STRANGE LIGHTS AROUND
THE A428
Steve Gamble
(This article is adapted from "Research Update" which appeared in the UFO Times, No 9, Sep 1990, pp13-16, published by BUFORA.)
One of the other projects mentioned in my 1998
The main aim of the project is to make an intensive study of UFO reports for
the
The outcome of the project will be a catalogue of all known events between
1950 and the present day. There are, of course, some reports earlier than 1950.
Also over the years the
My role in the project is to collate the information as it is collected. The fieldwork is carried out by Ernest Still (who as well as being a BUFORA Investigator is also Secretary of NUFORC) together with Cassie Pollock, Ray Shaw and Paul Edwards. At the time of writing we have discovered in the region of 200 reports. Over the years the newspaper clippings include a number of references to BUFORA and NUFORC as well as references to other local UFO groups which have since disappeared.
Supporting Evidence
A number of the clippings relate to reports that were already known to us.
Others provide additional supporting evidence for previously known cases or
provide pointers to other cases. To a certain extent an attempt will be made to
reinvestigate cases where there is little or confusing information. In addition
to the press cuttings a number of UFO journals and books have been checked for
cases. In addition to the BUFORA publications back issues of Spacelink, Gemini,
This research has shown up an area that might be a local UFO
"hotspot". This is around the villages of Little and Great Houghton.
These two villages are about two thirds of a mile apart on either side of the
main
Also we have been able to add a small amount of additional information on
the earlier two cases. The first of Jenny's cases concerns a young man driving
home to
Little Houghton is now
about quarter of a mile off of the current A428 and is on a small hill. The
clock is on the front of the church and is not directly visible from the A428.
It appears that to see the clock the driver would have had to havepassed
through the village and may have taken a more northerly route. In some places
the A428 has been straightened over the last few years, so it was important to
check if in 1973 the road ran through the village. The road through the village
looked too narrow to have ever been the main road. But a local resident was
able to confirm that until the mid 1970s the A428 had followed the narrow road
through the village.
Similarly in the second
case (BUFORA case number 83-035) we attempted to make contact with the witness
because it is possible that he was nearer Great Houghton rather than Little
Houghton, i.e. some two thirds of a mile from where the encounter was
originally thought to have taken place. Unfortunately this was not very clear
from the original report. Again the witness would have been marginally more
northerly than original thought, close to the
Of course there are many of these small round white lights to be found in
the UFO literature. For example, Jacques and Janine Vallee (Challenge to
Science, Tandem, 1967,page 118) describe such a light chased by the pilot of a
Mustang F-51 near
What about other reports from the Little/Great Houghton and A428 areas?
In August1960 Geoffrey Gayton of Little Houghton reported seeing from his
back garden a yellow round object coming from the west (Northampton Chronicle
& Echo, 22nd August 1960). Mr and Mrs Brown travelling along the
A428 (not A824 as originally published) towards
Without further investigation it is not possible to identify a cause of
these light phenomena. The reports, at least at first glance, all seem to show
round objects travelling along a west-northwest to east-southeast path. A
number of years ago Roy Dutton did some work which seemed to show that a number
of UFOs followed power lines, railway lines and rivers. The remains of the old
If these round UFOs were some form of charged atmospheric phenomenon, for example generated by Paul Devereux's Piezo-electric effect or the charged vortices Terence Meaden proposes as the agent causing crop field circles (see G.T. Meaden "The Circles Effect and its Mysteries", Artetech Publishing, 1989) then the above mentioned features might cause enough variation in the local electrical field to make the area attractive to this type of phenomenon.
There are other reports of UFOs following powerlines; for example, the Chronicle & Echo of 23rd April 1980 carried an item concerning a man who saw a round black object during the day near Long Buckby. The object was described as following the line of electricity pylons. It is unlikely that charged spheres could account for all the sightings in Northamptonshire. It is, however, possible that they are responsible at least in part for this particular subset of the reports.
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