by Timothy Good
In 2005, Margaret Fry received an anonymous letter with an Erith, Kent, postmark:
“… I was one of a group of children playing in the bottom end of Bedonwell Road when we became aware of a commotion on King Harold’s Way, involving lots of people. I ran to see what was going on and had to push my way between a man and a woman. The man said, ‘Stay back, we don’t know what it is.’ I looked and saw on the ground an object in shape similar to a soldier’s tin hat, but the dome part more streamlined. It was on the ground I don’t know how long, but then the rim started to slowly spin. You couldn’t see the join between the rim and the dome. It appeared as one whole thing….
“Its appearance seemed to be fluid, a translucent, silver color. The sun that day was blazing so [that] could have caused the glare from the object, distorting its color. It then rose about a foot off the [ground]. A few seconds later, it rose twelve or fifteen feet. Underneath the craft were nodules. They could have been lights, but [were] the same color as the UFO. All of a sudden, it sped off and hovered over Bedonwell School, but quite high up—then suddenly it sped silently away, but I remember feeling a low hum vibration. There were grown-ups taking children’s details, so all us kids took off at this point….”
Through a helpful source at one of the police stations he visited, John Hanson met a retired officer, Jim Streek, a young police constable at the time who had heard about the King Harold’s Way incident:
“I was on duty and assisting in the return of some property to some women when I overheard [their] conversation about a ‘flying saucer’ that had landed in King Harold’s Way. I told the Station Sergeant what I had heard. He laughed at me [but] my curiosity was aroused and, after completing my shift, I changed into ‘civvies’ and went to have a look, as the women had seemed serious.
“When I arrived in King Harold’s Way, after cycling there, I noticed a small group of children talking to two smartly dressed men, one of whom had a clipboard with him, standing next to a large black car. They looked like officials from a government department. I decided not to announce myself and left. It was only after all those years later, when I read the article in the newspaper, [that] I realized the connection.”11
Streek assumed these men to be Air Ministry officials from the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. “This made me wonder how long after the event the Air Ministry officials arrived at King Harold’s Way, to take statements from any people still standing on the pavement,” Margaret Fry ponders. “Of course, the Air Ministry officials would not have knocked on people’s doors, thereby adding to the significance of the event, which as always Officialdom wants kept secret.”12
Following the incident, Margaret had an attack of paralysis affecting her lower limbs. “I could not move and was very frightened,” she recalls. “My sister came home from work about 6 p.m., fed the children, and sent for our GP, Dr. Lobo, who thought I had polio. These symptoms lasted only a short while and I recovered.”
Had being in close proximity to an alien craft had an adverse affect? Dr. Thukarta, the young Indian doctor who together with Margaret and her son witnessed the landing, died young of a brain tumor a few years later.13
“Some years later, when I decided to investigate this, our own astonishing sighting, my GP, Dr. Lobo, told me that Dr. Thukarta had reported the incident to the British Medical Board. How much notice did they take, I wonder: they did not bother to interview me nor those children. I have in fact tried to contact them over the years, periodically, without success, as I no longer live in North Kent.14
“I calculate that, with the ninety residents of King Harold’s Way, plus the thirty teenagers, then the ten or twelve children on Ashbourne Avenue plus Dr. Thukarta, Steve, and myself, approximately 130 people had witnessed these amazing events,” Margaret told me. This estimate may be unreliable, bearing in mind that so many could not be traced—or chose not to come forward. Nonetheless, numerous witnesses were present at these events. Close encounters with landed craft reported by large groups are rare. The Bexleyheath incidents, for me, are the most convincing.
And yet, apart from the report in a local newspaper, why did such a momentous story not appear in the national press? “In 1955,” Margaret explains, “we were not a publicity-conscious nation of people. I do not suppose that it occurred to any one of those people to contact a [national] newspaper. In addition, the remaining witnesses still on King Harold’s Way when the Air Ministry officials had arrived must have been told not to talk about the incident; no doubt later they also informed their neighbors.”15
And why were no photographs taken? Cameras were not that common in 1955, and it is likely that those who possessed them did not have them to hand when the incidents occurred. In the unlikely event that any photos had been taken, it is also feasible that they would have been confiscated by the Air Ministry officials.
How did Margaret feel in the ensuing weeks after her encounter? “Well, firstly an elation that we are not alone in this vast, vast universe,” she explains. “I think almost every human being who has the ability to think must yearn to feel that at least some of the myriad upon myriad of stars we see in the night sky, which represent suns with perhaps planets revolving around them, such as in our solar system, are also teeming with life as we know it. So, I was elated. I felt as though I had my feet striding two worlds—wherever that other world may be. And the link had been that strange object. However, with these feelings of elation came loneliness. My son was too young to share these sentiments with, and it isolated me from the rest of my family….”16
Australia
The Bexleyheath event is not an isolated case. In 1966, for instance, several hundred Australian witnesses, including students, teachers, and residents in Clayton South—a Melbourne, Victoria, suburb—witnessed an astonishing series of events. The following synopsis is based on an article in an educational magazine by Tina Luton, who interviewed researcher Shane Ryan, an English lecturer at the University of Canberra who has spent five years investigating the case, interviewing hundreds of residents as well as former staff and pupils from three schools in the area to complete his documentary, Westall ’66: A Suburban UFO Mystery, which aired on SBS television in late 2010.
At about 10:15 on the morning of April 6, a group of Westall High School students were completing a sports session when a silvery gray saucer-shaped craft, about twice the size of a family car, overflew the school and descended behind some trees on the Grange Reserve in front of Westall State School. One girl, Terry Peck, was playing cricket when the craft approached. She chased after it into the reserve. Two other girls were already on the scene. “One was terribly upset, and they were pale, really ghostly white,” Terry recalls. “They said they had passed out. One was taken to hospital in an ambulance.”
Other staff and students, alerted by cries of astonishment, rushed outside to see what all the commotion was about. “There are flying saucers in the sky!” said one boy as he came in and interrupted a Year 8 science lesson. “We all burst out laughing, but the teacher said, ‘Let’s go and have a look,’” Joy Clarke recollects. “It took a minute or two to sink in what I was looking at. There were three of them, flying saucers like you see in comic books.”
Suzanne Savage, another pupil, was present with Joy and their teacher, Andrew Greenwood, as they observed the objects. One, seemingly larger than the others, disappeared behind some trees and then reappeared, hovering a while before banking on its side and disappearing in seconds.17
At one point, five light aircraft, presumed to have come from Moorabbin Airport, arrived on the scene. “They flew low, down toward the flying saucer, as if trying to get closer to it,” Shane Ryan reports. “And every time they seemed to edge toward the strange craft, it just flitted away, as if playing a game with them of cat-and-mouse….
“By this stage, about 300 of the high school’s 485 students had amassed on and around the oval, many climbing the high wooden fence on the school�
�s western boundary, and the wire fence at the foot of the huge high-tension electric power pylon that stood on the school’s southwestern corner.” Two such pylons were located at either end of the boundaries of the school property. “The flying saucer had lifted off and over these power lines as it ascended into the sky from the school and moved south toward the Grange [reserve]. At the sight of the flying saucer disappearing behind the pine trees, a huge chunk of kids who had been watching did what they all knew to be clearly against school rules [and] jumped the low wire fence that separated the school from the drainage ditch [and then] ran toward the Grange.”18
The craft, apparently, had landed. Pauline Kelly, in Year 9 at the time, currently the school’s bursar, did not see the craft, but she and two friends saw where it had landed. “There was a perfect circle burned into the grass,” she confirms.
Unlike Bexleyheath, the Westall event made the front page of the local Dandenong Journal for two weeks running, as well as Channel Nine evening news. But there were repercussions. “The film canister from this coverage was recently found empty,” Suzanne Savage reported. And following the incident, she also noted the presence of people in uniforms, including police. “The next morning the principal, Mr. Frank Samblebe, called a special assembly and said he never wanted us to speak of it again … and that there was no such thing as flying saucers.” Science teacher Andrew Greenwood and others, including students, were warned against speaking about the matter by officials who visited them either at their homes or in the principal’s office.
Jacqueline Argent, then in Year 9, was one of the first students over the fence, looking for where the larger saucer had landed. The following day she was called into the principal’s office and interrogated by three men. “They had good quality suits and were well-spoken. ‘I suppose you saw little green men?’ they said.”19
Although a number of parents—such as those who viewed the circle in the grass—believed their offspring, others did not. “To this day,” says Shane Ryan, “after forty-five long years have passed, many are still hurt that their own parents and siblings refused to believe them, or at least were reluctant to….”20
Chapter Six
Tales from the Vienna Woods
In Alien Base, I cited at some length the remarkable encounter with aliens in the Vienna Woods in October 1962, reported to me by Bobby, a Filipino pianist then studying at the Vienna Akademie. Bobby had been “guided” to a certain area, where he noted a sudden “strange, sinister stillness” (as in the Monguzzi case). “I looked up and saw the leaves and branches of the trees shaking, disturbed by the sudden rush of air coming from a strange object,” he reported. “I could hear the whistling sound the object made as it glided smoothly and nearer to where I stood.”
The craft landed on three legs about a hundred feet from him. Three humanoid occupants, with lean, strong-looking bodies, dressed in tight-fitting black-brown suits extending from their shoes to their head, alighted. Around their faces—which appeared human—they wore a glass visor with two tube-like devices attached from under their chins to their back, ending in what looked like an oxygen tank.
“Someone said something that seemed like a question, but I couldn’t understand a word,” said Bobby. One of the group—presumed to be the leader—then pressed something on a small box he was carrying and a beam of red light fell upon Bobby’s eyes, inducing a soothing effect. The box also acted in part as a translating device, since the leader asked Bobby a question in English, with a slight accent, similar to that of Germans. The device also was able to detect Bobby’s eyeglasses, before he took them out of his pocket.
Asked by the leader if he would like to be with them or visit their place, Bobby declined. There followed a lengthy discourse on the iniquities of mankind, and a number of dire warnings, such as the following:
“Observe carefully the great mass of humanity killing each other through centuries of war and strife…. There are thousands of good people on your planet, but the mean and selfish humanity outnumbers the good by millions and millions…. Some day you will all be wiped out by your own greediness, and if a few good people live through that, then they will propagate and breed an unselfish humanity and no longer will there be continuous strife…. There is a great and possible danger, too, that your humanity’s intense desire to conquer, eventually seeking power and domination over the other planets, will mean only a complete massacre for Earthmen, because other planets will retaliate with terrifying power and force…. This is our message. Transmit it and let humanity beware.”1
Assuming substance to this story, as I do, since Bobby was a friend at the time, one can only wonder at the apparent lack of discrimination shown by these extraterrestrials regarding their choice of contact. Though deeply affected by this encounter, and other related experiences which ensued, Bobby was reluctant to tell even a few people about it, much less humanity at large. And even if he had transmitted the message to all and sundry, would it have made the slightest difference?
Bobby believed that most people who have had similar encounters suffer from depression and other sequelae, owing to the futility of proving their experiences to others. But at least the story was published.
A Reversal of Roles
Josef Wanderka must be the only person on this planet who claimed not only to have ridden a motorbike into a flying saucer but—in a refreshing reversal of roles—lectured its occupants on the iniquities of humankind. Born in Vienna in 1929, he became an active member of an anti-fascist sabotage group in 1944, until Austria’s liberation from the Nazis the following year. A jeweler by trade, Wanderka’s first sighting of an unknown flying craft occurred in 1954. The following is extracted from an account he wrote in 1975,2 from my interview with him in Vienna,3 and ensuing correspondence.
Wanderka had bought a Fuchs FM40S 1.5hp single-cylinder engine to attach to the left side of the rear wheel of his bicycle, the better to enjoy recreational trips in the forests surroundings Vienna. On a late summer night in 1954, he was riding his roadster on high ground near Hördl forest in Vienna’s 13th district, admiring a magnificent view of Vienna, when suddenly he noticed a cigar-shaped silver object hovering over the city, moving from north to south:
“Its metallic, shining outer skin was so bright that I thought it was reflecting an anti-aircraft defense searchlight, which I recalled from wartime. But I could see no sign of any such searchlight. The distance between me and the craft must have been at least five miles, which made it seem the size of a medium-sized modern airliner, moving at about the speed of a sports plane.”
Wanderka dumped his roadster in a ditch and dashed to a nearby field that afforded a better view. There he encountered some Soviet Army soldiers who had a base nearby (part of Austria was under Soviet occupation at the time). They too had been observing the craft, and one joked that it might be a secret Soviet weapon. But Wanderka’s definitive close encounter—in late August or early September of 1955—had a much greater impact. It was to change him forever.
On this occasion, he was riding in woodland about fifteen miles from the city, toward Arbesthal. It was between 14:00 and 15:00. “Suddenly, I saw a dull metallic silver light shining through the shrubs. I rode toward the shrubs to find a gap where I could get through [and] when I did, I found myself in a glade.
“On the grass stood a metallic, disc-shaped object of about 2.5 meters height and 10–12 meters width, with a group of people in front of it [see photo section]. I couldn’t see any windows, portholes, or lights on its even and arched surface. Neither could I make out any wheels or undercarriage, but there was a ramp of about four meters in length and two meters width [extending from] a roughly rectangular opening [with] half-moon-shaped frames to each side of the opening. The distance between me and the disc was about twenty meters. I decided to enter the disc….”
“What on earth persuaded you to take such a dare-devil risk?” I asked him, when we finally met in Vienna.
“At that time, I didn’t care so much what would happen to me,” he explained. “I was tired of life, and also had private problems with my girlfriend. I wasn’t even that concerned about dying. I already thought the disc was from another planet, and that perhaps they’d come to rescue me!”
His report continues: “The inside of the disc-shaped object was illuminated by an indirect yellow light. It resembled the ideal illumination for an ‘intimate’ living-room atmosphere, which we try to achieve today. The short, arched walls seemed to continue infinitely in the background. I could see neither levers, instrument boards nor panels, seats, or beds for the passengers.
“The inside of the disc was illuminated in an inviting way, giving me no reason to be afraid. I switched my engine off and freewheeled onto the ascending ramp and into the disc. When I stopped, I found myself in front of a group of five or six beings, about 1.80 meters tall [with] unblemished, beautiful faces that one can only find with children between the age of six and ten.
“Their clothes consisted of overalls of a grayish color without any signs of seams, pockets, or any openings. The shoes were incorporated into this clothing and didn’t show any outline of toes. The hands were covered with mitts, also incorporated in their overalls. Since these overalls were loosely covering their slim figures, I couldn’t make out the sexes, for example contours of breasts. Their necks came out of a sort of silk frill. Their hair was mid-length and blond, and they wore a close-fitting cap on the back of their heads.”
Remaining seated on his bike, Wanderka introduced himself, saying where he lived and apologizing for having intruded in such a fashion. The aliens said they came from “the highest part of the Cassiopeia constellation, from Earth’s perspective.” Asked how they could speak German, they replied simply that they’d learned it. Their voices were similar to those of female adult humans, with a high pitch. “They pronounced the individual syllables similar to the accent of English people speaking German. Although I didn’t know much about astronomy at that time, the distance between our Earth and Cassiopeia sounded enormous to me. However, it seemed more important to ask them what type of society they lived in.”
