🔥 NEW STORY🔥: The Great British UFO Hoax
How a band of enterprising engineering students convinced the police, Army, Air Force and the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence that England was being invaded by flying saucers.
Neil Batey, a shaggy-haired 15-year-old paperboy, was on his way to deliver newspapers when he spotted a strange object. It was early on a warm and still Monday morning, September 4, 1967. He had walked across a cricket field from his family’s home in Clevedon, a seaside town in Somerset in South West England, on his way to the newspaper shop to pick up his deliveries. He saw it as he came over Dial Hill, the town’s highest point. “Just off the footpath, in the long grass,” Neil tells me when we speak on the phone, “was a large silver flying saucer.”
It was a shiny disk, a little over four feet in diameter, with a dome shape on top, and it was emitting a strange mechanical beep. “If I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t know what it was,” Neil adds. “But it was definitely flying saucer–shaped.” He hurried down to the newspaper shop and told the intrigued owner, Robert Seeley, what he had found. The pair sped in Seeley’s Humber convertible up to the hill, where Neil showed him the object. “He said, ‘Oh my god!’” Neil recalls. “And we both drove back to the paper shop, and he phoned the police.”
That same morning, 30 miles to the east, at Elm Tree Farm in the country market town of Chippenham, Wiltshire, Mary Puntis (then Mary Jennings) was woken by shouting. Mary was a 23-year-old teacher, staying with her parents at their farm on the last day of her school’s summer break. “I worked on the farm during the holidays to help out,” Mary shares during a phone call. “Dad had told me I could have a day off to get ready for school the next day. So I was in bed having a bit of a lie-in. And then Dad came shouting up the stairs: ‘Mary, get up! Get up, quick! Bring your camera! There’s a flying saucer in the field!’”
Mary went downstairs and found her father, Dick Jennings, speaking on the phone with the police. “I think you better get up here,” Dick was saying. “There’s something in the field. I don’t know what it is. It looks like a flying saucer.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Jennings?” Mary recalls the police dispatcher replying sarcastically. “Are there any little green men?”
“Well, I haven’t seen any, but you better get up here,” Dick said. Then he drove back to the field in his tractor.
“And I thought, ‘I better go, I suppose,’” Mary says. So she and her younger brother, Martin, got in her Mini car and followed the tractor up a hedgerow lane to the field.
“Halfway up the field, fairly close to the hedge, I could see this silver disk,” Mary says. She told Martin to wait in the car and trudged in rubber boots through the furrowed field to the object. Unbeknownst to Mary, it was identical to the one Neil Batey had just found. It was about the same width as Mary’s Mini and had a perfectly smooth metallic sheen with no visible joins or openings. “The only way you could describe it was that it looked like a flying saucer,” she tells me. “We were just befuddled.”
Chippenham is less than 20 miles from Warminster, the site of Britain’s biggest mass UFO sighting. Over a prolonged period in 1965, two years earlier, around 200 witnesses saw unusual objects in the sky and heard strange sounds. Fiery and glowing lights and booming and droning noises were accompanied by mysterious occurrences, including power failures and birds falling from the sky. The phenomenon became known as the “Warminster Thing.” Experts and officials were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation, and the area became regarded as Britain’s epicenter for UFO sightings. Had the “Thing” returned?
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