Lest we have given the impression in the previous nineteen chapters that the mysteries in Britain are all ancient, we will close our tour with some twentieth-century mysteries, all of them still unsolved and many of them still taking place. Strange phenomena of this kind are regularly reported in a unique publication w hich has now been providing its readers with the latest news on modern mysteries for ten years - Fortean Times (96 Mansfield Road, London NW3 2HX), which is edited by the leading researcher and writer in this field, Robert J. M. Rickard (see Bibliography for details of his books), and his colleague Paul Sieveking. Mysteries of the kind we describe in this chapter are now receiving more attention than hitherto. .Apart from Fortean Times, and our owm books Animals and Modern British Mysteries (the latter in preparation), a new' series of paperback books on mysteries which began publication in 1983 has received praise for its high standard of authorship and responsible attitude towards its subject matter. In ‘The Evidence for...’ series (Thorsons Publishers), the titles currently available are UFOs, Visions of the Virgin Mary, Alien Abductions, Bigfoot and Other Man-Beasts, Phantom Hitch-Hikers, and The Bermuda Triangle, with others in preparation.
The Evidence for UFOs was chosen as the title to begin the series, and not surprisingly, for UFOs are a truly modern mystery, and perhaps one of the greatest. They came into prominence in the late 1940s, but during the subsequent forty years they have prompted massive media coverage and have become a worldwide phenomenon of extraordinary variety and baffling complexity. Britain has had its fair share of UFO mysteries, ranging from the ‘flying crosses’ of the late 1960s through the Warminster hysteria of the 1970s (see ‘Places to Visit’) to the ‘alien landing’ at a US. Air Force base in Rendlesham b'orest. East. Anglia, in 1980 (see Butler, Street and Randles, Sky Crash, for the full story).
PC Alan Godfrey dratcs the UFO into which he was abducted in November 1980from his patrol car in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. (The full story and details of the interviews under hypnosis will be found in Jenny Randies’s book 'Fhe Pennine UFO MvstervJ
UFOs have never attracted properly funded scientific attention, but fortunately a number of scientists have been sufficiently intrigued to voluntarily devote themselves to the problem. .Although there is still no definitive answ'er to the question ‘What arc UFOs?’, ufology has come a long way since the first sightings of what, in the late 1940s, were called ‘flying saucers’ and it is now possible to separate the so-called UFOs into two categories - IFOs (identifiable flying objects) and ‘true UFOs’ (a new type of phenomenon). In the former category the major stimuli which cause people to sincerely believe they are seeing something inexplicable are rare natural phenomena like ball lightning and common natural phenomena like the moon, which is misidcntified surprisingly often, though it can look very strange under certain conditions, such as when veiled in cloud. Researchers have found that not only are many people unfamiliar with the night sky, but they have been conditioned by media coverage to call any inexplicable sighting a ‘UFO’ without looking very hard for a natural explanation. This conditioning is usually unconscious in that they are unaware of the extent of their knowledge of UFO lore, until it surfaces in the form of a purported UFO experience, sometimes of a very weird nature, which eventually turns out to be a fantasy triggered when in a dissociated state by a slightly unusual stimulus, such as an unfamiliar planet seen in the night sky while the witness is driving, a state now known to be conducive to at least partial dissociation.
However, not all UFO events can yet be explained in this way. There is no space here to give specific examples, but plenty will be found in the relevant books in the Bibliographv (authors to look for arc Randles and Evans). 'I'he hypothesis that UFOs are the space vehicles of beings from Mars, or anv other planet, in or outside our galaxy, has been largely discounted by serious ufologists, though this explanation is still widely accepted by uncritical UFO enthusiasts, especially in the US. A. Whether UFOs are craft of any kind, and whether they contain entities, are still unanswered questions despite forty years devoted to trying to answer them.
Ghosts and poltergeists are mysteries which have been studied for far longer, but like UFOs remain unexplained. 'Fhey are perennial mysteries in that new cases come to light year after year, but little scientific work is being done to track down the mechanism which causes ghosts and poltergeists to manifest. ."t first glance it might seem strange that science is so unenthusiastic about tackling such obvious and proven mysteries as UP'Os and ghosts, but these phenomena cannot be produced on demand or studied in the laboratory, and researchers usually find themselves with nothing more substantial to work on than witness reports. I'his secondhand level of investigation, coupled with the ridicule generally directed at such subjects, ensures that scientists have to be really keen, and not too concerned about promotion, before they vvill involve themselves with such chimerical phenomena.
The same attitude is taken by scientists faced with reports of monsters or unexpected animals, which arc regularly seen throughout Britain, be they lake monsters of the Nessie variety, or big cats roaming the wilds of darkest Surrey. The scientists demand a corpse before they will begin to show an interest, witness reports and even photographs being notoriously unreliable, since the camera can appear to lie in that a skilful photographer can produce hoax photographs only identifiable as such after skilled and detailed examination, and maybe not even then, d'he Loch Ness Monster is probably the best-known lake monster in the world, but even though she first became headline news over fifty years ago, there is still no solid proof of her, or rather their, existence in the lake, and only a handful of photographs exist, most of them dubious in one way or another (the best photograph obtained so far is shown in ‘Places to Visit’). Many other lakes in Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also said to be the homes of lake monsters, but serious investigation is expensive and is hampered by the nature of the creature’s environment. .-Mthough many sightings can be explained away as waves, sticks and birds, seen at a distance by excited witnesses, there are others which are less easy to explain, where a strange creature was seen at close quarters, as happened to .Mphonsus Mullaney and his father, of the same name, in .March 1962. .-Mphonsus Mullaney senior was a teacher in Glinsk, and the encounter took place at Lough Dubh near Glinsk (County Galway). Mr Mullaney described what happened to a Sunday Review reporter;
We were working on the bog after school and I had promised to take young.lphonsus fishing. We carried a twelve fool rod with a strong line and spoon bait for perch or pike, of which there are plenty in Lough Dubh.
For a while I let the boy fish with the rod and used a shorter rod with worm bait, but I got no ‘answer’. After five minutes I decided that the fish were not there that evening, but I took the long rod and walked up and down the bank.
Suddenly there was a tugging on the line. I thought it might be caught on a root, so I took it gently. It did not give. I hauled it slowly ashore, and the line snapped. I was examining the line when the lad screamed.
Then I saw the animal. It was not a seal or anything I had ever seen. It had for instance short thick legs, and a hippo face. It was as big as a cow or an ass, square faced, with small ears and a white pointed horn on its snout. It was dark grey in colour, and covered with bristles or short hair, like a pig.
D'he creature was apparently enraged by the pain after trying to take the baited hook, and also annoyed by a barking dog, and tried to climb out of the water to attack the boy, who screamed and ran to his father. They both hurried away, and informed local people of their sighting, so that armed men soon converged on the lake, but nothing was seen. Later Alphonsus junior identified a rhinoceros in a picture book of animals as being closest to what he had seen.
.As this strange report indicates, the lake monsters do not all conform to the same description - most lake monsters do not look like rhinoceroses, but have long necks and small heads. It is likely that there are several different types of unknown creature lurking in our lakes. Recent expeditions into unexplored country in the heart of Africa have produced convincing reports, and a sighting by a scientist, of a large and hitherto unknown lake creature believed to be a type of dinosaur. If this can happen in Africa, why not in Britain, where there are also large areas of unpopulated and relatively unexplored terrain with deep and remote lakes where all kinds of unknown creatures could have lived undisturbed for millions of years. This is one mystery which may be explained eventually, and so too may the mystery of the British big cat. h'or many years, but especially during the last twenty years, reports have been made by apparently sane citizens of big cats seen lurking in the undergrowth - usually described as pumas or panthers (the same animal, also known as the mountain lion), but occasionally other species are named such as the lion or cheetah. I'hese reports do not appear in isolation, but in waves. T'he so-called ‘Surrey puma’ is perhaps the best-known example, with hundreds of reports received by police during the early 1960s from rural Surrey and adjoining Hampshire, and sporadic reports continue to be made from this area. 'I'here is hardly an area of mainland Britain (also the Isle of Wight!) from which reports have not come, but in recent years they have most often come from Exmoor (Somerset/Devon border), the Inverness area, and Caithness; also. Ayrshire, Nottinghamshire, Cheshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Sussex, Kent, Devon, Powys, Dyfed and Glamorgan.
I'he evidence that big cats are living wild in Britain is now overwhelming, yet still not officially accepted - perhaps because it is feared that people would panic if they were told that big cats are on the loose in large numbers. However, these cats generally avoid human habitations and certainly will not attack humans unless provoked. 'Phe reason why they are being seen more often now is in part likely to be due to the fact that there are less wilderness areas for them to inhabit, as humans steadily encroach into the untouched countryside. They may also come close to settlements in search of food, especially if they are breeding successfully and thus increasing their numbers. They are thought to live mainly on wild creatures such as rabbits, though sheep are sometimes killed in a manner suggestive of cats, and on such occasions the creatures get wide publicity, especially if sighted, as happened in the early 1980s on Exmoor when many savage attacks on sheep and lambs were suffered, behaviour untypical of the British big cat.
.As with any alien creature, the Establishment demands a corpse before it will take the reports seriously. The big cats are too cautious to be easily killed or trapped (on Exmoor armed Marines specially called in were unsuccessful) but it has happened. 'I'here have been several reports over the decades of huntsmen and farmers killing unidentifiable animals, but they always disposed of the corpse and the killing has only become known to researchers vears later. In 1980 a farmer at Cannich near Inverness actually managed to trap a fully grown female puma in a cage, but experts stated that the cat was tame and had never lived in the wild! Four years later the stuffed body of a black cat shot in Morayshire in 1982 was examined by scientists at the Natural History Museum in London and identified as a Scottish wild cat, not a puma, but they were baffled because of its colour - wild cats are tabby, definitely not black. 'Phey decided it must be a rare melanistic (black) mutation. Interest-inglv, black pumas are now frequently reported in the States, although pumas are not usually black and naturalists declare that black ones are very rare. 'Phere are known to be other black wild cats breeding in the area of Scotland where this cat and two others were shot. Phis melanistic wild cat does not however explain the many sightings of non-black cats in areas where wild cats are not native, such as Surrey, and the big cats reported are much bigger than wild cats. 'Phe search for an answer, and preferablv further corpses, will continue, headed by naturalist Di P'rancis whose book Cat Country describes many intriguing encounters with these UFOs - unidentified furry objects. We also wrote about the big cats, along with lake monsters, in our earlier book Alien Animals.
A comparison between a plaster cast of a zoo puma's paw print (right) and one of the prints of the Iunstead Monster, found near Godaiming (Surrey) on 7 September 1964.
UFOs, ghosts and alien animals are not the only mysteries
Still occurring in Britain today. In our next book, Modern British Mysteries, we shall also describe sightings of ball lightning and phantom black dogs, mysterious deaths and disappearances, falls of fishes, frogs, ice and other unexpected objects from the sky, unidentified humming noises, phantom armies, out-of-place animals such as porcupines, raccoons, wallabies, crocodiles and boars, spontaneous human combustion, teleportation, toads and frogs embedded in rocks, and many other strange phenomena reliably reported in the twentieth century in Britain.
World History
