It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard. This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.
Here are the basics of the claim.
In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above. It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles. "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported. "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones." Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside. There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation). But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."
Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.
At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds. At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road. But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close. Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel." The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.
But the incident wasn't over yet. As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack." "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."
A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force. Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place. I could hear an odd humming tone. It was most unusual. It lasted no more than a minute."
All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.
Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.
There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds. People reported flocks of birds being found dead. "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported. "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow. It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."
This time, though, people began seeing things as well.
Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars. Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky. Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it. It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall. It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it. It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."
By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:
By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965. He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.
So, what's going on here?
There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them. The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster. The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.
A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts." Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect." It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life. He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing. They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.
Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.
In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth. (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here. I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)
So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory. When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.
Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation. Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.
The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident. That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.
The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything. We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category. Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965. Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria." But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.
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