Tucked away among rolling hills in the quaint countryside of western Wiltshire, England, about two hours west of London, is the sleepy, historical town of Warminster. It is a typical quiet rural English town, with charming little streets and not much typically going on, but starting from the 1960s this would become ground zero for a series of intense UFO phenomena and high strangeness that has never fully been explained and which remains a bizarre mystery talked about to this day.

While various UFO phenomena had already been reported from the area for years, it would all begin in earnest in 1961, when there was a report by four witnesses who claimed to have observed a cigar shaped object fly across the sky leaving a trail of sparks in its wake, and there would be a steady stream of reports over the ensuing years of similar phenomena in the sky, but things would really begin to get strange towards the end of 1964. On Christmas day of that year, residents were alarmed at a cacophony of strange, eerie noises that took different forms depending on the witnesses but which were rather frightening in every case. Some reported a loud booming noise, while others complained of sounds that sounded like twigs or branches being dragged across their roof or of something pounding on the top of their homes. One local named Mildred Head would say of her own experience, “Our ceiling came alive with strange sounds that lashed our roof… as if twigs were brushing the tiles… ended up with a noise [like] giant hailstones.” Some cases were rather dramatic, such as that of local woman Marjorie Bye, who heard booming noises on her way to church that were so intense she felt paralyzed and complete helpless. At least 30 people would hear these eerie aural phenomena and there was no discernible cause for any of it.

Warminster, England

The strangeness would continue on into the new year, with a glowing cigar-shaped object seen by at least 17 residents on June 3, 1965, and on August 10 a local woman known as Mrs. Atwell would claim to have seen a bright object like a “brilliant star” travelling across the sky after being woken by a deafening droning noise. On August 17, 1965 there was a frightening incident when a thunderous boom echoed out across the country side, described as sounding like a massive bomb going off, after which scared locals saw in the sky “a monstrous orange flame was seen in the sky, crackling and hissing.” At the time there were other reports of sporadic booming noises, with some rumors saying that at times the shockwaves of these were so potent that they had actually killed off flocks of pigeons or other birds, causing them to simply drop dead from the air to flutter down lifeless, and in some cases even human beings had suffered negative physical symptoms or had even been knocked down by the blasts. Some people were also claiming that their cars had stopped operating in the presence of the phenomenon, or that it had damaged buildings, and it was all very dramatic.

The frightened residents would actually call a town meeting on August 27, 1965, to discuss what to do about all of this oddness, and the town hall would be packed with hundreds of spooked locals and town officials. Here the panic and fear would be fanned by a man named David Halton, who verified that pigeons were mysteriously dying and also claimed that rats had been turning up mutilated without any explanation. It was at this meeting that we make the acquaintance of local news reporter and editor for Warminster Journal Arthur Shuttlewood, who would become instrumental to really launching the phenomena, now being called “The Warminster Thing,” into the public consciousness at large. He would claim to have gathered reports from dozens of people who had heard the noises or seen strange things in the sky since the early 1960s, and as soon as his articles began hitting the papers there would be a deluge of new reports as people wrote or called in with their own stories. Within the coming year there would eventually be around 1,000 reports gathered of all manner of UFO activity in the skies of Warminster, and most of these were compiled and kept in a dossier by Shuttlewood himself.

Through all of this there was even a photo of one of the UFOs offered up to Shuttlewood by a man named Gordon Faulkner, after which it gained wide publicity when it was printed in an issue of The Daily Mirror in September of 1965, and this would truly catapult the local phenomena to worldwide attention. Unfortunately, Shuttlewood would become a quite obsessed with it all and not a little unhinged as the months went by. He began giving increasingly bizarre, possibly embellished accounts of the phenomena and he really derailed into the realm of bizarre when he made the claim that he had actually been contacted and subsequently met up with the aliens responsible.

The whole weird affair apparently began on September 25, 1965, when Shuttlewood claimed that he had received a call from an individual calling himself “Karne,” and who claimed to be an alien from the planet Aestsa. Shuttlewood then apparently told the individual to prove it, and almost at that very instant there was a knock at the door. Shuttlewood claimed that the person at the door was Karne, and that he had blotchy skin and unnerving eyes without pupils. The two had then allegedly had a chat, during which Karne warned of an impending catastrophic war and warned that humankind was on the fast track to doom. The conversation would apparently come to an end when Karne, who was having an increasingly tough time breathing and had been fidgety from the start, looked at a gold device on his wrist, excused himself, and then left to never be seen again. Oddly there would be other reports of mysterious figures in the area at the time, including a hodgepodge of faceless humanoids, very tall humanoids dressed in white, strangers wearing balaclavas, helmeted figures, and a grey-clad figure with “streaming fair hair,” making it all even weirder still.

In the meantime, many curiosity seekers and UFOlogists had flocked to the region and were engaging in “sky watches,” mostly concentrated on Cradle Hill, Starr Hill and Cley Hill, where most of the sightings had occurred, and through it all Arthur Shuttlewood was reporting and spinning tales. By all accounts he had devoted his life to the phenomena, and was the one largely responsible for keeping the hysteria going. He would go on to write two books on the Warminster Thing, and he would also insist that he had met the aliens on several other occasions, making it unclear if he was honestly reporting all of this stuff or had gone off the deep end, how much of his reporting was based on actual sightings and how much he made up. Whatever one may think, Shuttlewood would stand by his stories and insist it was all true right up until his death in 1996.

Arthur Shuttlewood

The Warminster UFO flap would remain strong right up into the 1970s, during which time the town added crop circles to its long list of oddities, after which it seems to have died down, although there have been sporadic UFO sightings right up into the present. Although it has faded with time and slipped somewhat into obscurity, the whole affair Warminster Thing affair is still remembered locally and by UFOLogists. In 2015 there was a conference held in Warminster to mark the 50-year anniversary of the original sightings, during which several prominent researchers were in attendance, and later that same year a wall coated with murals was erected to commemorate the incident. To this day the name Warminster has been closely linked to UFOs, with the region still considered to be one of England’s premiere hotspots for UFO sightings.

What happened in this quiet rural town and why did it attract so much activity? There have been lots of ideas, the most popular of which is that this all had something to do with the nearby military base on Salisbury Plain, although why an Army barracks would have anything to do with unexplainable aerial activity or the testing of experimental aircraft is anyone’s guess. Other ideas include that it all has something to do with Stonehenge or of course that this was really aliens, drawn here because of the base or for any number of inscrutable reasons we may never understand and are perhaps not meant to. It is unclear what could have been going on here, or how credible Shuttlewood or any of the other witnesses ever were. Was this the doing of aliens, military experiments, or simply the product of panic and mass hysteria? There is no way to know, and the area of Warminster remains a place steeped in mystery and with a reputation of having one of the most intense UFO flaps England has ever seen.

One of the games that the both the mainstream and the conspiracy theory media play is connecting the dots. One of the biggest dots today is the spread/epidemic/pandemic of the coronavirus. Some of the connections make sense, other make you go “Hmm,” like a recent story that the virus was brought to Earth by a meteorite which dropped it (accidentally or intentionally – different dots) over Wuhan before crashing elsewhere in China. Today’s story may be a little beyond “Hmm” to the realm of “Wha-at?” before coming back to settle between “You know …” and “Uh-oh.” A video of the feed from the live cam on the International Space Station shows 22 minutes of what appears to be a large UFO parked nearby. One thought offered by the person who uploaded it is that it could be aliens fleeing Earth because of the coronavirus. Where does that push YOUR Needle to … “Hmm,” “Wha-at?”, “Uh-oh” or “I thought aliens were supposed to be protecting us from destroying ourselves”?

Meanwhile, are they watching the ISS?

“I was watching the NASA live space station cam when I noticed the camera zooming in on a strange object coming from below the space station. At first I thought it was a capsule or satellite, but its speed increased and after 22 minutes it shot up and into deep space.”

Those quotes are from the video (watch it here) uploaded by Scott C. Waring, the always controversial owner of the YouTube Channel and website ET Data Base. Waring is well known for seeing aliens in every UFO sighting, ISS feed or Mars rover video he posts, but this latest ISS feed video has a few twists that make it a little unusual. For one thing, it’s much longer than most ISS videos of strange anomalies (22 minutes). That’s primarily because NASA doesn’t cut it off or cut away as is normally the case in these situations. In addition, at one point the camera zooms in on the UFO, an action Waring says was NASA’s doing, not his. There is no recognition of any of this on the accompanying audio feed. While Waring offer thoughts on the shape, it’s tough to imagine this is a spaceship. However, it acts like one at the end as it seems to suddenly fly off, out of the camera’s range.

“Also … this coronavirus is spreading like a wildfire out of control, it’s possible that aliens know what going to happen and they decided abandon the earth. The virus may be very dangerous to aliens too. If this is true, expect to see a big rise in UFO sightings as they appear from underground bases and leave Earth’s atmosphere.”

We’re outta here!

While the astronauts don’t seem to have any comments about the UFO, Waring has a great one connecting UFO sightings in general with the coronavirus. Aliens fleeing Earth is a seldom-heard theory in comparison to the more popular ones like the zoo theory (aliens are observing without interfering) and the benevolence theory (UFOs around nuclear plants are protecting us from destroying ourselves). In fact, the more common virus theory is that the aliens would infect Earth and its inhabitants with something they’ve already developed an immunity to – like the diseases brought by Europeans that nearly wiped out the indigenous people of the Americas. It’s much more believable that an advanced civilization capable of interplanetary or intergalactic space travel would be better prepared to deal with viruses and diseases in the places they visit than vice versa.

On the other hand … who knows?

Thank you to Scott C. Waring at ET Data Base for the thought-provoking dot connection.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full effect, with each of these superpowers pushing the limits of technology and rushing to be the first one to put a man into this new frontier of the unexplored. The Soviets had had some issues in their pursuits, plagued by a series of tragedies that seemed to have left them grounded. On one occasion in October of 1960 a Soviet rocket exploded upon take off, killing around 150 people, and this was followed by a cosmonaut who was immolated within his space capsule during a fire, but despite these setbacks on April 12th, 1961, the Soviets were proud to announce that they had put the first man in space. 27-year-old Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had been put into orbit, becoming the first man to circumnavigate Earth orbit in an artificial craft, the Vostock 1, and he became a media sensation because of it, making headlines all over the world. However, there has long been talk that there were others up there before even this, and that they managed to vanish into a dark history of conspiracies and cover-ups, with the ultimate fates of these lost cosmonauts swept under the carpet to fall between the cracks of history.

There has long been talk that the Soviets had actually managed more excursions into space before and after Gagarin’s flight than they have let on. Indeed, not long before Gagarin’s launch there had been rumors that a successful space flight had already been made, with a news crew allegedly even on the ground covering it, but this story oddly just sort of disappeared and never aired, with focus instead directed solely to Gagarin’s mission. According to the news source that had been set to cover it, they insisted that a flight had been successful, piloted by decorated ace pilot and cosmonaut Vladimir Ilyushin, but that it had gone off course upon re-entry, leading to his capture by the Chinese government and was therefore unsuitable for showing the world the technological mastery of the Soviet Union. This was backed up by several journalists, most notably Denis Ogden of the British Daily Worker and French journalist Eduard Bobrovsky.

Yuri Gagarin

Ilyushin was soon being unofficially deemed the first man in space, but curiously the pilot himself was completely silent, according to official reasons because he was recovering from an automobile accident. The Soviet government was having none of it, denying that he was even a cosmonaut at all, and all the while details of the Illyushin incident were being changed all the time, making it all murkier. The Soviet government would also change its stance on the pilot’s absence, changing its story on several occasions, saying he was in a coma or other tales, and no one had any idea what was going on. In the end skepticism would be laid squarely on Ogden’s shoulders, as his article in the April 11 edition of the British communist The Daily Worker is the origin of every other article on the matter, and although he claimed that he was being provided information by an “inside source” there is no concrete verification as to who this could have been, and it may have all been pure stipulation and speculation for all we know.

There were also several reports from as early as 1959 that seemed to point to some amount of secrecy from the Soviets in relation to their space program. In one case, an alleged high-ranking Czech Communist created a stir when he leaked supposed top secret information concerning several unofficial space forays carried out by cosmonauts Alexei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Maria Gromova, all ending in tragedy, although the Soviets would not admit to this. There was also a report from space theoretician Hermann Oberth, who claimed that the Soviets had put someone in suborbital flight as early as 1958, but that the cosmonaut had died in the process, and he also related several other Soviet pre-Gagarin failed space missions, apparently from information kept by intelligence agencies. In 1959 there was also an article that appeared in the news publication Ogoniok, which claimed that high altitude parachutists Colonel Pyotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur, and Alexey Grachov had all been involved with testing high altitude space flight equipment when they either died or mysteriously vanished to never be heard from again.

More well known are the allegations made by famed science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in 1960. According to Heinlein, on May 15, 1960 he was informed by members of the Soviet Army that a man had been put into space on that day aboard what was called the Korabl-Sputnik 1, which had experienced mechanical problems to leave the cosmonaut stranded in orbit, but that officials had quickly shut the story down, backtracking to claim that it had been an unmanned flight. If there was a cosmonaut aboard, then whoever it was is forever lost in space without even being officially recognized, more or less erased from history.

Adding weight to such claims was a pair of Italian brothers by the names of Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, who were ham radio enthusiasts and had supposedly been monitoring Soviet and American space transmissions since 1957. According to them they would eventually record thousands of hours of communications from Sputnik, Vostok, Explorer, and many other Soviet and American missions over the years, but some of these were more chilling than most. In 1960 they came forward to make the claim that they had picked up Morse code transmissions from outer space which they believed conclusively proved that the Soviets had someone up there, in a craft they deemed to be moving away from the Earth, suggesting that something had gone wrong to send the poor cosmonauts hurtling out into the far reaches of cold space. The brothers would claim to have captured at least nine separate emergency transmissions from various doomed cosmonauts, with one supposedly of a cosmonaut asphyxiating during his final transmission, one of cosmonaut seemingly in the midst of a cardiac arrest, and another of an alleged unidentified female cosmonaut who apparently burned up on re-entry. Her haunting last transmission would reportedly say:

Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous? Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!

This particular recording is notable because it would have not only been a cosmonaut who had beaten Gagarin to space, but would have also been the very first woman in space, and yet if she was real we do not know her name or who she was. Indeed, at the time the brothers’ recordings made headlines and were widely publicized despite continued Soviet statements that they were false. Over the years there would be much doubt cast on the recordings of “lost cosmonauts” made by Judica-Cordiglia brothers, with much of the skepticism based on the fact that not only were the transmissions blatantly not conforming to usual communications protocols and were often inaccurate with relation to technical and operational details, but these transmissions were not picked up by the numerous audio monitoring arrays set up by the Americans, British, French, and Germans, and additionally often featured Russian that was sloppy and not grammatically correct, suggesting that it was all an elaborate hoax or that the brothers had been tricked.

Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia

Stories of mysterious lost cosmonauts continued well into later years as well, with the most famous of these perhaps being the claims that the Soviets were the first to put someone on the moon, or at least try. A long running rumor and conspiracy theory is that just before the historic Apollo 11 landing on the lunar surface the Soviets had desperately thrown together their own mission to beat the Americans to the punch. Allegedly, on July 3, 1969, the Soviets attempted to launch a crewed Soyuz 7K-L3 craft, but it would spectacularly explode on the launch pad, killing all aboard and quickly covered up by the government and officially explained as an unmanned test of lunar hardware. More mysterious is a claim that in early 1969 cosmonaut Andrei Mikoyan and another crew member had been successfully launched towards the moon, but that technicl glitches and miscalculations had conspired to make sure that they had then overshot their target to go hurtling out into the blackness of space.

There have also allegations made by Russian fiction writer Pelevin that the Soviet unmanned Luna, Korabl-Sputnik 1, and Lunokhod rover missions were actually crewed by cosmonauts on suicide missions, which would have technically put cosmonauts on the moon before the Americans, although there is no evidence whatsoever of this ever happening, and the craft involved were not designed to hold hman beings. In 2001, a senior engineer on the Soviet space program came forward to allege that the Judica-Cordiglia brothers had been on the mark, and that pilots named Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome in 1957, 1958 and 1959 only to vanish off of the face of the earth. Is there any truth to this all?

This is the problem with most of these reports, a lack of any real confirmed evidence, plus the fact that the United States would have been very quick to jump any any such Soviet failures yet there is nothing to suggest they ever did. In the meantime, the first official man in space would remain Yuri Gagarin, who in later years would spiral into alcoholism and before dying in 1968 in a jet crash he would for his part deny the rumors that anyone had been put into actual space by the Soviets before him. Interestingly, Gagarin would also make some rather odd claims along the supernatural, saying that had had a weird space encounter in April of 1961. At two points during his spaceflight aboard the Vostok-1, Gagarin allegedly had inexplicably gone silent and lost contact, and when he was asked about it later he was not sure what had happened, thinking he may have just briefly lost consciousness. In later years during hypnotic regression, Gagarin would come out to claim that he could remember seeing an enormous, mysterious figure floating in space in front of him, and that he had heard a voice in his head saying, “Do not worry, everything will be fine. You’ll come back to Earth,” before the apparition vanished into thin air right before his eyes. Had he lost his mind or was this just one more strange oddity to add to the rest?

In the end we are left with quite a mess of conflicting reports and allegations concerning the darker side of the Soviet’s space program. Were there really all of these cosmonauts who perhaps predated Gagarin and beyond who just sort of were erased from the records, in some cases with their identities never known at all? On the face of it it certainly seems plausible that such things might get buried under the copious amount of secret files and hidden documents from the Cold War era. It would also make sense that the Soviet Union would want to erase their missteps and mistakes, after all, this was a time of intense back and forth bravado and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, when there were certainly instances when nothing could be taken at face value. Yet, there has been nothing truly concrete dug up on lost cosmonauts or any evidence of cover ups of their deaths or disappearances. If they ever really did make history, then it is buried history, they are perhaps forever lost to the mists of time, with no posthumous awards or recognition and faded away and forgotten. Whatever the truth may be, the story of the lost phantom cosmonauts has been discussed and debated to this day, and shows no signs of going anywhere.

One of the lesser-known aspects of the UFO subject is that which revolves around what we might accurately call “UFO impostors.” As a perfect example of more than a few, Brad Steiger told me the following bizarre story just a few years before he died: “On a unfortunate number of occasions, I received letters complaining of my outrageous and insulting behavior while speaking at a conference. There were claims that I had openly berated my audience, calling them stupid for accepting the very premise of UFOs. A close friend happened to arrive on the scene after one pseudo-Steiger had departed and tried his best to assure the sponsors of the event that the rowdy, disrespectful speaker could not have been the real Brad.  In his letter, my friend warned me that he had visited a number of lecture halls where the impostor had damned his audiences. ‘Someone seems out to damage your reputation,’ he advised.”

Steiger continued on with his story: “In a most bizarre twist, dozens of men and women have approached me at various lectures and seminars, congratulating me about the manner in which I bested Dr. Carl Sagan in debate. The event allegedly occurred after a lecture when I happened to bump into the great scientist in a restaurant.  The eatery, according to the witnesses, was crowded with those who had attended the seminar, and they egged on a debate between myself and Dr. Sagan.  I mopped up the floor with him, countering his every argument against the reality of UFOs. The truth is that I never met Dr. Sagan, therefore, neither had I ever debated him. But from coast to coast, there are those who claim to have witnessed my triumphal bout.”

That a number of people claimed to have seen Steiger debating with Sagan suggests that this mysterious man was not just an impostor, but a downright doppelganger! Now, there is the mysterious matter of John Keel’s secretary – who turned out to be nothing of the sort at all. Keel found himself reluctantly dragged into the mysterious mix of UFO impostors in a very weird fashion. Of the turbulent times from 1966 to 1967 – when his research in and around both West Virginia and Ohio, in relation to the Mothman mystery, was at its height in the town of Point Pleasant – Keel had some very interesting things to say:

“A blond woman in her thirties, well-groomed, with a soft southern accent, visited people in Ohio and West Virginia whom I had interviewed. She introduced herself as ‘John Keel’s secretary,’ thus winning instant admission. The clipboard she carried held a complicated form filled with personal questions about the witnesses’ health, income, the type of cars they owned, their general family background, and some fairly sophisticated questions about their UFO sightings. Not the type of questions a run-of-the-mill UFO buff would ask. I have no secretary. I didn’t learn about this woman until months later when one of my friends in Ohio wrote to me and happened to mention, ‘As I told your secretary when she was here …’ Then I checked and found out she had visited many people, most of whom I had never mentioned in print. How had she located them?”

How, indeed? There really was no definitive answer to that question. It’s worth noting, however, that Keel uncovered additional cases that involved clipboard-carrying characters who would turned up at people’s homes in Point Pleasant, all asking the same kinds of questions that Keel’s “secretary” asked, but this time posing as census takers. They were nothing of the sort. But, you knew that, right? Of course you did.