Sep 13 2007

Harwell, Harlequin and UFOs

On August 29, I wrote a blog-post titled Atomic UFOs that detailed a UFO investigation undertaken by staff from Britain’s Harwell atomic energy installation in the early 1970s.

Well, a reader of UFOMystic named Matt Richardson decided to follow-up on my story and contacted Harwell direct for further details. And although Matt is still looking for data on the specific incident as detailed in my blog-post, he did secure from staff at Harwell an intriguing clipping from the 1960s on other incidents in the vicinity of the installation, and which Matt generously provided to me.

Extracted from the Autumn 1965 (Vol, 15, No. 3) edition of a publication called Harlequin is an article titled Mystery Lights and Noises Around the Harwell Skyline. It relates the details of a series of then-recent UFO-style encounters in the area involving a “mysterious spinning orange light.”

One source cited in the article, a Mr. David Holliday, then a farmer from East Hagbourne, said: “My wife happened to look out and she saw a light up in the sky. You may laugh at this but it was coming quite fast and spinning around in the Chilton direction at about 9.58 p.m. It could have been over A.E.R.E. Harwell…It was an orange light that appeared to be rotating on its side.”

Harlequin also cited the testimony of a Mr. Leonard Bowers, a security officer at Didcot Power Station, who stated: “They came from RAF [Royal Air Force] Abingdon and went over A.E.R.E.”

A further source, Alan Black, said that he had seen a phenomenon that appeared to resemble “a half-moon which had fallen on its back, over Harwell.”

Most dramatic was the encounter of two children: Stephen and Sharon Evans, who had a close encounter at nearby North Moreton with a decidedly strange phenomenon.

The Harlequin article quotes Stephen’s words as they were published at the time in the Oxford Mail newspaper: “We heard a noise and saw a light up in the sky. It came almost straight down, getting brighter as it got lower. It was only a few feet above Sharon, and the light was shining on her…It was only there for a little while, then it started to go up.”

The final word in the article went to a Mr. J.T.G. Turner of Shillingford, who - commenting on a “terrific roaring sound” he had heard, said: “Thinking a storm was blowing out I got out of bed to shut the window. To my amazement all the trees were quite still; the noise was deafening at times but I could not see where it was coming from. I jokingly said to my wife it must be a flying saucer. Now I am not so sure that it wasn’t!”

Matt tells me that he is going to continue to dig into the Harwell-UFO-atomic energy links, so further surprises may be in store.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 6:46 am and is filed under Breaking News, Close Encounters, Eyewitness Accounts, Media Appearances, The Redfern Files, UFO Sightings, UFOlogy. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.
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