1980-07-10 - Brookwood (UK/England) - Egg

Silent silver egg shaped object flying slowly at around 500-1000' in the UK

I realise that this case is decades old, and had it been of the usual 'lights in the sky' nature, I wouldn't have bothered contacting you. However, despite being brief the sheer clarity of the sighting (my only one to date) has stuck with me, and I hope that it helps add another tiny piece of the UFO enigma.

I was playing in the garden of my childhood home, which was no more than a mile from one of the largest military bases in the UK, and less than ten miles from both the defence research establishment and Farnborough airport, home of the UK's most famous air show. As a result I grew up seeing low flying aircraft ranging from Westland Wessex helicopters doing search and rescue exercises over Brookwood Cemetary (which was at the bottom of my garden) to jets flying almost at roof level, weird experimental craft being displayed and tested out of Farnborough, and commercial traffic from the nearby Heathrow and Gatwick international airports, and Fairoaks aerodrome. Like all boys of the time, I had a keen interest in all things military, and became quite the expert at aircraft identification.

The event occurred at around 2-3pm on a Sunday in early June of 1980 (the date I quoted is my best guess). Despite being located between a road and railway track, being a Sunday it was extremely quiet, and one of those rare halcyon British summer's days when there was not one single whisp of cloud in the sky - nor were there any contrails in evidence. For some reason I felt compelled to look up - there was no sound, but maybe it was just a serendipitous urge - and saw a clearly defined silver egg shaped craft travelling at no more than 100-200 knots in a north to south direction at an altitude of around 500-1000'. My estimate of size was in the order of a VW Transporter (bug bus) at most, a VW Beetle at the least. Given my position, I had less than a minute to observe it before is disappeared over the tree line, BT in that time made a couple of key observations:

1/ The craft was totally silent.

2/ The surface of the object was perfectly smooth. Whilst we have made numerous aircraft with a refelctive polished aluminium outer skin, it's never perfectly smooth - there are always small imperfections around rivets, obvious seams, and ripples in the surface where it has been worked. This object was like a drop of mercury, and reflected the ground beneath it.

3/ The craft did not at any time change direction, altitude, or speed as far as I could ascertain.

5/ for me, the most startling aspect was that as it passed almost directly overhead, I felt a very hard to describe sensation. At this stage I had no concept of this object was, so I felt no fear, yet I became aware of a sort of shiver that went through me, and that my hair seemed to stand up. It only lasted as long as the craft was overhead, and faded in and then out as it passed. My description sounds fairly prosaic, but I can assure you that ive never felt anything quite like it before or since; I just can't quite find the words to adequately describe it. There maybe some parallels to the way in which you feel infrasound rather than hear it - as if the signal hits you on a cellular level.

4/ The craft was flying into the wind, which was very very light anyway.

As an aside, when I was totally clear in my own mind that what I had seen could not be explained by anything I'd seen before, I rushed into the house in order to tell my mother what I'd seen. "It was probably Telstar," she informed me dismissively, and that explanaition sufficed for a while until my teacher, to whom I later recounted the sighting, told me that satellites orbit WAY higher than what I'd seen.

I've never seen a ghost, have seen the Surrey Puma (our local anomalous big cat), and never seen anything else in the sky I couldn't rationalise. However, this event has stuck with me for over thirty years, and rarely go more than a few weeks without it popping into my head.

For the record, I'm now a professional photojournalist, and have even leant my talents in image analysis to various publications and groups in respect of various paranormal subjects. I'm also not prone to flights of fantasy, and have an IQ which would put me in the genius category.


((NUFORC Note: Witness indicates that the date is approximate. PD))