UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Among the cases of supposed UFO crashes, the infamous one at Roswell, New Mexico, seems to always take the spotlight. After all, this is the event that even people who know nothing of the UFO phenomenon at large know about, so iconic is it in scope. Yet, what many people might not realize is that Roswell is by far not the only supposed UFO crash in history, and not even the earliest. One very intriguing report comes from many years before the Roswell incident, and while not as famous, it is every bit as strange.

The story goes that in the spring of 1941, a Reverend William Huffman, of the Red Star Baptist Church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was asked by the local Sheriff to come and help give last rites to the victims of a plane crash on the outskirts of town. Huffman then dutifully made his way out to the supposed crash site to find the place crawling with police, FBI agents, fire fighters, and military medical personnel who were all buzzing around a twisted mass of metal wreckage. At this point it seemed as if this was exactly as he had been told, a plane crash, but things would soon take a turn for the bizarre.

The reverend soon noticed that some of the pieces of the crashed craft were not as one would expect, and that rather than jagged as one would suspect, they seemed to have “a rounded shape with no edges or seams, and a very shiny, metallic finish.” This was decidedly odd, and did not seem to be a typical airplane, yet as he examined the wreckage further it got even weirder still. Charlette Mann, the reverend’s granddaughter and the one who first brought the case to attention after being told the story by her grandmother on her deathbed, would tell UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield of what he had seen in that wreckage thusly:

Upon arrival it was a very different situation. It was not a conventional aircraft, as we know it. He described it as a saucer that was metallic in color, no seams, did not look like anything he had seen. It had been broken open in one portion, and so he could walk up and see that. In looking in he saw a small metal chair, gauges and dials and things he had never seen. However, what impressed him most was around the inside there were inscriptions and writings, which he said he did not recognize, but were similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Taking this further into the realm of the outlandish was when Huffman was allegedly asked to come look at and pray over three dead bodies, but these did not appear to be human. The beings were described as being of almost childlike stature, with hairless large heads, big oval-shaped eyes, incredibly long arms and fingers, tiny mouths and ears, no discernible noses, and dressed from head to toe in what seemed to be a shiny material like “wrinkled aluminum foil.” Mann says of the state of the bodies:

There were 3 entities, or non-human people, lying on the ground. Two were just outside the saucer, and a third one was further out. His understanding was that perhaps that third one was not dead on impact. There had been mention of a ball of fire, yet there was fire around the crash site, but none of the entities had been burned and so father did pray over them, giving them last rites.

Huffman purportedly did administer last rites to these strange creatures, after which he was approached by some military personnel and told in no uncertain terms to keep it all total secret. He doesn’t seem to have done a very good job of this, because he apparently went home and immediately told his family what he had seen. However, they would not say a word about it to anyone, and Huffman’s wife would keep it all to herself until she came down with cancer and on her death bed in 1984 confided in Mann of what he had told them on that strange day, and she had apparently even seen a picture of one of the alien bodies, which was in the possession of her father. She has said of this picture:

Well, the first awareness that I had of it (the dead bodies) is actually a picture that my father had and it was at a dinner party. And, I had heard rumors, and bits and pieces over conversations, but it was a picture, an old picture, because it had … it was like the old Kodaks, with little lines and scallops around it. There were two men holding up a non-human, is the best way I can describe it. A little entity, a little person who appeared to be about 4 feet tall. They had him underneath the armpits with arms outstretched on either side of him.

When Stringfield heard the story of the crash he immediately launched an investigation into the case. Stringfield found that other living witnesses such as Mann’s sister and the living brother of the Cape Girardeau County sheriff in 1941 were both able to corroborate the story. He also was able to uncover fire department records of a plane crash in the area at the specified time, and he even managed to track down a photograph of the alleged alien, which was kept by Guy Huffman, the reverend’s son and Charlette’s father. Stringfield would publish his findings in an article for the UFO publication Status Report, and he would later include the account in his book UFO Crash / Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum.

It is hard to know what to make of this case. The account comes from a woman who got it from her grandmother, who got it from her grandfather, so already we have this as a third hand account at best. Stringfield found that others corroborated the account, but that still leaves the chance that Huffman himself was spinning tall tales. There is evidence that a crash did happen at the time, but it is clearly and unambiguously described as an airplane crash, with no mention of dead alien bodies. The photograph that Mann and Stringfield claimed to have seen remains elusive, and no one has been able to track it down, leaving it in limbo. There just doesn’t seem to be much solid evidence that this ever happened, and yet what if it did? Was this another Rosewell UFO crash that in this case managed to slip between the cracks and be successfully brushed under the carpet by the government? What did Huffman encounter out there, if anything? These are questions destined to remain unanswered, and this story of a lesser known UFO crash will probably remain even more shrouded in shadows than its more famous cousin.

On October 21, 1952, a Flight Lieutenant Michael Swiney of the Royal Air Force took off in his Meteor trainer jet on a training flight with a flight student. At the time he was a flight instructor at the RAF’s Central Flying School, at Little Rissington, Gloucestershire, England, and today his student was a Royal Navy Lieutenant, David Crofts. The two were engaged in a cross country flight that would take them on a route along the south coast of the country, after which they would turn around and head back. It was meant to be a routine flight and with the calm weather on a fairly calm afternoon there were no anticipated problems. Yet this was to be a flight into strangeness that neither one of the men would ever forget, and which would propel itself into the realm of some of the great UFO mysteries.

The flight went according to plan at first, with a perfect take off and climb up through the cloud cover. It was as they punched through the clouds at an altitude of approximately 12,000 feet that Swiney allegedly spotted three white spherical objects at an estimated altitude of 35,000 feet, directly ahead of them. It was the pilot’s first impression that these were parachutes, but as they drew closer it became very obvious that these were something far stranger. He would say of the objects:

It was something supernatural. I immediately thought of course, of saucers, because that’s actually what they looked like. They were not leaving a condensation trail as I knew we were. They were circular and appeared to be stationary. We continued to climb to twice that height [to 30,000 feet] and as we did so they did in fact change position. They took on a slightly different perspective. For example the higher we got they lost their circular shape and took on more of a ‘flat plate’ appearance – like when you hold a tea-saucer above your head and look at it, and then bring it down to your eye-level, it loses the circular shape and becomes a flat plate. At one time the objects, which were still very much in view, appeared to go from one side of us to the other, and to make quite sure it was not an illusion caused by us in our aeroplane moving to one side, I checked that we were absolutely still on a very steady heading, and sure enough they had moved across to the starboard side of the aircraft.

Swiney’s plane managed to climb to 35,000 feet, and they approached close enough to the anomalous objects to see that they were devoid of any wings, vents, portholes, fins, or anything else that would have been expected of a conventional aircraft, and it was all so outlandish that Swiney began to suspect he was perhaps suffering from a lack of oxygen and that he was possibly hallucinating. However, this was put to rest when his passenger, Crofts, saw them as well. Crofts would describe the strange objects thusly:

I looked straight through the D-window and there were three dots ahead…[initially] they wouldn’t have been bigger than my thumb-nail at arm’s length and there were certainly three of them. I looked up from time to time and saw they were approaching and getting further and further apart. What I saw looked like the bottom of a stemmed glass. They were lens shaped, like an ellipse and the sun was behind them, and there was no cloud at that height. It was impossible to tell the size of them or how far away they were.

This was all unsettling enough that the shaken Swiney decided to call off the training exercise and head back towards base, despite Crofts’ suggestion that they move to intercept. As they made their way back to base, Swiney radioed ground Air Traffic Control, and although Swiney wanted to get as far away from the objects as possible, ground control ordered them to turn around and approach the anomalies. Swiney dutifully banked around and reportedly blasted towards them at full speed, actually managing to gain on them before suddenly the objects turned at a sharp angle and sped away at a rate of acceleration that was far beyond anything known before vanishing, leaving both Swiney and Crofts completely puzzled.

In the meantime, it turns out that a Ground Control Interception radar in southern England designated Sopley had picked up the objects, which were moving at around 3,000 miles an hour over the countryside of the southwest of England. This was causing quite a bit of panic, as all aircraft in the area were meticulously tracked and accounted for, and these particular objects were nothing that was supposed to be there. Considering this was right in the middle of the Cold War and with tensions high, this meant that these unidentified, out-of-place aircraft were potentially a threat to national security. The response was to scramble any available fighter jets immediately in order to assess the potential threat and possibly engage, and two Meteors from RAF base Tangmere, in Sussex, were launched to join up with Swiney’s plane and offer support, however, they were unable to make visual confirmation, the objects vanished from radar somewhere off the coast of Kent, and the fighters returned to base.

After this incident the whole thing was kept remarkably quiet, even though it was also picked up on a private listening station and there has been evidence that GCHQ, the government’s own secret listening station at Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, had also aware of the events as they unfolded. It seems that the RAF and the Air Ministry were keen to explain it all away and distance themselves from it all, despite the multiple radar confirmations at the same time as visual contact was made by Swiney and company. Indeed, at some point the entire file on the incident reportedly has since just sort of gone away, as if nothing ever happened on that fateful day at all. Yet those who were there insist that it indeed did happen, and speak of the thick layer of secrecy overlaying the incident. Indeed, not long after this supposedly happened, the Air Ministry issued a warning that restricted RAF personnel from discussing encounters with unexplainable phenomenon with anyone other than official superiors.

As a matter of fact, the practice of the British Ministry of Defense with regards to UFOs at the time was to typically regularly destroy and dispose of any files pertaining to such UFO incidents, as they were seen as largely explainable with mundane explanations and were not worthy of funneling resources into. Since this practice was only stopped in 1967, all official reports from before that year no longer exist in any form. However, Swiney claims that in 1974, after decades of the event weighing on his mind, he requested to see the file on the incident witnessed by he and his co-pilot, and much to his surprise it was actually shown to him. He explains of this:

I was then in a position to say that I wanted to see the report I had written in 1952. I simply said ‘I want to see it’ and the next thing was one of my staff (a RAF Group Captain) plonked it on my desk,” Swiney explained. The file was obtained from an Air Intelligence branch that had inherited D.D.I. (Tech)’s records, and the officer who recovered the file said it had been located “in the Blue Book. So I had a look at it. It was all there, and if I remember rightly I also saw David Croft’s report which was attached to it. I had a look at it and when I was satisfied I put it in the out-tray. I should have taken a copy there and then.

After this the report seems to have just vanished, and an attempt to take a look at it again in 2000 with the help of researcher Dr. David Clarke resulted in them being given the runaround through several agencies, all of who said they were unable to locate the requested file. They were also told that no files on UFOs from before 1967 were available in general because of the past policy of destroying them all, making his 1974 experience all the stranger. When confronted about this discrepancy they received no answer or further explanation from the government, and the file seems to have just disappeared into thin air. As far as the Ministry of Defense is concerned, it never happened. Yet Swiney has always remained adamant that this file did exist, that he saw something truly beyond explainable, and that it was no normal balloon, aerial phenomena, or other mundane cause, and he has said of this:

I had then been flying for about nine years and I had seen many funny reflections, refractions through windscreens and lots of other things, but this was nothing of the sort. We tried very hard to explain away what we were looking at but there was no way we could do that. There was something there, there is absolutely no doubt about it. It was NOT a reflection. I am completely open-minded. I don’t think there are little green men who are going to suddenly land and get out of peculiar-looking craft. But what I do know is that both David Crofts and I saw something, the like of which we had never seen before, and I have never seen since. I cannot explain it. But all I do know is that I did see, as did he, something which was most unusual.

In the meantime, what has gone on to be mostly known as the “Rissington Incident” has been much discussed in the UFO community and has appeared on such well-known TV programs as UFO Files the BBC’s Timewatch. What happened here with these pilots? Was this phenomenon, which was also clearly observed by ground radar, all caused by mundane causes, or was it something more? What happened to that file, and did it ever exist at all? The answers remain unclear, and the Rissington Inceident has gone on to become a regularly discussed unsolved UFO case that will likely invite debate for years to come.