It was a Sunday sometime in the midsummer of 1978. I was writing plays at the time, and I had a play being performed at the Shepherds Bush Theatre, only a four-minute bus ride away from where I lived in Notting Hill. Lots of lively people were always passing through my flat (they still do!) in the Portobello Road, but on this Sunday no one called and the telephone did not ring. I felt a bit out on a limb, which is an unusual feeling for me. I decided to go to the theatre and see my play. I did this several times during the week as a playwright learns a lot seeing his own work being performed.
I got to the theatre only to find it dark and closed. I felt like an idiot, because of course I should have realized that there were no performances on a Sunday.
I traveled back to Notting Hill Gate by bus and got off the bus still feeling out on a limb. I crossed the road to the Coronet Cinema and saw advertised a film entitled “Salon Kitty.†I blush to recall – this was a soft porn film about Nazis and prostitutes. I got my ticket and sat there watching this piece of crap and asking myself whether I had finally reached the age where I went into cinemas alone to watch soft porn films!
The film finished round 11.10 pm. It was now dark, and I bought some cat food from a local store and started on the five-minute walk home. I reached my house and was about to turn right into the yard from the pavement when I saw a bright white light in the sky above me. It was raised 20 degrees elevation from the horizontal plane, and was about as big as an outstretched fist, and it was moving very slowly.
It was a most peculiar white light. If it had been say, a searchlight of that power and intensity it would have blinded me; I would have put my hands over my eyes and fallen to the ground.
But no, it was quite pleasurably hypnotic, and it went straight to the back of my head. Almost as if the light had prompted me to do so, I turned to the left and looked in the sky above Powis Square, a play-park in front of my house in Colville Terrace.
I then saw something that I have not forgotten to this day. In the sky above Powis Square was a World War 2 Lancaster bomber no less, hovering dark, silent and quite still over the square, its nose pointing west. There were no lights on it, and its four propellers were not turning.
At this point I decided to call for help. I have to explain something here. At the time I had a third-floor flat in the house I refer to. I had a girlfriend (we will call her Barbara) who lived in the basement flat of this same house. Seeing her lights on to my right, I shouted to her. She came out, and started to mount the basement stairs to come up to street level. I remember thinking at the time in a panic-stricken kind of way that if when Barbara reached the top of those steps she did not see what I was seeing, then I was hallucinating or someone had slipped me something.
Then she saw the bomber, lit ghost-like by the original light which had now diminished somewhat. Her jaw dropped and she was a very frightened woman.
The bomber-shape now began to move to the northwest as the light diminished.
To the utter astonishment of us both, the bomber now began to change shape. It changed (“morphed†we would say today) into a huge triangle that disappeared rapidly to the northwest.
In the sky high above the black triangle there now appeared a much smaller light than the first light, which had now almost faded to nothing. This second light raced across the sky in the same direction as the disappearing black triangle. Another even smaller light came out of this light, and executed some six complete cycles of a sine wave.
The entire display then disappeared, rather like a light bulb being switched off.
Speechless, we got into Barbara’s flat. As soon as I went into her living room, horror struck me. There was man in black sitting on her settee!
At first, at least, he was “explained.†He told me that Barbara had kindly let him in order to wait for James, who lived upstairs and was not at home. The MIB was a handsome man, about fifty years old and well built. He wore an immaculate suit and tie, with a lion’s mane of tawny blond hair over a large head. He was very well spoken and he moved and gestured rather like a rather old-fashioned stage actor. He said that his connection with James was through Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
The MIB, on seeing two pale-faced people who obviously did not want to talk much, decided not to stay and wait any longer and politely took his leave. I could not understand at the time why Barbara (a most cautious and very straight woman) had let in a total stranger in the first place.
Here I have to enter a personal note. As I said, Barbara was my girlfriend at the time, and though I had a third-floor flat, on most nights I usually stayed with her in her basement flat. But this night, in a state of shock, we parted without saying much after the MIB had gone. I suppose both of us wanted to be alone for a while. This struck me as unusual because frightened people usually want to stay together.
I collected my cats from the yard and took them to my flat upstairs. I opened the tins of cat food, and put the food in the cat’s dishes. It was when I straightened up from bending down to do this that I nearly fainted with a terrible realization.
I had lost some time!
It was still only 11.10.
By this time it should have been approximately 11.35.
Of course I did any and every kind of time check: Phone, radio, TV (there were no personal computers then). I phoned the cinema manager and he confirmed the time the film finished. I checked with other tenants in the building. I again went through my rough calculations. No matter how I calculated, I knew I had lost half an hour between leaving the cinema and the ending of the experience.
At this point I should say that I took the kind of decision that can cause accusations of falsehood, deceit and deception. I decided not to rush downstairs and tell Barbara about the missing time, since she was most upset about the incident. I should add here that Barbara was a dour physics graduate with little imagination and sense of the ridiculous.
The next day I saw James, and remarked that he had missed his AA friend the night previous. Puzzled, he asked me about this friend, and I described his appearance. My head spun again when James said he had no such friend as described, adding that there was no such person in the AA groups he attended.
Needless to say this was the second piece of information I kept from Barbara. I did note that James, though of much smaller build, was also very well spoken and he also moved and gestured rather like a rather old-fashioned stage actor.
The follow-through was profoundly disappointing: no dreams, no disturbing recall of aliens, no indications of an abduction-type experience. And nothing remotely like it has happened to me since.
The relationship between Barbara and I broke up almost immediately due to this incident. It was as if she now regarded me as some kind of witching person who had done something terrible to her. I had become a spider who had trapped her in a drama of conflicting explanation structures. For the rest of her life Barbara knew that she would have a broken world-structure in her hands. Naturally, she moved away from yours truly as fast as she could. Barbara, by the highest standards was a brilliantly intelligent woman, but like most scientists, she was ill equipped to deal with this kind of experience. Relativity having not yet settled in as a common cultural reference, Barbara had great difficulty applying her imposed Cartesian/Newtonian framework to the levels of absurdity that she had encountered.
After 25 years I still see Barbara occasionally along the Portobello Road. But she now hurries by me, and according to reports, the man she married eventually once asked her why she appeared to be afraid of me. She said I was “strange,†and left it at that. Her husband (not a very bright or inquisitive fellow I am afraid to say) shrugged his shoulders and forgot about the matter.
We live now in an age where the clocks and measuring rods of late 19th century mechanism are being translated into streams of information which have a life almost of their own. These streams consist mostly of powerful images generated by media and entertainment in which “fact†in the mechanical sense plays little or no part at all. Mythological engineering now plays a part in Western societies equal to that of mechanical engineering, and in many cases the two (such as Star Trek) are mutually supportive. Yet the “hard†physical sciences do not yet understand the equations of Marshall McLuhan, despite the cognitive lens of which I spoke of earlier undergoing changes of focus, definition, and organization. By ratio and comparison we have subjected stone-age cultures to this kind of experience. We would be fools indeed if we thought that it could not happen to ourselves in turn.
It took me some time to realize just how complex my UFO experience was. It had a subtle psycho-mythological substrate. When I discovered this, I was quite shaken by the implications. I had seen a mythological animal, no less. Not a unicorn or a white rabbit with a pocket watch, but a mythological creature for a technological Age: a Lancaster bomber, of all things. Why is such a thing mythological? Because this aircraft was once was a flying lance of freedom, a piece of Britain’s sacred electro-mechanical muscle, just as symbolic as the lance of St George and engaged in an equally desperate life and death struggle with a dragon.
What I saw was a multi-faceted information-based phenomenon, and its mystical unity came complete with a shooting star above it, no less!
All of this, of course, was not felt consciously by me at the time: This interpretation came as a result of the deconstruction of the experience itself in bits and pieces over the years that passed afterwards. It was only after some years had passed that I began to realize how rich in lore and symbols was the experience.
To myself now, years later, this UFO was a liminal object that is something whose “existence†lies between fact and fiction, like an Escher drawing. I am now aware that indeed there were other structured levels involving time, destiny, and personality besides an “objective†component.
I have analyzed the major features of this experience as follows:
(1) The folklore content. The transfer from the myths of pre-technological Age (knights on horseback) to the Lancaster, a “modern†construct.
(2) The National/historical element. This aircraft represented no less than the saving of the National life.
(3) Personal factor. I had seen a film about Nazis approximately some 20 minutes before the sighting.
(4) The screening filter. I applied some screening myself as what I thought at the time was a necessary measure. I did not tell Barbara about the missing time, nor did I tell her about James not knowing the MIB. What I was being screened from in turn is anybody’s guess.
(5) Atmosphere. Just like the one-minute’s silence before the bugles sound at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. Although there was no sound, there was also the feeling I had when the only Lancaster still flying appeared on the Hyde Park horizon in 1995 during the 50th Anniversary of D Day. I had the feeling that all our lives had been saved by such things as this aircraft.
(6) The spectacular hi-tech “alien†manifestation of an ancient almost holy thing such as a Lancaster. I had also the creepy feeling that this “hi-tech†dimension was designed for the framework of my human understanding.
(7) The “objective†content. The UFO moved, accelerated, had a shape-change, and was accompanied by no less than three kinds of light phenomenon. As I have said, I had a witness not normally disposed to the appreciation of such things.
All of these elements form a powerful multi-dimensional information construct in terms of images and situations. Instead of pods on stilts with insect brains, the “aliens†(and what I saw was certainly not of this world) gave this holistic dimension as “communication.†I had always rejected what I always thought to be the hopelessly crude Victorian Station Master’s idea of detecting “signaling codes†from outer space by electromagnetic emanations. This mechanical metaphor was derived from an Age of lighthouses and railways and postal services and a box-like Euclidean space in which parcels and passengers traveled in quantifiable numbers and units from point A to point B. According to the Theory of Relativity, this would surely result in the greatest dead-letter box of all time. The novelist Hermann Melville’s character, Bartleby (whose whole personality was annihilated by working in a dead-letter office of mere Earthlike proportions) would be doubly amazed.
Certainly my “encounter†convinced me that we live in a vaster framework of being and existence than we could possibly imagine. I had the sobering thought that this manifestation was the kind of thing George Adamski and many others saw. This kind of technology, not far removed from holographic TV, could produce a “man from Venus†at the drop of a hat. It would be an equally sobering experience for scientists to find that their discoveries were part of a multi-dimensional media/gaming entertainment system of many levels of focus, development, and application.
The model in my mind which emerged from this experience is that of an islander from a far-flung Pacific culture that has not invented weaving or the wheel, waking up one morning and seeing a sail-rigged ship with paddle wheels and a single funnel pouring smoke into the sky.
I was that islander, and by analogy, and with a little tribal re-scaling, I think I saw such a ship.
Twenty-five years later I was to write a book about George Adamski, Looking for Orthon. I think the book began that night in Powis Square.
Colin Bennett
About Colin Bennett: Colin Bennett was born in Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, within arrow-shot of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle. He left school after studying science and mathematics, became a professional musician, then a mercenary soldier before winning a scholarship to read English at Balliol College, University of Oxford.
After leaving Oxford, he had several plays performed on the professional stage in London including the Royal Court Theatre before retraining as an electronics engineer to cure what he calls “a bad dose of left-liberal decadence.†After his reconstruction, he then ran his own electronics consultancy and printing firm. He has had two novels published, and now lives within a spear-throw of Portobello Road, London, and hopes he has done with reconstructions. He is frequently consulted on security, conspiracies, and computer hacking. He now heads a team who spend all their time running the Combat Diaries web sitehttp://www.combat-diaries.co.uk/.
He is the author of Looking for Orthon (Paraview Press) a biography of George Adamski. His following book, on the life work, and ideas of Charles Fort, was Politics of the Imagination (Head Press). This won the Anomalist Award for Best Biography, 2002.
His third biography is due out in March 2005. This is An American Demonology (Head Press) the story of Captain Edward Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book in the early 1950s. This Project was the official United States Air Force investigation into the UFO phenomenon. Both the above books are available on Amazon.
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TWO BOOKS BY COLIN BENNETT BELOW:
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