by Timothy Good
In April 2012, Henry W. McElroy, the retired New Hampshire State Representative cited earlier, posted an update on the Internet, part of which relates to the foregoing meetings. “My research and observation of the records,” he writes, “suggest that perhaps the information that Eisenhower and possibly others may have received in such alleged meeting(s) with the Off World Astronauts is what motivated President Eisenhower and his administration in 1958 to convert NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) to NASA (National Aeronautics and SPACE Administration) which enabled us earth-based Humans to speed up our learning in order to better develop and utilize ‘Outer Space Exploration Technologies.’ Enlightenment on these Space Technologies may have been given us by the Extraterrestrials for the purposes of more effectively moving into Outer Space on a more timely basis via the Moon, the Space Stations and Mars….”19
Art Campbell describes his correspondence with a man who claimed to have had access to highly secret archives of the U.K. Security Service—commonly known as MI5—who asserted that Eisenhower had had meetings with two or three separate groups of aliens during his presidency. “In the 1953–1955 timeline,” wrote the source, “the ET visitors had landed at several places and asked for a meeting with the leader of the most powerful country on Earth. The top item on the meeting agendas was continued nuclear research and testing with more and more powerful weapons.”
Regarding the nuclear agenda, Campbell’s MI5 source alluded to a Russian nuclear weapon test in 1951 (September 24) that was almost double the size of the first weapon in 1949 (August 29), adding that the visitors showed particular concern about the first hydrogen bomb in 1952. (On October 31, 1952, U.S. Operation Ivy began with the detonation of Mike, the world’s first high-yield two-stage thermonuclear device, at the Enewetak Atoll [formerly spelled Eniwetok] in the Pacific. At 10.4 megatons, the experimental liquid deuterium device exceeded the explosive power of all ordnance detonated in World Wars I and II combined.)20 The MI5 source indicated that there was considerable pressure on Eisenhower to exert influence over his government’s accelerated nuclear testing programs.
If President Eisenhower had managed to exert any influence on his military commanders regarding the arms race, there’s no evidence of it. And ironically, a few days after the Holloman event, Operation Teapot commenced at the Nevada Test Site on February 18, 1955, with a total of fourteen tests conducted to further the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with thermonuclear warheads.
George Adamski, who features in several later chapters, was among the first to claim regular contacts with aliens. He was also closely associated with certain high-ranking military and political personnel. According to a friend of mine, the late Madeleine Rodeffer, sometime in 1959–60 Adamski was taken by military limo to a base in California for a meeting with Eisenhower.21 No further details are available.
“Apparently,” writes Art Campbell, “those in government who knew of the alien concerns decided to form a committee to advise the president concerning these matters. My source believes this group was initially called the ‘Alternative Committee.’ Might this have been the beginnings of the group that, today, is believed to be the extremely powerful worldwide special interest entity which exerts considerable influence on UFO secrecy?
“It is obvious to me that our government is not merely covering up whether UFOs exist, but also that we have had contact with ETs and that they have objected strenuously to our nuclear testing and stockpiling….”22
The official Air Force One Passenger Manifest for the flight from Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, D.C., to Spence Field, Moultrie, Georgia, on February 10, 1955. (The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library)
The official Air Force One Trip Narrative for the flights on February 10/13, 1955. (The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library)
A facsimile of the letter from Gerald Light to Meade Layne describing the events surrounding the former’s visit to Edwards/Muroc AFB in April 1954.
Chapter Five
Public Landings
In mid-July 1955, England suffered a heat wave for a week, with temperatures in some areas soaring to 100°F (38°C) or more. Toward midday on Sunday, July 17, Margaret Fry was at home in Bexleyheath, Kent—part of the London Borough of Bexley—with three of her four children and her sister. Her husband, who worked in Middlesex, was away at the time. Shaun, the eldest child, had a high temperature, so Margaret walked down the road to call her general practitioner (GP) from a public phone box, as relatively few families had telephones in those days.
“My GP was on holiday, but his relief was a young Indian, Dr. Thukarta,” her account continues. “He examined my eldest and said we should go to the surgery immediately to get him medication, as he had sunstroke. I arranged with my sister to take care of the children and brought my second son Steve [eight and a half years old] with us, as he used to be rather naughty. He sat in the back of the doctor’s brand-new Austin car, and we set off.” It was now midday.
“The road I lived on, Hythe Avenue, was quite a long one, and from the outset the car was spluttering and stopping. After a while we became aware of a heavy shadow over the car. The rest of the sky was bright blue and cloudless, the sun blazing to the left of us. We kept peering through the windscreen, wondering what was causing the shadow engulfing the car. Eventually I asked the doctor if we could stop. ‘No fear,’ he said, ‘I’m no mechanic!’
“We turned right onto Ashbourne Avenue and then right into Chessington Avenue, and amazingly this shadow turned at right angles with us. By now we definitely knew something was above the car, which then spluttered and stopped. ‘Can we get out now?’ Once out of the car, we looked up and were horrified to see a concentrated mass of gray cloud-like material barely eighteen feet above our heads.
“As we watched, this oval mass started spinning. It then slowly solidified, and we saw three ball-bearing-like ‘wheels’ come down from what I thought was a smooth underside. I did think it was landing and would squash us, but we were so shocked, we did not think to move away from under it. However, the ‘wheels’ retracted, and it continued to spin and hum like a top, combined with a slight whooshing sound like the sea. There was absolutely no down-draft, as would be under a helicopter. It then flipped on its side, then righted itself again, then flopped down at the crossroads ahead of us. ‘My God,’ we exclaimed, ‘it’s one of those flying saucer things!’”
Margaret told me that the craft had landed by the corner house on Chessington/Ashbourne avenues, which now has a garage, but then had only a wooden fence along the Chessington Avenue side.
“In 1955, few working-class people had cars, so road traffic on a Sunday in a suburb was nil. The few cars that people had were parked on the road, and children were playing hopscotch on the pavement. They were around eight to ten years of age. I yelled out to them and they all came and stood around the craft with their mouths open. I then realized it was in fact maybe four or five feet off the ground: maybe it had risen. It seemed huge, although when we measured the spot years later we found it must have been just less than thirty-five feet in diameter.
“It was a typical bell-shaped craft. The surface seemed like pewter; dull, yet at times it shone as well. It could have been described as silver, gray, blue, metallic, yet not really quite like any of these hues. In fact, it looked literally just out of this world. We all knew instinctively what it was. We were aghast. Steve had his face pressed to the car window, watching. The craft had indents or moldings, that I thought must have been portholes, around the center, and below this was a wide ledge, and above, a rounded dome which had further moldings—for a door? What impressed itself in my memory was that the lower circular part was in sections—or so it seemed—with distinct seams and what appeared to be rivets.” [A sketch by Margaret is reproduced here.]
“After five or six minutes of being absolutely still near to the road, it then tilted toward us slightly, and in that position went
up. It wobbled from side to side, then at about a hundred feet it stood still and a porthole opened up. For the first time, I felt real fear, thinking there had to be people in it: when it was near to the ground and we were standing at arm’s length, we were so utterly amazed at the craft itself that we did not think of aliens or anyone being in it.
“It then ‘swished’ upwards to about thirty thousand feet, which took about seven minutes (for some reason we timed it with our watches). We got back into the doctor’s car, still dazed. All the way to the surgery, the doctor kept repeating that he did not believe in flying saucers. He was sure it was a secret American prototype aircraft. ‘What sort of secret aircraft would come down in the middle of the day in a built-up suburb?’ I replied. We did not even notice that the car was now running perfectly. After getting the medication, the doctor dropped us off at my house.
“I do recall every small detail of this, as does my son Steve. Although I related every detail in a letter to my aunt the next day and wrote notes and drew sketches into a diary one year later, I always refer back to these.”1
Years later, Margaret gave me a copy of Steve’s official report sent to Contact UK, a UFO research group, from which I cite:
“… It was a small, two-door car, and right away it seemed to be starting and stopping. We turned on to another road and then it stopped. I remember the doctor and my mother got out and were looking in the sky, so I looked through the side window. I could see a silver or metallic craft which had an inner circle of light which was rotating and appeared to me to be flashing orange and red lights. There were some children about my age playing on the pavement and my mother shouted to them to look up at ‘the flying saucer.’ They all did. The doctor was shaken up [and] it took him ages getting medicine for my brother. I still remember that he was upset…. The whole thing has stayed very clear in my memory.”2
“When we got home,” Margaret continues, “both Steve and I were excited in telling our family about the flying saucer. ‘What use was that?’ said my sister. ‘Why didn’t they come out?’ Shaun was aggrieved, complaining he was feeling so ill, and we were talking rubbish, whereupon Steve wanted to punch him, insisting we had seen a flying saucer.”
At the time, Margaret’s father was working as a scientist with the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, and lived nearby with his wife. “When they came to visit me the following weekend at Bexleyheath, Dad informed me rather kindly that I had been mistaken; the object I had seen was only the sun! ‘Yes, of course,’ I said patiently, ‘but this thing had come down in front of us while the sun was to the back of us.’ Mother promptly went to purchase the Erith Observer & Kentish Times, to see if anyone else had reported the object. She returned in triumph, waving the newspaper before Dad…. An Erith policeman and several others, it transpired, had also seen this craft fairly low to the ground, just after it left us at midday on 17 July 1955.”3
Margaret Fry is now a well-known UFO researcher, living in North Wales. We first met at her Bexleyheath house in 1972 and have kept in regular contact ever since. I can vouch for her total integrity and dedication to the subject. Thanks mostly to John Hanson, a retired police constable and UFO researcher, further information has come to light that not only seems to vindicate Margaret’s account, but also indicates that another, similar event occurred a short distance away, in the same week, involving numerous witnesses.
In 2002, in an attempt to track down further witnesses, John, together with his partner Dawn Holloway, began making inquiries in the Bexleyheath area, first at newspaper offices. This led to an article about the event, including two sketches by Margaret of the craft, appealing for additional witnesses, which appeared in the News Shopper, a local newspaper.4 Two weeks later, an article in the same newspaper published testimony from Rodney Maynard, 62, a former serviceman. Fifteen at the time, Maynard had been working as a labourer on a building site in nearby Streamway.
“We were on our lunch break when we heard something was happening in King Harold’s Way, so we went up there to have a look,” Maynard told the News Shopper following the appeal. “This thing had landed in the roadway. It took up the whole width of the road and overlapped onto the pavements. It wasn’t on the ground. It had about eight massive suckers [underneath]. The center was still, but the outer rim was spinning slowly and it had white lights flashing, like a camera flash,” he recalled. (Evidently, this craft was different from the one reported by Margaret and others and, as it transpired, the landing had occurred several days earlier.)
“There were about thirty of us staring at it. We could hear it humming. It had what looked like windows but the glass was concave and molded together so you couldn’t see in. A couple of us went forward to try and touch it and it began to spin faster. Then the craft lifted slowly off the ground and hovered above our heads, tilting slightly.” The craft moved slowly until it was over Bedonwell Primary School, where it stayed for about a minute, then shot up into the sky.
Maynard, whose sixteen-year-old brother was also present, described the craft as “black, sleek and streamlined with a surface like polished metal. It was beautiful…. I have never forgotten it…. We used to talk about it among ourselves but our mums kept telling us we hadn’t seen anything.” Maynard also listed several other pals who were present: Ron Deadman, Tony Savin, Vic Clarke, and Tommy Staggs.5
Margaret told me that this craft had landed close to the junction of King Harold’s Way with Orchard Avenue. Maynard provided further information to John and Dawn. He said that the event had occurred “one hot summer’s day in July 1955” when he and his mates and about thirty other youths—all aged between fifteen and seventeen years—were working on a culvert to carry stream water underground, at the base of King Harold’s Way. When they heard a commotion up the hill, they had run up the road with other people to see what was happening.6 Maynard’s description given to Ron and Dawn is at variance in several respects with that given earlier to the News Shopper—in particular the length of time the craft hovered above Bedonwell School:
“It just lay there on the ground, making no noise, surrounded by at least sixty people, including many children. We stood there watching as it flashed with light, at one-second intervals—so bright, it hurt to look for too long. On top of the object was this oval-shaped protrusion that reminded me of a nipple. I decided to get closer to the structure, which looked like beaten silver, with tiny dots all over it [and] with these massive ‘suckers’ underneath. I shouted out to my brother.
“We were so close to it, we could have touched it. The object began to wobble from side to side, the suckers drawing in slightly. People started to shout, now alarmed. In the blur of movement, too fast for the eye to catch, it left, leaving an image on the retina, which lasted for a few seconds. I looked across the sky and saw it tilt before coming to a halt in mid-air, over Bedonwell School, where it stayed for about two hours.”
Maynard said that, some weeks after the incident, he received a call from the local police constable, warning him not to discuss it with anybody. He says he complied for nearly a half century, until reading the 2002 local newspaper appeal, at which point he reported his own experience. As for the witnesses he names, despite publicity and their own research through electoral rolls, John and Dawn were unable to find them.
Another witness who came forward was David Philips, a retired postman. “I was living on a council house estate in Bexleyheath during July 1955, about a mile away from your publicized incident in King Harold’s Way,” he told John and Dawn. “It was a beautiful hot summer’s day, with patchy cloud, when I noticed a disc or saucer-shaped object hovering a few hundred feet above the ground, about a mile away. Suddenly it tilted, revealing what looked like three ball-bearing-shaped lumps set into its underside. I was so excited I ran to the house, shouting for my mother and father. As they came running out, whatever it was shot off across the sky, like a black streak of lightning, toward the London area,
and was gone.”7
Since this craft is described as having “three ball-bearing-shaped lumps” set into its underside, as opposed to the “eight massive suckers” described by Maynard, it is a fair assumption to suggest that it was the same, or similar, craft as that seen by Margaret and the other witnesses on July 17. The craft reported by Maynard and others is evidently related to another event which occurred a few days earlier.
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 14, as Doris Jacques glanced out of the open French windows at the back of her house in Hythe Avenue, Bexleyheath, she observed a glowing orange half-moon-shaped object in the sky, just above the roof of the house behind her back garden. On the underside of this craft could be seen small gray oval-shaped objects (one of Doris’s sketches appears below). These flew off in all directions, returning shortly afterward to the larger craft, which then headed toward Bedonwell Primary School, where it hovered over the playground.8
Doris Jacques’s daughter Pamela—then a pupil at that school, behind Brabourne Crescent—arrived home, excited, at 15:30. “Mummy, did you see the flying saucers?” she asked.9
“We were all in the playground, which is right close to Hythe Avenue, and we were all looking up,” Pamela Rossiter told me. “What I saw were lots of little cigar- or oval-shaped objects, like bright lights—and there were so many of them. They were very high up, and they were there for quite a long time. And then they all disappeared into one much larger one, and it was gone. I remember how we were all so excited. And then I went home and told my mum—and she said she’d seen this as well.”10
