The October 1967 UFO flap
In 1967 October a rash of UFO sightings
occurred over Britain. Many of these made it no further than
the pages of the press, but some were reported to the Ministry
of Defence. Details of the MoD’s investigations of these
events have been publicly available at The National Archives,
Kew, since 1998.
Most celebrated of the cases was the famous
‘flying cross’
reported by two Devon policemen and identified by astronomers
and the MoD as Venus. What is less well known is that, three
days later, policemen in Cheshire also reported a bright
cross-shaped UFO. The MoD report on this sighting can be found
in file AIR 20/11890. What follows is a brief summary with my own
comments.
At 4.15 am on 1967 October 27 two
constables on beat duty in Stalybridge, Cheshire, made the
first sighting of an object said to be bright, cross-shaped and
travelling at about 1,000 feet in a north-easterly direction.
The actual azimuth of the object was not stated.
Fifteen minutes later another PC at
Mottram-in-Longdendale, about three miles south of Stalybridge,
reported a hovering object moving from side to side over
Glossop, a town another 3 miles or so away. Depending exactly
where the officer was standing, the azimuth of the object would
have been anywhere from the east to southeast.
“The object then began an up and down
movement and finally remained stationary for about five
minutes,” the report continues. Three officers were sent
out by car from Chester to verify the incident, bringing the
total of police witnesses to six.
The PC at Mottram-in-Longdendale was in
touch by radio with one of the PCs at Stalybridge, so it is
evident they were seeing the same thing. It is also evident
that, despite the earlier report, it had not moved north-east
at all, or else it would not have been hovering over Glossop.
The object disappeared into misty cloud at
5.30 am, over an hour after it was first spotted.
Spurious side-to-side and up-and-down
movements of hovering celestial objects are common due to the autokinetic effect in the eye. In addition, passing clouds can
give the illusion that stationary celestial objects are moving.
Evidently all this was well-known to the
MoD investigator, who commented in a handwritten note on the
teleprinter printout: “The facts are consistent with
Venus being viewed through semi-transparent clouds.”
A DAYLIGHT UFO SIGHTING had been made
earlier that same month from Okehampton, Devon. Four witnesses
from a company called Sterling Hatcheries reported to
Okehampton police that they had seen through binoculars a
brilliant white semi-spherical object “like an inverted
parachute” for two hours from 08.50 on the morning of
October 5. It lay in the direction of Okehampton Camp, to the
south of the town, and over the two-hour period of observation
it moved horizontally at an altitude of about 50 degrees.
On that date, Venus was at a crescent phase
(like a parachute, in fact) and brilliant enough to be seen in
daylight. Its actual altitude at the time of the sighting was
around 45 degrees. It would indeed have appeared to move over a
period of hours due to the rotation of the Earth.
Taking into account the position and
movement of the object, and its appearance through a telescope,
the MoD investigation concluded: “The object is
Venus” (AIR 20/11889).
It is highly likely that the two Devon
policemen who made the ‘flying cross’ sighting
three weeks later in the same area had heard about this case,
although without knowing the solution.
A SIGHTING NEAR OKEHAMPTON on the evening
of October 26 of a beam of light was attributed to a tank
searchlight, while that same night the lights from a USAF
refuelling exercise led to further UFO reports.
SUMMING UP THE MONTH’S ACTIVITIES on
October 30, the head of the MoD secretariat S.4(Air), James
Carruthers, wrote to the Under Secretary of State for the RAF,
Merlyn Rees: “There is nothing in any of this current
series of reports to alter our basic attitude to UFOs” (AIR 20/11612).
Despite the fact that any reasonably
competent investigator could have come to the same conclusions
as the MoD, these cases are still quoted in some quarters as
genuine UFOs.
Content last updated 2008 May
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