The Day IT Landed ?
IF YOU THOUGHT that UFOs were things only pilots, 'nuts', or Americans saw -- on lonely, untravelled roads -- think again! For on September 2nd, 1967, at least eight people (two women and six children) saw something in the Bentilee sky which could only be described as 'unEarthly'....
It all began just after 9pm when a group of children were playing outside a house on Beverley Drive, opposite Wendling Close, when one of them noticed a strange, brightly glowing object in the night sky.
"There's a flying saucer!" shouted one of them, a David McCue. And then the first of the two women came onto the scene.
"Look at that thing in the sky!" shouted a Mrs Stevenson to her neighbour, Mrs Bowen.
The object travelled above the rooftops, over the Close, towards the fields behind. Said Mrs Stevenson, in an interview with UFO researchers Stanway & Pace afterwards, "It was a scarlet glow and dome-shaped.... It was like a wind when it came over but there was no sound."
According to the author of the book "UFO: Flying Saucers Over Britain" (Robert Chapman, Mayflower Paperbacks 1974/75) -- from which most of this information has been gleaned -- all the eye-witnesses were agreed about the general shape of the object: dull, orange-coloured disc with a dome that glowed such an intensely bright red that, according to Mrs Stevenson, the entire field "looked as though it was on fire -- like a bonfire."
Running toward the spot where the UFO was thought to have landed, the children and two women (the latter now with the protection of a dog) were prevented from getting too close because of marshy ground. Fear, though, slowly overcame curiosity, and the women turned back to call the police.
Unfortunately, when they arrived, the object had gone, 'hedge-hopping from one field to the next, before "going out"'. The subsequent police search proved fruitless, and they gave up, according to the book, "laughing and joking about the whole business". But as they left a man called out from an upper window saying he could see a bright yellowy light rising from the fields. Later the police agreed they'd seen the light, but said it had "gone out as they turned to look at it", and dismissed it as probably just a car headlight.
Researchers returning six months later though concluded that indeed an object had been seen, by multiple eye-witnesses, that the object had caused the on-lookers fear and anxiety, and that all who'd seen it were agreed that it was something "completely unknown in their experience and could not be explained."
Copyright The Bentilean 1999
Back to: The Contents Page | The Archive | The Bentilean Main Page
The Best of... Contents