For over fifty years people have been seeing things in the skies over Britain, many of them in southern England. Popularly known as UFO’s these sightings seem to be outside the realm of our familiar terrestrial aircraft of whatever kind.
Dorset’s Moigns Down is one such area, an ideal spot for a fine Sunday afternoon’s stroll in the country. Certainly Mr J.B. Brooks, a local of this area between Dorchester and Wareham considered it so. He regularly walked his two dogs over the Down on fine days, probably with no thought in his head regarding ancient legends concerning the area, or of its history.
And nothing seemed out of the ordinary when, on the morning of the 26th of October 1987, Brooks left home as usual to exercise his dogs on the chalk hill. By about 11.25 however, high winds which were prevailing that morning had accelerated into a force 8 gale, forcing the walker to shelter up in a timely and conveniently placed ditch or hollow in the ground. Here Mr Brooks rested up, gazing skyward and waiting for the wind to abate so he could resume his walk.
Suddenly into his view intruded an airborne object the like of which Brooks had never before seen or could have imagined. The thing took the form of a small disc or hub, from which a fuselage-like girder or antenna extended forwards, while another three identical projections aligned parallel to each other extended backwards on the other side. But the observer barely had time to comprehend what he was seeing before the next thing happened. In an instant the four girder-arms extending from the disc were seen to separate from one another, forming an equi-dimensional cross, which then began rotating around the central axis.
In his later report of the incident Brooks estimates that the revolving, but stationery object remained in view for about 22 minutes before the extended arms closed up again and the strange, unearthly device left the area of the hill at phenomenal speed.
At this point it is temping to think that the walker out exercising his dogs genuinely bore witness to some sophisticated surveying or reconnaissance devise possibly under the control of an advanced alien intelligence. Certainly from the description of its appearance and modus operandi, the UFO (if that’s what it was) displayed a technological level at least a few decades ahead of our own, for the hub around which the arms rotated appears to have been no more than a few feet across. Yet it was large enough to incorporate a drive mechanism capable of hovering, revolving and accelerating away at very high speed.
While UFOlogists may well favour the alien/space theory, other sceptical experts had an altogether more anthropocentric explanation for the sighting. For instance, it emerged that Mr Brooks had recently undergone a cornea transplant. Debunkers of the space/alien hypothesis ruefully considered the possibility that what Brooks actually saw was a ‘floater’ just a detached piece of skin on his eyeball! It is not known whether the proponents of this medical solution to the mystery were ever asked to explain how a floater was apparently able to unfurl itself and stay revolving for over twenty minutes.
This rather fanciful line of reasoning however is far removed from other technocratic considerations, which could shed some light on the enigma. Moigns Down occupies an area not far to the west of one of the most intensively used military ranges in the country, as well as lying not far west of the Atomic Research Establishment on Winfrith Heath. And it may be significant that in its extended form the Moigns UFO would have been comparable to a helicopter’s main rotor without the helicopter. Could Brooks then, have seen just the rotor of an army helicopter otherwise obscured by a cloudbank, its sound equally drowned out by the gale?
The Moigns incident, however, is not the only recorded sighting in Dorset of an object that does not fit the conventional UFO stereotypes of fiery or glowing – or pulsating – discs, cones spheres or triangles. Thirty-two years later on August 12th 1999 Brian Jones was looking seaward while attending an open-air event near Weymouth when he saw what he likened to a very odd microlite. The object was described as being oblong but with rounded ends and of a dense, dark colour. From the underside Mr James could see that something was suspended. As he was fortuitously carrying a camcorder at the time, he was able to video the object moving slowly on a course north-west towards Bridport, following the line of Chesil Bank while framed against the setting sun. The object did not descend, maintaining a height of approximately a kilometre before disappearing from view after about five minutes.
However, the resolution of the image on Brian James’ video was less than sharp, owing to the lack of available light, although the lens was at maximum zoom. The video footage therefore, was too indistinct for any positive identification to be made, even when shown on local TV news. It was thought the object may have been a parachutist, yet there was no aircraft in the area at the time from which a parachutist could have jumped. Also the fuselage and motor of a normal microlite could not be identified. Neither was any sound heard to come from the object, though the PA system of the nearby function James was attending could have drowned this out. The canopy was the wrong shape for a normal paraglider and furthermore there was no high ground in the vicinity to launch one from other than the risky outcrops of Portland.
The only possible man-made explanation tendered is that Brian James probably saw a powered paraglider, but one with the pilot wearing the motor and propeller as a backpack. But aside from these two unusual cases, there are significantly more which fall more easily into the conventional UFO mould. Six interesting sightings to occur in Dorset can be noted here.
One witness, Jim Horbury, was in Bournemouth on the 2nd of March 2001, when at 2 p.m. he sighted a large slow-moving triangular craft bearing bright lights but making no sound as it crossed the sky at approximately 100 feet. The object was afterwards described as “very frightening.” Then on the 2nd of May 2003, “two orange orbs” were seen to descend rapidly in a double helix formation “as if intelligently interacting with each other” over Bournemouth University. Two sauce-shaped gold-coloured craft were seen to swiftly and silently cross the sky over Parkestone, Poole at 10.15 p.m. on August 9th, 2001.
A flying triangle approximately 100 feet long with blue lights down its left side, red lights down is right. And a pulsating circular light changing colour in the centre was logged at Lyme Regis (10.55 p.m.) Portland (11 p.m.) and at Hengistbury Head (11.05 p.m.) on February 28th, 2002, after having first been sighted in Cornwall. At Winterborne Stickland a 9-year-old boy playing football around 8.20 p.m. one day in August 1991 saw “a large silver disc with a raised centre and red and yellow lights around it” tilt 45 degrees and then head earthwards. A man driving his girlfriend home through Broadmayne at midnight on July 28th, 2002 saw a phosphorescent cone-shaped green light silently and rapidly shoot across the sky.
