lit up like a mothball” and heading – as best she could tell – straight for the Stratton/Wanborough area. “I was so terrified I ran in and locked the door,” she reported.

Her husband initially poo-pooed her frantic claims of a possible visitation to the Borough of Swindon from outer space. “But after I had stopped shaking I finally convinced him.”

It was the second time in a matter of months that Mrs Matthews had witnessed “a queer object like this” tearing over Swindon. On the other occasion, in the vicinity of Pinehurst School playing field, “a white circle of light rose straight up very fast and spun across the sky.”

After perhaps a brief pause to let the ink dry, she went on: “I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on. I don’t think I am going senile, I have good eyesight and I am under 30. But any more frights like this will drive me to keep in the house at night.” Such occurrences, added Mrs Matthews almost certainly with a shudder, “make you feel cold and shivery for quite a while afterwards.”

There were no subsequent reports, as far I can gather, of undue alien activity to the east of Swindon on the night in question.

But Mrs Matthews was by no means alone in relating such other-worldly goings on in, around and most notably above this town and neighbouring communities during that particular year. For 1965 – half-a-century ago – was a vintage year for the captivating phenomenon of unidentified flying objects as sightings of alleged “overhead visitors from outer space” and “manifestations of an advanced technology” were rife, here and elsewhere.

It was also – and this is what they called it 50 years ago, 17 years before director John Carpenter used the same description for a science fiction-cum-horror flick – the year of “The Thing.”

Imagine you are among a party of boys and girls from Park Grammar School in Swindon and are doing a spot of night-sky watching from a hill in Warminster when you are suddenly gripped with fear/excitement/panic.

“Zigzag lights still baffle – Swindon boy is left trembling,” is how the Adver reported the story, coincidentally, around the same time as Mrs Matthews’ missive arrived on the editor’s desk.

Rising to the occasion, Christopher Robinson graphically related his sighting of The Thing: “In a blinding flash of light it seemed to explode and divide into two brighter portions. Either that or the first simply vanished and was replaced by two others. “

Fellow Park Grammar pupil Graham Challifour described the sighting as a “wonderful and stirring spectacle,” while adding that, “other people must surely have seen them. It made me tremble for quite a while.” Norman Leighton recalled: “These two zigzagged to and fro, jerked up and down rapidly and then sped across the sky at an angle of 45 degrees before disappearing.”

Christopher Crooks-Radford was convinced that it could not have been a plane as there were no signs of landing lights. “They were not shooting stars as I’ve seen plenty of those in the past,” he assured the Adver.

So why were a bunch of 14 year-old Swindon schoolboys lurking around after dark on a hill in Warminster 50 years ago? Looking for The Thing, of course.

Just a few days earlier, in the summer of ’65, something quite unprecedented happened in the until-then pleasant but unremarkable Wiltshire town: something bordering between the ridiculous and extraordinary that could have come out of the pages of a Quatermass novel.

In what was described as the first meeting of its kind ever held in the UK, some 200 people, including a detective, a clergyman and several “experts,” crammed into the town hall to clear up a mystery which had been rattling the cages of Warminster folk for months… widespread reports of extra-terrestrial activity.

The locals had been unnerved by a plethora of UFOs that they had likened to “twin red hot pokers” and “huge cat’s eyes” that “crackled and buzzed.”

Noises, too, had provoked further discomfort – especially when heard in concert with the mystifying sightings.

One woman told the hushed meeting that she had been awoken by a noise that resembled the loud rumblings of a refrigerator. Peering from the bedroom window she was confronted with “this brilliant object quite low in the sky.”

She told the gathering: “It was travelling very slowly. It was like a brilliant star. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was shaking like a leaf.”

Dr Cleary Baker, who had acquired the title of Evaluation Officer of the British Unidentified Flying Objects Research Association (BUFORA) felt that, on the evidence, they were dealing with “the manifestation of an advanced technology from somewhere.”

This Thing or Things had possibly been piloted, he informed the meeting with all due severity we assume, by “alien beings.”

Dr Cleary suggested that these beings were not interested in little old Warminster, as such, but – in all seriousness, folks – were spying on sites such as the War Department’s rocket ranges at nearby Salisbury Plain. Therein, perhaps, lies a clue…

  • THE so called Thing was spotted over Wiltshire in the Year of ’65 by astonished Chippenham housewife Eileen Humphries.

    From her dining room window she observed a bright star-like object that “came in low and glided off.”

    Also in Chippenham a few months later Westinghouse girls Angela Pinnock, 19, and Heather Witchell, 17 were in a state of excited shock after glancing out of the factory window to witness inexplicable “things in the sky” One of them, avowed Angela, appeared to be “a long streak of light which seemed to be stationary for a while and then, suddenly, went up and behind a cloud.”

    One thing was certain, they weren’t aircraft the girls assured us.

    On the other side of Swindon, a “glowing ball of fire lit up the whole sky” near Faringdon, close to the Uffington White Horse, according to a couple of milk-girls during their early morning rounds.

    “It was very large and moving extremely fast,” recalled Pam Gills a few hours after their close encounter. “I have never seen anything like it.”

    “No rational explanation,” could be found after ex-Army man Mr C Spencer and his wife, of Great Bedwyn near Marlborough, were left open-mouthed by a dazzling spherical object that shot across the sky exhibiting far greater intensity than any star or aircraft.

    Down-to-earth Mr Spencer admitted that he had never given “flying saucers” much thought. But after the perplexing object that whizzed from “horizon to horizon in less than two minutes,” he was now keeping an open mind.

  • THE still inexplicable events of 1965 forever left Warminster with the tag of UFO Capital of the UK.

    The Warminster Phenomena, as it is known, began on Christmas morning 1964 when weird, unidentified noises awoke many a bleary-eyed local.

    No-one had a clue what the rattle-like, scraping sounds were and they continued on and off for well over a year.

    The first UFO sightings, as reported by local journalist Arthur Shuttlewood and subsequently related in his book The Warminster Mystery, were in May.

    Cigar-shaped objects covered in “winking bright lights” were observed followed by reports of “twin red-hot pokers” in the sky, witnessed by 17 people at a local lake.

    Further disclosures of flickering UFOs – dubbed The Thing – saw all manner of investigators, “ufologosts,” crackpots and hoaxers descend on the town…not to mention journalists.

    At the height of the furore The Daily Mirror published a photograph of a UFO moseying over the town in daylight.

    The Warminster Thing aroused world-wide interest and Cradle Hill became the centre of sky-watching activities which, over the years, eventually dwindled through lack of sightings.

    The mystery was never cleared up. The War Department (later the MoD) who tested weapons on Salisbury Plain, remained characteristically tight-lipped.