The Flying Saucerers

 This photo from The Flying Saucerers shows a "glowing air chariot" seen at Starr Hill, Warminster in August, 1975.  (Photo: Chris Waller)

Arthur Shuttlewood suggested in The Flying Saucerers (1976) that the phenomena he had witnessed in the vicinity of Warminster posed "a mystery not to be fully revealed until man has solved the equally baffling mystery of knowing and understanding himself and his fellow creatures throughout the universe . . . More and more, intelligent people are discussing links with other dimensions and planes of existence, psychic elements and forces of cosmic energy . . ."

In addition to reflecting about some of the various circumstances motivating him to make these comments, he considered in his fourth book such abstruse topics as parallel universes, inner Earth inhabitants, and humans having been "seeded" upon Earth from outer space.  Shuttlewood reminded, "Yet nothing rises above nature, so we may forget the word supernatural."

It was in May 1967 that strong clues to what may prove to be prime missions and objectives of UFO intelligence in our atmosphere were uncovered at Warminster.  The fact that most sightings and all reputed landings of UFOs in Britain stemmed from the guidemarks of seven White Horses situated west to east, from the one at Westbury to that at Uffington, set us thinking.

Shuttlewood quoted David Holton, a local naturalist, herbalist and chiropodist:

"Close and careful observation in the Warminster area, itself a cradle of ancient religion and mysticism, will satisfy even the most sceptical of the reality of subconscious forces that have made headline news in recent years.  The mistake is so often made of confusing 'reality' with purely physical states, anything else being regarded as 'unreal.'  Modern physicists do not fall into this trap.  They now know that all matter is basically atomic and all atoms are basically energy, a purely etheric 'substance.'  Anything etheric is as 'real' as physical matter, the only difference being in the way it is perceived; that is, by other channels than the known senses."

In The Flying Saucerers Shuttlewood quoted from books by such authors as Valery Brussof, Bruce L. Cathie, Levi H. Dowling, Sir Ambrose Fleming, Charles Fort, Sir James Jeans, John Keel, Ivan Panin, F. C. Payne, Max H. Plindt, Brinsley Le Poer Trench, and Paramahansa Yogananda.

Shuttlewood's perspective had developed over the course of ten years of close study and evaluation of the phenomena sometimes considered categorically with the term 'UFOlogy.'

. . . one must not make the unpardonable error of ignoring or rejecting matter that may not fit a preconceived pet theory or favourite fetish.  Some realists discount much of what they see as "nothing but lights in the sky."  Those lights in the heavens could turn out to be far more important than clear-cut and apparently metallic aeroforms skipping through the skies in daylight.

In the following excerpt, a crucial personal experience is described by Shuttlewood.  The event was one of two that at first he found "frightening in the extreme, until assessed in cool retrospect."  He confessed, "I hesitate to relate them, although it will torment my mind and conscience if I deny them space."

Believe or disbelieve me: that is your prerogative.  Yet they cement the bases for my own conclusions about flying sorcerers today, after almost ten years of studying them at closest possible range.  One early October night in 1969 I walked away from a few people gathered at Cradle Hill gates and wended my way up the road leading to the military vedette post.  I halted opposite a semi-circular screen of bushes and undergrowth on the right, bordering the road and a large meadow this side of Long Wood.  For the sakes of those assembled at the gates, some of whom had journeyed long distances in hopes of seeing something inexplicable overhead, I wondered if low and dense cloud cover would break and conditions for viewing become more agreeable.  Sure enough, the sky cleared on one side of the copse and a few silvery stars peeped shyly through jagged lines of disrupted cloud, wan but promising.

I feel genuine sorrow for nice people who come onto our hills and go away disappointed because weather and sky are unsuitable.  I therefore breathed a sigh of relief at the rift in cloudbanks.  In all fairness, our team have always stressed there is scant likelihood of seeing our flying friends under poor atmospheric conditions.  I was about a yard out into the road, well divorced from the barbed wire and hedgerows to my left.  As I stood there looking over the copse area, three sharp tugs came at the bottom of my light tweed jacket, behind me . . . I was riveted to the spot!  I felt my scalp tingle and limbs tremble violently.  A cold shiver snaked through me when I realised that this was no practical joke or hoax.  No one had left the gates and sneaked up on me.  There was no one and nothing visible to tug so imperiously at my jacket.

My inside seemed to overturn, my heart leapt painfully and I felt awful, rooted there and unable to move a sinew for fearful seconds that dragged to eternity.  Then my legs carried me unsteadily from the site.  Almost in a state of physical collapse, I inched my way backwards, managing to turn and break into a lifeless jogtrot after several unending yards.  Like the unaccountable encroaching of the heavy walker, the invisible coat-tugging entity has since affected quite a few venturing souls along that road, in the copse region, or at Starr Hill. This is some comfort to me — and I am thankful that witnesses such as surgical chiropodist James Webster, Tonbridge, Kent, and his brother Tony from Glastonbury, can support me over the veracity of a minor incident that to me assumed major revelation status when it happened.  Whenever my jacket has been tugged since, it is usually a warning not to commit my cardinal sin of talking too freely or to the wrong people!

Here was my confirmation that an intelligence walks among us unseen.  A beautiful golden UFO sailed between the two copses within a minute or so of the coat-tugging episode.  Watchers were thrilled, for it was a supreme example of the flying unknown.  The brothers took photos of the gold-plumaged ovoid as it executed a semi-circular flight path not far from the screen of bushes where I suffered the nightmare of coat-pulling insistence.  Reaching home in the early hours, I was still shaken, mentally agitated, swearing I would never go skywatching again.  Attacked by something invisible, I easily could have been killed or badly maimed, unable to defend myself, my earthly mind reasoned.  Then, in quiet retrospect, wiser logic took over and I suddenly knew I was being assured, mutely, that there are other dimensions of life besides our own, and all life forms should be treated with respect as sacred.  An ultra-realist seeking truth about UFOs, I was forced to change tack to keep on the correct course.

Shuttlewood's "second indelible experience" involved an incident near Copse No. 2 when he was watching several lighted objects in the sky while walking and felt "the oddest sensation of my life" and described physically feeling himself floating.  He recalled crying out "Please don't take me.  I'm not ready yet!"  Shuttlewood commented:

When reading stories of people taken aboard alien spacecraft in books that cater for sheet sensationalism, I have thought "What utter rubbish.  Impossible!"  Now I am not nearly so sure.  Some such tales could be perfectly true, I intuit, yet I would be cock-a-hoop with joy if I could state, definitely and without misgivings, precisely why flying sorcerers are here among us today in greater numbers than ever before; and would relish being able to claim everything had been revealed to me by 'them.' 

Shuttlewood included a passage from The Wheel of Life: The Autobiography of a Western Buddhist (1959) by John Blofield to suggest how one variation of Warminster UFO sightings correlated with the Eastern spiritual belief that the Bodhisattva manifests himself to the faithful.  The incident occurred on the sacred mountain of Wu T'ai.

"We reached the highest temple during the late afternoon and gazed . . . at a small tower built upon the topmost pinnacle about a hundred feet above us.  One of the monks asked us to pay particular attention to the fact that the window of this tower overlooked mile upon mile of empty space.  Although we were surrounded by mountains on all sides, there was no single peak which seemed to be on a level with that tower.  This observation of the entirely empty space confronting it was very necessary to our appreciation of what we hoped to behold during the night.  What we expected to see was a very extraordinary phenomenon which many people suppose to be a manifestation of the Bodhisattva himself: something reminiscent of the burning bush and pillars of fire seen by Moses!

"We went to bed soon after dark, but in such a state of excitement that none of us could sleep.  The cold was so bitter that Kuggtsun and I each rolled up in a cocoon of warm blankets and lay with the backs of our cocoons tightly pressed together for warmth.  Then, shortly after midnight, a monk carrying a lantern stepped into our room and cried "The Bodhisattva has appeared."  Almost oblivious of the cruel cold, we threw off our thick quilts and hurried into our padded gowns and warm cloth shoes.  My teeth were chattering loudly but the cold held no pain for me then, even though I had stepped from my cocoon almost naked.  Fully dressed, we wound quilts about us like cumberous shawls and walked out into the monastery compounds.

"The ascent to the door of the tower occupied less than a minute.  As each one entered the little room and came face to face with the window beyond, he gave a little shout of surprise — as though all our hours of talk had not sufficiently prepared us for what we saw now.  There, in the great open spaces beyond the window, apparently not more than one or two hundred feet away, innumerable balls of fire floated majestically past.  We could not judge their size, for nobody knew how far away they were, but they appeared like the fluffy woolen balls that babies play with, seen close up.  They seemed to be moving at the stately pace of large, well-fed fish, aimlessly cleaving their way through the water: but of course their actual pace could not be determined without knowledge of the intervening distance.

"Where they came from, what they were and where they went after fading from sight in the west, nobody could tell.  Fluffy balls of orange-coloured fire moving through space, unhurried and majestic — truly a fitting manifestation of divinity!"


"Assuming that a Wisdom Force does exist in the universe as a separate entity — separate, that is, on the plane of differentiated phenomena — it is still difficult to understand why it should manifest itself materially in the form of slowly-moving balls of fire."

Shuttlewood responded:

Frankly, I am in full agreement with the soulful summing-up by the author, for we at Warminster have often seen these golden peardrop forms floating gracefully, like ducks bobbing elegantly on rippling water, at leisurely pace along the tree-stippled horizons of our local hills.  They are the finest type possible of flying saucers, sending waves of warm emotion through the spectator when they hover and pulsate with cosmic energy we cannot measure, perhaps because it is measureless and timeless.  These are the UFOs we welcome most, for from their proximity in remote regions on star-spangled nights, their soft lambent glow suffusing the scrubland and tree patches with light, we somehow intuit that we all belong to the same universal family; and that, somewhere along the dark corridors of the dim past, we were the ones who foolishly switched-off the light of communication between us!  My inspired reckoning is that these are the giants of past ages in modern guise, ever reminding us that mankind faces many challenges before he completes his final life-cycle at the very hub of our wonder-filled universe.

 
The Flying Saucerers also presents observations about UFOlogy from a vantage point of people in military occupations during the 1970s.  Here are some excerpts.

World War 2 was especially rich in mysterious aerial phenomena, including the 'foo' fighter discoid that worried German and Japanese air crews as well as the American and British.  And one of the grave dangers at present is that a mistaken impression of a UFO might precipitate the beginning of another world-wide conflagration of hate, death and misery on an unprecedented scale.  The possibility is frightening and must be uppermost in the minds of governmental departments and ministries everywhere.  In April of 1973 a landing of a daytime flying saucer was reported to the police at Gwent, near Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, (where later, in early 1974, mysterious explosions over mountainous terrain were reported, with no debris ever being found).

I heard of the police report which duly went to a government investigating branch, and learned the whole story of how two little girls alleged they saw the luminous landed spacecraft in a field at Gwent — and became scared at the unearthly contraption in the meadow, wingless and shimmering.  A GPO engineer who knew the girls went with them to the scene.  No longer so scared, they entered the field with him.  He gave a complete description of the craft to the police; all three added that, when they reached a point no more than seventy-five yards from the glowing spaceship, it suddenly dematerialized!  It did not tilt upwards at one end, a manoeuvre we have previously witnessed at Warminster before the departure of a near-landed aeroform . . . it simply disappeared from view.

One of my officers in the Grenadier Guards in the last war was Lord Carrington, Defence Minister in the Conservative Government in 1973.  So I wrote a personal letter to him, telling him I knew the police and his investigating unit had the Gwent landing story at first hand, incorporating names and addresses.  In his reply, he did not deny the substance of the alleged unusual adventure that befell the two girls and an adult companion in that field.  But, after assuring me that the government had carefully considered all evidence to date on reported UFO appearances, from its special branch, he told me that none of the evaluated testimony regarding sightings or landings indicated any threat to our national security, sovereignty or defence!

So the government, he emphasized, has no 'official' attitude on UFOs, what or who they are and from whence they come.

In another chapter, Shuttlewood commented, "It is a shame that those in authority, in powerful positions and occupying seats of national and international control, insist upon fobbing-off an all-too-gullible public with long lists of preferred alternatives and laughable alibis instead of the blunt truth that UFOs are actual and factual."

Many of these circumstances are worthy of contemplation.  It has long been evident that there are individuals operating within military or other group hierarchies who fail to understand that each person is responsible for one's actions.  Countries, governments and agencies, corporations — these are all constructs to offer entitlements to the people functioning within these paperwork principalities.  When someone takes some action with the mistaken belief that he or she is merely following protocol, there is a failure to understand the human predicament in each decision of serving or failing to serve the 'greater good'.  Concerning unidentified flying objects and other anomalous occurrences, each instance of suppression of information or evidence that could expand the awareness of people universally is a lost opportunity for contributing to cultural progress and heightening social awareness.