Chapter 2
The Start of Things

The Thing from out of Warminster/Came to the Minster school...

Anon. Children's song. c.1966

The couplet above came back to Steve Dewey recently as he reviewed ideas for chapter. He cannot remember now if it was he that sang it, or a school-friend, or an older brother. Neither can he accurately remember the next few lines, except that he is sure that they involved aliens ripping the heads off his friends. Although he was only seven or eight years old at the time, he was very aware of what the Thing was, even though he had not seen it, nor met anybody who had. Yet such was the influence of the Thing on the culture of Warminster from 1965 onwards that it found its way into playground songs, teatime chat, and local gossip. By July 1965, as Arthur Shuttlewood notes, 'it was the leading topic of conversation in every pub, club, shop and social assembly in towns and villages round about.'(1)

Many older ufologists will know that The Warminster Mystery is the title of a book by Arthur Shuttlewood that describes the UFO sightings around Warminster. It is also a provocative title for this chapter, as one of the mysteries is 'what happened to the UFOs'? If we are to believe the theories of Shuttlewood that Warminster's importance lay in it being the focal point or node of some Earth encompassing navigational grid, why have the ufonauts given it up? Why are they finding other areas of the Earth more important than Warminster? The last question is probably unanswerable; perhaps, therefore, a more apposite question might be 'why have the ufologists given up on Warminster?'.

The Warminster Mystery is an interesting book, and perhaps one of the more important books in UFO history. It is not only us who believe this; in Cults of Unreason, Christopher Evans calls The Warminster Mystery 'a minor classic of its kind.' It is important because it describes the genesis of the phenomenon, the conversion of a disbeliever, the increasing "devotion" of Shuttlewood to revealing "the truth", and the increasingly avant garde theories and hypotheses put forward to explain the phenomenon. In Shuttlewood's books we meet all of the ufo-nuts, mystics and general side-shows associated with UFO phenomena. For some ufologists the events in Warminster, and the way they were handled, while teaching nothing about the UFOs themselves, informed the ufological methodology. John Spencer averred that:

Anybody witnessing events at Warminster was able to learn a good deal about what was right and wrong with the study of ufology. Its more sensible methodology in these modern times is due largely to lessons learned in those early years.(2)

In a sense, Warminster is the history of ufology writ small; or, perhaps, as if the UFO phenomenon had been held up to a weird distorting mirror. Cattle were not mutilated, but only stampeded; it was only a few poor dormice that were mutilated. Where were the Men in Black? Warminster's only strange visitors attempt to kill themselves, or walk injured along the road. What of alien contact? Most of Shuttlewood's contacts with aliens take place over the phone. Abduction? Nobody is abducted. Corn circles? It is possible that the genesis of the modern crop circle phenomenon lays in the rather small, scruffy 'UFO nests' reported by Shuttlewood. It is as if the people of Warminster were aware of the generality of UFO reports and fortean phenomena, but did not know the exact details. The Warminster Thing was a very parochial phenomenon - very few British books and even fewer American ones even mention Warminster. In UFO encyclopaedias, it rates at best a one-paragraph summary. How can a phenomenon last so long, create so much excitement, generate so many sightings, and be a hot topic in local and national media, and then reach the sorry state of languishing in near obscurity?

Anatomy of a Phenomenon

The genesis of the Warminster UFO phenomenon is described in The Warminster Mystery, the first bookwritten by Arthur Shuttlewood on the subject of the Thing. When the phenomenon began, Shuttlewood was a journalist with the Warminster Journal, the local newspaper. It was through this position that Shuttlewood first came into contact with the phenomenon. At first, Shuttlewood claims he was a dispassionate reporter, simply unearthing the facts. Some evidence that Shuttlewood was outside of the ufological mainstream before his own sighting is given, perhaps, in The Warminster Mystery, where he asks, 'Have you head of 'leys' or 'orthoteny'? I had not until Gavin Gibbons, an author, came to see me on 29th October, 1965.'(3)

It took nine months - it might be flippant to note the length of time over which Shuttlewood's beliefs gestated - before Shuttlewood 'dared ... join the small band of local folk who are convinced that our visitors are as real as us and believe that they are not flying fantasies but definitely humanoid, coming from distant worlds which may not be so very different from our own planet.'(4) The general public quickly became aware that something odd was happening in Warminster. David Holton - about whom more in later chapters - appeared on TV in March to proclaim that the strange noises were alien spaceships. Warminster UFO sightings were reported in the News of the World in July, and the the Daily Mirror in September 1965. But events in Warminster dated back to Christmas the previous year.

Interestingly, the Warminster phenomenon began not with UFO sightings but with hearings; which is, perhaps, why the phenomena came to be labelled the 'Thing'. It should be noted, though, that the term 'Thing' had already been used to describe UFOs in Britain. The Flying Saucer Review, Volume 10, Number 1, reprints an article from the Brighton Evening Argus. The article, which describes a UFO sighting near Brighton, uses the word 'Thing' quite prominently, repeating the word twice, and printing it in capitals.

The date on which the Warminster phenomenon started is a moot point. Flying Saucer Review reported that, in November 1961, four witnesses near Warminster saw a UFO leaving 'a trail of sparks.'(5) Two of the events reported by Shuttlewood in The Warminster Mystery as occurring in 1965 are also reported by Shuttlewood in the Warminster Journal, in December 1965, as having happened in 1963 and 1964.(6) The mythological history of the Warminster phenomenon, however, began on Christmas Day, 1964. The order of events given here differs slightly from that given in The Warminster Mystery; here the events are described in the order suggested by their dates and times. Mrs Mildred Head was woken at her home at 1.25 am. 'Our ceiling,' she reported to Shuttlewood, 'came alive with strange sounds that lashed at our roof.' The sounds began as if twigs or leaves were being drawn across her roof, and then changed to a noise she described as being like giant hailstones. Plucking up courage, she got out of bed and looked out of the window, where the night was dry and clear. Mrs Head also noted a strange humming sound, which grew louder and then faded away, except for 'a faint whisper - a low whistling or wheezing.' This story was reported to Arthur Shuttlewood sometime in 1965, possibly around May, after Mrs Head had read in The Warminster Journal of a similar incident.(7)

Sometime later that Christmas morning, over thirty soldiers at Knook camp, about four miles from Warminster, were rudely awoken by a loud noise. A sergeant(8) told Arthur Shuttlewood that the sound was similar to that of a huge chimney stack being ripped from a roof and being scattered in pieces across the whole of the camp. The guard was alerted, but nothing developed beyond the extraordinary sound. The soldiers were surprised but unable to explain the sound, although they claimed that the sounds were unlike those of conventional aircraft.(9) Note that this is an interesting assertion. Why should the sound be like an aircraft anyway? Why shouldn't the sounds have been caused by some anomalous weather phenomenon? Why did the soldiers not say something along the lines of 'it sounded unlike conventional weather'? The implications are interesting. Although the Warminster phenomena started off as hearings were there already, perhaps, assumptions created by the reports of UFOs already extant in popular culture? Alternatively, has Shuttlewood's report of the statements been embroidered – with the intention of heightening curiosity and interest – with an implicit denial that what happened was conventional?

At 6.12(10) that morning Mrs Marjorie Bye was walking to the Holy Communion Service at Christ Church in Warminster. As she approached the church the air about her filled with 'menacing sound. Sudden vibrations came overhead, chilling in intensity... descending on her savagely, caught her... in a grip of steel, a peculiar droning.' Before she had reached the church wall 'shockwaves of violent force pounded at her head, neck and shoulders and numbed her. Helpless, she was pinned down by invisible fingers of sound. Wailing, whining, droning - frightening!'(11) What happened shocked her greatly, making it difficult for her to reach the sanctuary of the church. Indeed, such a phenomenon would have been most disturbing; at 6 am on Christmas morning, Warminster would have been dark, and the roads quiet. Arthur Shuttlewood points to Mrs Bye's bravery in coming forward; and asserts that she courted no publicity, wishing her report to remain anonymous (although Shuttlewood notes that her name was leaked later in the year; as to how and why her name was leaked, he gives no indication). 'At precisely the same time,' Shuttlewood claims dramatically, Roger Rump, Warminster's head postmaster, heard noises almost identical to those described by Mrs Bye. His house was not far from Christ Church. He described the noise as 'a terrific clatter ... As though the ... roof tiles were being rattled about and plucked off by some tremendous force. Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being ... loudly slammed back into place ... I could hear an odd humming tone. It was most unusual ... [it] lasted no more than a minute.'(12) It is interesting to note, however, that, according to Shuttlewood's own description, what Mr Rump's experience is not 'almost identical' to Marjorie Bye's. Should we, however, allow some leeway for poetic license? Shuttlewood was, after all, a journalist, not a researcher. Nonetheless, it would have been useful to note the similarities between the events reported by Mrs Bye and Mr Rump. From Shuttlewood's descriptions the sounds are dissimilar - Mrs Bye's sound was a whining, droning kind of noise, while Mr Rump's was a clattering kind of noise; and while Mrs Bye was 'pinned' and 'numbed', Mr Rump was able to sit bolt upright in the bed and listen.

These four events are the true genesis of the phenomenon, all witnessed, in one case by as many as thirty individuals, in one night. Not one UFO seen. And if the reports are to be believed, not one of the witnesses assumed any kind of flying saucer or ETI was involved.(13) The unidentified noises continued on an ad hoc basis from then until at least June 1966. Roughly nine cases are described in The Warminster Mystery in which the only unusual phenomena are noises. Shuttlewood claims that 'Every few days I learned of roofs bombarded by aeronautical amblings of the Thing in apparently malevolent mood.'(14)Shuttlewood certainly loved alliteration. If he was indeed receiving reports every few days, then most of these are not included in his book. It is, therefore, difficult to tell how many how many witnesses reported these mysterious sounds. We do know that, by August 1965, it is claimed there had been at least 49 witnesses to the sounds.(15) Shuttlewood damned those who attributed the noise-based phenomena to poltergeists, ghosts, or the supernatural as 'deluded people'.(16) Yet the two phenomenon were obviously linked together in some causal way, even if only cultural. It's surprising that Shuttlewood should have given poltergeist-type explanations such short shrift. After all, 'poltergeist' is simply German for noisy ghost, and the early manifestations of the Thing were certainly noisy and as capricious as ghosts. Also, Shuttlewood himself was later to link all kinds of paranormal phenomena with the Warminster Thing. However, over the course of time the "noise" phenomenon receded and the visual phenomenon took its place, to become the most important element of the Warminster phenomenon; the Warminster Thing became a UFO.

The most pyrotechnically spectacular of these noise-events – and almost certainly not attributable to a poltergeist - happened on August 17th, 1965. A 'detonation never so far explaine'(17), as Shuttlewood described it, rocked the houses on the Boreham Field housing estate. Walter Curtis described ' a huge blast! A whole series of jolts and explosions were felt underfoot ... the biggest explosion I have ever heard.' His wife added that it 'was as though the gas main right opposite us had blown up with a tremendous roar.' David Pinnell, on hearing the explosion, ran outside to see 'a monstrous orange flame in the sky ... it was shaped like an electric bulb ... by its light I clearly saw ... [the] hills.' The light faded, but then what appeared to him as a great ball of smoke with 'a funny yellow core', floated down from the hills, crackling and hissing whenever it touched grass or trees. Percy Westinghall described the explosion as 'one hell of a bang', likening it to the sound of a building being demolished. His wife also noted that minor quakes seemed to follow the explosion. Another, unnamed, witness to the illuminated ball of smoke described its golden heart, and how it was very large and shining. The puffball settled in the road and 'gradually dispersed in straggling wisps, the fiery centre burning out as it did so.' Two houses had some broken windows, but this was the only damage caused by the explosion.

Seeking possible causes for the explosion Shuttlewood talked to officials at the nearby School of Infantry and Battlesbury Barracks as well local aerodromes. All denied responsibility. Hypotheses put to him regarding thunderbolts or meteorites he 'wrote off as highly improbable'. In The Warminster Mystery Shuttlewood describes the explosion as the capers of 'the Thing in baleful mood.' In 1965, the idea of a small meteorite explosion - a sort of mini-Tunguska event - or of some type of ball-lightning phenomenon, would have seemed avant-garde. However, with hindsight, both explanations seem more plausible than Shuttlewood's conclusion about the baleful Thing.

Shuttlewood also reports that tangled pieces of a white, light, brittle metal were found at the "Battlesbury site", although the use of the phrase "Battlesbury site" only serves to confuse matters. Did the explosion take place near the Boreham Field estate, or near Battlesbury, a large hill about a mile to the north of the estate? If the explosion took place near Battlesbury, why were the windows of other buildings, such as those of the army's barracks, which would have been closer to the explosion, not affected by the blast? Why were houses in The Dene, a part of the Boreham Field estate closer to Battlesbury, not affected? Shuttlewood's reporting could be slack on occasions. Certainly his books contain minor details like this where it is hard to know exactly what the facts were. Of course, a more accurate record might be available from the local papers of the time, but the version of the story the average ufologist gets is from his books. In this case, you could not hope to get a more accurate version of the story from the Warminster Journal as, surprisingly, the story does not appear there.

The first UFO sighting recorded in The Warminster Mystery was around May 19th, 1965. Hilda Hebdidge informed Shuttlewood that three times during that week she saw unusual objects in the sky. She first related these to the Fleet Street UFO group(18) , who passed the information to Shuttlewood. The UFOs were cigar-shaped, and covered in winking bright lights. They (although it is unclear whether "they" here refers to the UFOs or their winking lights) were various shades of gold and yellow and most vivid. The UFOs were stationary, with no beams or rays, and made no noise. They appeared to be high in the sky. They gradually faded as she watched.(19) These sightings, however, are not the first reported in the Warminster Journal. On the 3rd of June, Patricia Phillips phoned Shuttlewood to describe a 'brightly glowing, cigar shaped object,' which remained motionless over the south of Warminster for almost half an hour.(20) Shuttlewood sold this story to the News of the World. On the 19th of June, Kathleen Penton saw 'a shining Thing going along sideways in the sky from left to right. It glided over quite slowly in front of the downs. Porthole type windows ran along the whole length of it. To my eye, it was the size of the whole bedroom wall - enormous. These windows were lit up, the colour of yellow flames in a coal fire. It was very much like a train carriage with rounded ends to it. And it did not travel lengthways, but was gently gliding sideways.'(21)

Although UFO sightings had now commenced, the strange sounds still continued to be heard. And, on the 10th of August 1965, came confirmation that the sounds might be connected to the UFOs. At 3.45 am on that day Rachel Atwill was woken by a terrible droning sound. 'It made the bed and floor shake. I went over to the bedroom window and looked out. Between the two bungalows opposite, about 200 yards above the range of hills beyond, was a bright object like a massive star. I have never believed in flying saucer stories, but I cannot describe it as anything else. It was definitely domed on top and was huge in size, an unwinking light of uncanny brilliance. It hung there in all its glory and did not frighten me, but the awful noise it made did.' Yet despite the noise, which, with the sighting, lasted for some 25 minutes 'not one of my neighbours on this private estate saw or heard anything. I asked each one of them later that day.' The humming began to attenuate and the UFO began to flicker(22) ; the noise finally stopped, and the object vanished from sight. As with the reports from earlier in the year, it was the noise that was the disturbing aspect of the phenomenon: 'The noise was most upsetting to me. I felt there was a tight band of steel around my forehead towards the end, a pounding and a hammering at my eardrums.'(23) Throughout 1965, and for the first half of 1966, the noises continued to be reported. On the 17th of March 1965, Mr and Mrs Brown's house was rattled. The Marson household was assaulted by the noises in May 1965 and June 1965.(24)

A very graphic account of the effects of the noise were given by Eric Payne. At 11 pm on the 28th of March, 1965, he was walking down a dark, foggy, quiet country road, when he heard a sound he described as similar to the sound of the wind in telegraph wires. The sound increased in intensity, however, and he was pushed and held down by 'a tremendous racket ... [like] ... a gigantic tin can with huge nuts and bolts inside it, rattling over your head.' He heard a shrill whining and buzzing which 'nearly drove me mad.' He reports that his 'head was pushed from side to side and I might as well have have left my arms and legs at home for all the use they were. I simply could not stop this tremendous downward pressure. I crawled round in the road for a bit and then sank to my knees on the grass verge.'(25) . This report shows how contradictory, or perhaps, how sloppy, many UFO reports, and certainly those of Shuttlewood, can be. We feel that questions should have been asked. If, as Payne reports, he might as well have left his arms and legs at home 'for all the use they were', how was he able to crawl around in the road 'for a bit'. And why - if he was already crawling - did he then sink to his knees on the grass verge? I am not doubting Mr Payne's experience; I merely point out that Shuttlewood's reports could be vague, confusing, even misleading. What is also mysterious is that this event is reported, in an article by Shuttlewood in the Warminster Journal in December 1965, as happening in 1964. Rogers reports this phenomenon as happening early in the January of 1965. In Rogers' account, the only sound described is that similar to the hum one hears from telegraph wires.(26) The more exciting account described by Shuttlewood is omitted. Interestingly, Payne's account is one of a group that came to light after David Holton appealed for reports of the sounds.

As we have seen, from roughly May 1965 onwards, the Thing became a predominantly visual phenomenon; reports were mainly of UFOs. One of the early mass sightings was that of the 3rd of June; Mrs Phillips' report has been described above. The UFO was also seen, from the Philips household, by Mrs Phillips' husband, their three children, and a visitor; by Warminster residents Mr and Mrs Horlock, who described the UFO as 'twin red-hot pokers hanging downwards, one on top of the other, with a black space in between'(27); and by seventeen people swimming or fishing at Shearwater, a lake near Warminster. One of the Shearwater witnesses told Shuttlewood 'It was obviously huge, but very high up.' Shuttlewood points out that the 'evidence came in before any news of this extraordinary night vision had been published.'(28) Although the UFO was seen by many people, there are discrepancies in the reports: in the colours reported by the groups of witnesses; in the shape of the UFO; and in the way the phenomenon ceased.

It would be pointless to reiterate all of the sightings here; interested readers are directed to The Warminster Triangle.(29) Suffice to say that from Christmas 1965 the reports flooded into Arthur Shuttlewood and the local papers. For the moment, having established the genesis of the Thing, and indicated what made it peculiar to Warminster, we want to leave the story of the Warminster mystery and look at the context within which it arose. For those interested in ufology, the Warminster mystery is an essentially 1960s phenomenon. Apart from the unusual sounds, it provided nothing that had not been described for earlier UFO sightings, both in Britain and the US. What marked Warminster out in particular was the sheer number of sightings, as well as the fact that a whole town seemed to be enmeshed in the phenomenon. What was also unusual, perhaps, was that the phenomenon had one prime focus, through which all information flowed. Shuttlewood's position as a respected local journalist helped focus attention on the Thing. It was to Shuttlewood that many of the reports of UFO sightings were made, and it was through him that these sightings were articulated for the public; although, as we shall later see, very few of these reports actually made it into the pages of the Warminster Journal: there are many more experiences described in the Warminster Mystery for 1965 than are reported in the Journal. In the next chapters, we will look a little more closely at the cultural context within which the Warminster phenomenon arose, after which we will revisit the Warminster mystery to see what happened over the following months and years.

(1)  Arthur Shuttlewood, The Warminster Mystery, p. 73.

(2)  John Spencer, ed., The UFO Encyclopaedia.

(3)  The Warminster Mystery, p. 124.

(4)  Ibid., p. 22.

(5)   Flying Saucer Review, 1961.

(6)  The report of another event that perhaps happened earlier than Christmas 1964 is attributed to David Holton. He reported that a flock of pigeons appeared to have been killed by the sounds on April 11th, 1964. Note, though, that there is some confusion, unsurprisingly, in what happened, and when and where. Ken Rogers, who appears to be quoting directly from a letter of Holton's published in The Warminster Journal cites the date above (The Warminster Triangle, page 3). Gordon Creighton and Charles Bowen, in an article in the Flying Saucer Review (Volume 2, Number 4) report this event as being in April after the noises had started; that is, in 1965. Even more confusingly, in The Warminster Mystery (p.31), the first we hear of dead pigeons is in February 1965; again, David Holton had been on hand to examine them. In all three descriptions of the events, the pigeons were killed at Five Ash Lane. So at least there's some consistency...

(7)  The Warminster Mystery, pp. 19-20.

(8)  Presumably an officer at the camp, although this is not obvious in the book.

(9)  The Warminster Mystery, p. 16.

(10) It is interesting to note that the time of the Knook Camp incident is not noted in Arthur Shuttlewood's book. Oversight by the author?

(11) The Warminster Mystery, pp. 16-17.

(12) Ibid., p. 19.

(13) Remembering, of course, that there was perhaps an implicit assumption in the statement of the soldiers at Knook about the sound being unlike conventional aircraft, although it must be remembered that Shuttlewood might himself have ghosted in this assumption.

(14) From The Warminster Mystery, p. 27.

(15) According to Lionel Beer's article 'Curiosity Overtakes The Public at Warminster', in Flying Saucer Review Vol. 2, No. 5 (September - October 1965). Shuttlewood, who quoted this figure at the public meeting in Waminster, was at this time simply referred to as 'a local reporter in the Press gallery'.

(16) The Warminster Mystery, p. 22.

(17) Ibid., p.75. The following accounts of the explosion are described on pp.65 to 68.

(18) Either a UFO group are already poking their noses in, and contaminating the local culture, or Ms Hebdidge was sufficiently UFO literate to know of a UFO group.

(19) The Warminster Mystery, pp. 34-35.

(20) Ibid., p. 37.

(21) Ibid., p. 25.

(22) The actual words attributed to Mrs Atwill in the The Warminster Mystery are: 'When the hideous humming grew less, the starry Thing flickered feebly.' This description has Shuttlewood's alliterative mark stamped all over it. How accurate, therefore, are his reports? How much extra description has he ghosted in to make the report more interesting? How accurate are the reports we receive of the Warminster phenomena?

(23) The Warminster Mystery, p. 47.

(24) Ibid., pp. 20-21.

(25) Ibid., pp. 27-29.

(26) The Warminster Triangle, p. 4

(27) Mrs Horlock saw a similar UFO at a later date.

(28)  The Warminster Mystery, pp. 37-39.

(29) The Warminster Triangle, Ken Rogers. The Warminster Mystery, along with Shuttlewood's other books, is out of print.