Arthur Shuttlewood's Daytime UFO Sightings

Arthur Shuttlewood (1920-1996)

The following excerpt is from the sixth chapter of The Flying Saucerers (1976) by Arthur Shuttlewood, who described in his fourth UFOlogy book what happened when he was among a group of 'skywatchers' making their way from Warminster to Stonehenge on a bright Sunday afternoon in early autumn 1967.

Between the villages of Chitterne and Shrewton, not far from our town, the driver of the leading car in the motorcade waved us down with an imperious hand signal.  We stopped and pulled off the highway before dismounting, sensing with quiet expectancy that something was afoot — or, more accurately, aloft.

Following the line of his upraised arm and hand, we saw his forefingers pointing to a huge object in a blue sky unsullied by cloud.  Here was a prime example of a daytime UFO in all its magnificent might, silhouetted against an azure backcloth in the heavens.  It was a sober grey in colour, resembling base gunmetal, until the sun shone full upon its circular structure, surmounted by a hemi-spherical dome or turret.  Then it blazed with silvery brilliance, sparkled with gem-like magic.  To our gaze, it was the size of a full moon.  The skywatch party shivered into activity, prompted by the metallic giant hovering silently overhead, with several dashing to cars for cameras and tripods, anxious to capture wonderful pictures of this silvery monster, others seeking recording gear, astro-compasses and theodolytes, etc.

The temporary absentees missed the dramatic disappearance of the slightly tilted aeroform.  One moment, boldly and brazenly, it was there.  The next, with no tell-tale fading of outlines, it was gone!  Naturally, we all concluded it had moved off at such a prodigious rate that it had deceived our eyes, which are severely circumscribed.  Anything travelling in excess of 100,000 miles an hour would either fail to register or be glimpsed as an indistinct blur — and we cannot see beyond the spectra of infra-red or ultra-violet.  This was not the case, here.  Showing fairly sensible logic, we broke up and formed a circle in a nearby field, each scanning a separate portion of the horizon around us in a wide panoramic vista, full of eagerness to fasten onto the next appearance of the fleeing UFO, confident it would return.  Some three minutes passed, pregnant with optimistic anticipation, until an excited shriek came from a female watcher.  "Good God!  Look what's happening.  It can't be true."

We again followed the direction of a pointing finger thrust skywards and saw the same spectacular sky chariot materializing on the very same blue spot from which it had vanished.  This beautiful and out-of-this-world scene almost beggars description in our limited terminology. . . . Imagine a bevy of industrious spiders busily billowing out the silvery strands of glittering gossamer that fashion their nests or cobwebs; or imagine shining silkworms churning out their choicely delicate strands of silk into lustrous cocoons.  Speed up this enchanting natural process a million times and magnify these superb domestic insects in action accordingly, and it gives some clumsily-worded impression of what our avid eyes feasted upon.

Gradually, the silver-white filaments were interlacing, interweaving and interlocking, spinning speedily from side to side or bobbing up and down like shuttles on a weaver's loom.  It took another three minutes or so before each intricate piece was launched back into the jigsaw, resolving themselves into the apparently metallic shape of the enormous flying sorcerer.  The giant had not moved at all.  It had remained where we had spotted it — but invisibly so!  It was a staggering revelation in miniature of the extraordinary capabilities of UFOs.  We all gasped at the sheer magic of this mysterious yet marvellous reappearing act.  I have only seen nine daytime sky chariots at Warminster in the past decade, as opposed to hundreds at night; yet this was a supreme example of their aerial artistry that amplifies my conviction that the UFO intelligence is much closer to the pulse and heart of the universal Architect and Creator than we are, currently.  It was a memorable experience for sixty-six human eyes and thirty-three bewildered minds.

My article reviewing Shuttlewood's initial book The Warminster Mystery (1967) mentioned his first daytime spacecraft sighting.  Here is the complete passage from Chapter Twenty providing his description of the incident, introduced with the statement "The most unforgettable memory of my life must be the rewarding glimpse I had of a colossal cigar-shaped spacecraft at 3:42 p.m. on Tuesday, 28th September, 1965."

I was putting the finishing touches to a story and had gone upstairs to fetch a notebook.  Glancing from our landing window, I was glued to the spot.  Dwarfing cloud layers at little more than a half-mile high, 600 yards outward from my vantage point, seemingly a good eighty yards in length and twelve in width at the rear, sailed the cigar ship.  I later wrote in a notebook: "Magnificent—majestic—moving, in more ways than one!" which scarcely did it justice.  Look at Michael Rae's bogus yet convincing picture of this [type of UFO] craft.  The leading edge in flight is the thinner portion of what I now call "my banana boat of the sky."  Note the peculiar appendage or protrusion humped dome-like over the rearward edge.  This, to my eyes, was the coloured, highly polished or burnished amber.

Turn the picture sideways, so that the craft is vertical instead of horizontal and with the thinner portion upward, and you have the fiery cigar seen by so many witnesses, including the Rev. and Mrs. P. G. Phillips, on 3rd June.  Turn this protuberance inward towards your gaze and you view the dark circular patch or ring they saw after the carrier had disgorged its smaller discoid inmates.  The amber growth, which showed up with startling clarity in daylight against the solid white core of the craft itself, is undoubtedly the hatch portion via which the discs are released.  I rushed for my movie camera, and kicked on the floor to warn my wife, below in the kitchen.

I trained the camera on this gliding giant and felt the mechanism jump uncontrollably in my hands, needling pains shooting up my left arm and left side of my face, which were exposed to the phenomenon.  In spite of the pain, I doggedly held on to the camera and took shots of the cigar.  I cursed when it entered a heavier belt of white cloud travelling in the opposite direction.  I noted the end of it spinning and changing colour to sandy brown as the cloud swallowed it up.  Camera poised, I patiently waited for it to emerge.

But it never did break through.  It had vanished.  I searched the sky, frantically, for it and — within three seconds — found the giant aeroform again more than three miles farther up.  It was still following the same course, north-west to south-east, from Colloway Clump towards Shearwater.  I had seen the craft at first low down; then higher up.  It was not until later that I realised the immense speed at which it must have moved to rise three miles in less than three seconds!  Either the craft had the propensity or capacity of disappearing entirely — or it had moved faster than the human eye could follow.  The amber projection, domed and rather reminiscent of an old gramophone horn wide end upward, was now a minute speck, and almost indiscernible unless one already knew it existed and what to look for.  In addition to this, several other things impressed me over this astonishing occurrence.

I have never suffered from a nervous tic.  Yet my face began twitching and my eye watering, as soon as I watched the cigar craft sail leftwards.  In fact, my left hand and wrist, also the left of my face, were partially paralyzed by rays which it must have thrown out to thwart my camera.  This paralysis wore off fairly rapidly, although I was typing for two days with fingers of my right hand only.  And my left eye persisted in watering for over eight weeks, the eyelid being sore and inflamed.  I pointed this out to 150 hard-headed business and professional men of Bristol Rotary Club, whom I addressed by invitation in early December 1965.

Shuttlewood also recalled:

I reported the incident to my Ministry colleague in London.  "A great pity!  It could have been most valuable," he drily commented, after I related how the dislodged film dangled ineffectively away from the lens and view-finder.  There was no noise from the 'banana boat,' nor was there any smoke trail or exhaust.  Yet my wristwatch had stopped — and has not kept good time since; the first occasion it has done this in three years.  I have puzzled over the purpose of the amber hump.  Was it a stopper, cork or plug to ensure air-tight compactness in flight, which when opened was the essential escape hatch apparatus for the circular Things?  That awesome appendage hypnotised my gaze.

How easily could I have made a fortune out of much that has happened in Warminster . . . There are numerous literary outlets for 'Thing' publicity. Yet I have held back, intending first to gather all available testimony to try and make a cool, sensible appraisal of the collective whole. In addition to this, I reiterate that I have never consciously tried to persuade people that these Things exist and are (whether we like it or not) among us at the present moment. It was nine months, after all, before I myself was finally convinced to my own satisfaction. And I have had to see one with my own eyes before the wool of disbelief ceased fuddling my mind.

Shuttlewood's daytime sightings were placed in perspective when he cited in the fourth chapter of The Flying Saucerers a lengthy, strange 16th Century sky sighting —

. . . without going back to several hundred instances of flying sorcerers listed in holy books of long ago, there is a report in a sixteenth-century church record in Belgium, mentioned in the 31 March issue of Reveille.  The record describes in great and emotional detail the sudden appearance in the sky of a flock of flying machines that hung suspended over the village for many days.

Word of this remarkable event spread rapidly and curious visitors poured in to have a look.  So many came that the local priests were able to raise enough money to repair the church steeple and erect a statue.  In addition, the report goes on to state, so many people thought that the static flying machines were 'things of the devil' that they rushed off to repent of all their transgressions — and the clergy did a roaring trade for months!  No one can accuse us at Warminster of having an ulterior motive; we are not out to 'make a quick buck' at the expense of truth.  One of the beauties about UFO-spotting from Cradle and Starr is that sighting the spectacular unknown, when it occurs, costs nothing.  It is absolutely free!