A former Ministry of Defence (MoD) investigator has revisited the case of the Warminster Thing as the town marks the 60th anniversary of the first sightings.
Nick Pope worked in what was known as the government’s ‘UFO desk’ between 1991 and 1994. His job was to research reports of strange sights in the sky and deem if they had any defence significance. His research soon brought him to the so-called ‘Warminster Thing.’
Nick said, “Once I was posted to the UFO desk I made it my business to go back through the archives. The MOD had been looking at UFOs since World War II, they’d even had sightings reported by pilots on bombing raids. There were hundreds of files going back decades and I wanted to know the backstory to these sightings.
“I started reading and it wasn’t long until I hit Warminster and the ‘Warminster Thing.’ I became aware the town was, really, the first UFO hotspot in the UK. There was something truly extraordinary going on in and around Warminster in the sixties. I was mystified.”
Arthur Shuttlewood, former features writer at the Warminster Journal, reported on a woman’s shock after she witnessed ‘sudden vibrations’ and a ‘menacing sound’ in the sky above the town in 1965. By June, reports were coming in from witnesses across the town about unexplainable sights at night.
Rumours soon spread of a ‘thing’ in the sky and a photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner, which shows what appears to be a grainy flying saucer, was handed to Shuttlewood. He in turn sent it to the Daily Mirror which printed the photo in September 1965 and brought the Warminster Thing to a national audience.
Nick, who spoke to the Warminster Journal over Zoom from his home in Tucson, Arizona, continued, “With most UFO sightings, we think of them as one-off events. Someone sees something, they report it, it is investigated and you find an explanation or you don’t.
“But with the Warminster Thing, you have an entire community where dozens if not hundreds of people are experiencing things. It becomes a news story and builds up such a critical mass that the mainstream media run with it, TV cameras come down and public meetings are held. It pushes it [the sighting] over the line and it becomes something else.
“One theory points to military exercises, like low flying planes dropping flares, as well as meteorological activity. Both can look ‘spooky’ to people who aren’t used to this activity. If you stumble upon something like that at night, it might look out of this world.
“But nobody at any point turned around and said to the people of Warminster, ‘this is what you saw.’ We still don’t know what really happened, it’s not case closed.
“Personally, my first impression when I read about the Warminster Thing was that something really bizarre had happened. But I knew instinctively that we would never get a definitive explanation. Memories fade, things get lost, the trail has gone cold.”
Nick, who has been branded ‘a real-life Fox Mulder’ in the past due to his work on UFOs, visited Warminster in 2010 to give a talk in the Athenaeum Theatre about the Warminster Thing. He has fond memories still of that experience.
He added, “Everyone here in the US has heard of the Roswell incident, whether you’re a sceptic or a believer. The first time I physically went to Roswell I saw it through a completely different lens. That was the same experience I had when I went to Warminster. I was actually there, at ground zero. I looked into the audience, particularly at some of the older people there, and thought to myself ‘some of these people probably lived through the Warminster Thing.’
“It was a two-way-street. I was there to give a talk about my MOD research, but I was also in listen mode after the presentation. I was staying at the Old Bell, a wonderful hotel and pub in Warminster, and spoke with a group late into the night over a few local ales. The year 2010 was decades after ‘The Thing’ but in a sense, it’s still a part of the town and can never be undone.
“That mystery is always going to be there. Time passes and perhaps it means less to people these days. But even now, if you stop someone in street and ask them about the Warminster Thing there is a chance they could say ‘Oh, yes…’ and start telling you all about their thoughts.”
Picture: Nick Pope, Credit Chris Loomis Photography.
