Return of Spring-heeled Jack?

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Dr David Clarke

Spring-heeled Jack, the legendary bogeyman familiar to students of British folklore, has been invoked by news of an extraordinary experience with a road ghost in Surrey.

Scott Martin and his family told the Surrey Comet they were confronted by a ‘dark figure with no features’ that vaulted over a dual carriageway and over a 15ft bank whilst on a taxi ride home late on Tuesday, 14 February.

The experience left Scott, his wife and four-year-old son Sonny shocked whilst the taxi-driver ‘admitted he didn’t want to drive back alone’ along the Ewell bypass near Epsom afterwards.

Scary stuff! Mr Martin, 40, who lives in Banstead, told the paper how initially they paid no attention when the figure appeared by the road. But ‘…the next thing he jumped over the centre fencing…and ran across two lanes. On the side of our road is a bank easily 15ft in height and this figure crossed the road, climbed this bank and was gone from sight all in about two seconds.’

Mr Martin described the figure as ‘dark…with no real features, but fast in movement with an ease of hurdling obstacles I’ve never seen. My last image was of him going through the bushes at the top of the bank. I’m not usually one to be freaked…but the cab driver was petrified.’

The Martin’s experience is of course a classic extraordinary experience with a ‘road ghost’ of the phantom jaywalker type. Other examples are the ‘phantom hitch-hiker’ at Blue Bell Hill in Kent and the infamous Stocksbridge by-pass ghost in South Yorkshire, described in see my paper here.  However this part of Surrey is not, as far as I’m aware, associated with a haunting tradition of this type, nor have the police received other reports of ‘unusual incidents or sightings in the area at night’. It will be interesting to see if publication of this report produces a rash of similar phantom jaywalker accounts.

As for Spring-heeled Jack, the newspaper account says ‘the family has since likened the figure to the legendary figure reported to be responsible for a string of attacks in the 1800s and known for his ability to leap great heights.’  After a brief summary of the SHJ legend it adds that the last ‘sighting’ was in Birmingham in 1986!

But as recent research into the Victorian newspaper archives has made clear, there was no one identifiable person called ‘Spring-heeled Jack’. Rather he was a frightening figure, an archetype: ‘part ghost, part bogeyman, part mystery assailant’, whose name and disguise was adopted by a range of human imitators in the century that followed his reign of terror in Victorian London.

As this Surrey story shows, the leaping legend continues to live on in the collective memory 175 years after his name was first uttered….

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More UFOlogy in a pond

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Dr David Clarke

Sightings of an underwater ‘saucer’ that resembles the legendary Loch Ness Monster are creating waves in the Lake District. It’s not the first time that a mysterious creature – dubbed ‘Bownessie’ – has been sighted in the waters of Windermere. As is also the case in UFOlogy, there are reports from ‘credible witnesses’ and even photographic evidence that some believe provide evidence that such creatures could exist.

A BBC news story includes both types of narrative, followed by the appearance of a skeptical scientist, Dr Ian Winfield, who has studied the lake for the past 20 years. He says the only living creatures in the lake that could have been seen are pike, salmon and otters. These are, of course, the equivalent of the balloons, stars and aircraft that frequently lead to UFO reports.

Which brings to mind a response that Lord Mountbatten once received when he asked the MoD’s Chief Scientist, Solly Zuckerman, if the government should investigate flying saucers. Lord Zuckerman was a naturalist and former president of the Royal Zoological Society. His response was to draw a comparison with the Loch Ness Monster.

“Here we have a submarine ‘saucer’ which has been seen by many people but which, so far, has never been seen when somebody goes to look for it,” he wrote.

“If all the resources of modern science [that have been deployed] at Loch Ness failed to provide any indication of the beast, we still won’t know there is no monster, although the likelihood is that most sensible people will take the view that the whole story is a myth.

“But those people who wish to go on believing in Loch Ness Monsters [and Bownessies – DC] will be able to do so on no more solid a foundation than disbelief in modern methods of observation. So it is with ‘flying saucers’.”

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Worryingly big sea monsters

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Dr David Clarke

Last week it was UFOlogy in a Field. This week it’s UFOlogy in a pond.

No, I’m not talking about the ‘submarine saucer’ (Nessie), but a subject I’ve mentioned elsewhere in my blog on ‘Sea Monster Files.‘   Two years ago one S. Darby, who described himself as a marine biologist, made a Freedom of Information request to the MoD that asked if there were ‘any abnormally large or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea that haven’t been revealed to the public.’

Naturally, he was concerned that if such information was held by the Royal Navy it should be released as ‘our lives could be at risk.’

In their 2010 response, the Navy denied it was hiding any secret evidence of sea monsters or unidentified submarine objects (USOs). Any ‘unusual sightings’, it explained, would be recorded in the logs of submarines and surface ships but these could not be unearthed without a costly search of hundreds of paper files.

After a short flurry of Press interest, Mr Darby disappeared back into the subterranean depths.  At the time I wondered if he really was a marine biologist. Could he be a vexatious leg (or flipper)-puller of the type who want to know if Liverpool has an emergency plan to deal with ‘alien invasion’ (Liverpool Echo, August 2011)?

But this week Mr Darby was back, posting on the What Do They Know? website that aggregates information gathered by those who make FOI requests. In his follow-up request Mr Darby asked:

‘Following the recent discovery of a ‘supergiant crustacean‘, reaching a staggering 34cm in length and found 7 km under the ocean, my concerns have been reinvigorated. Hence I again pose the question, are there any abormally large or dangerous sea monsters in the deep sea?’

The swift reply from the Navy Command says ‘MoD invites people to report sightings of marine mammals (which could include unusual sightings), via the Marine Mammal reporting form on the UK Hydrographic Office website.’   In other words, there’s a form for everything! Much like MoD used to invite people to report sightings of ‘flying saucers’ by filling in a form helpfully provided by its ‘UFO desk.’  A word of warning to the Hydrographic Office: The UFO desk was closed in 2009 after a tabloid silly season campaign persuaded some readers that formations of Chinese lanterns in the night sky were an ‘alien invasion fleet’ that required urgent MoD action.

Who knows, maybe there are ‘worryingly big sea monsters’ that pose a menace to marine biologists.

But I suspect this story should be placed in the same category as the one about ‘alien big cats’ on the loose in the British countryside, or frozen alien cadavers hidden away in a remote air force hangar in New Mexico.  All sound like contemporary legends to me.

Worryingly big sea monsters?:  UFOlogy in a Pond.

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UFOlogy in a Field

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Dr David Clarke

Scientific tests have ruled out the possibility that big cats were responsible for the deaths of two roe deers whose remains were found in Gloucestershire.

What’s that got to do with UFOs?  Well apart from the fact that some ‘independent thinkers’ blame such mysterious deaths on ET, UFOlogy and big cat-ology shares quite a lot of common ground.

Reduced to its basic constituents, what we have are a large number of ‘credible witnesses’ who claim to have seen extraordinary things (a leopard or black panther, presumably wearing thermals, on the loose in rural Gloucestershire).

As is the case with UFOlogists, those who believe that ABCs (alien big cats) exist point to so-called ‘physical evidence’ (animal carcasses, footprints, etc) as proof. When such ‘evidence’ is discovered it leads to great excitement. Journalists spread the story, bringing others out of the woodwork who have seen big cats, so the mystery increases.

But then results from DNA tests on the carcasses of two roe deers, commissioned by the National Trust, come back negative. The tests found evidence of foxes, but no trace of anything on vacation from the Serengeti. How many times have we been presented with dodgy UFO photos and ‘evidence’ (such as the notorious wind-farm propeller struck by an ET craft), that dissolves when placed under critical scrutiny.

UFOs and big cat-logy has another similarity. The Government (in the form of Natural England) says there aren’t any big cats, despite mountains of ‘eyewitness’ evidence to the contrary. And there’s even a faction within the big cat fraternity who believe the government secretly know that big cats exist but are covering up the truth because they don’t want people to panic.

Sounds familiar?  UFOlogy in a field.

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New for 2012!

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Dr David Clarke

I’m bringing in 2012 with two new books and the cover story in Fortean Times in what should prove to be an interesting year.

If the doomsayers are correct we should expect the coming year to bring (in no particular order) ‘the end of the Mayan calendar’, shifts in the Earth’s magnetic pole, Eurogeddon and an alien invasion at the opening of the Olympics.

But while you prepare for Armageddon check out the lead story in Fortean Times 284, published on 5 January, for some light relief. In my feature ‘Scared to Death’ I investigate a fatal encounter with a ghost in 19th century Sheffield and look at other Victorian examples of alleged ‘death by supernatural causes’.  In the same issue Andy Roberts and I unearth a new case from the UFO archives in which a Yorkshire police officer was visited by the mysterious ‘Men in Black’.

Also new for 2012 are two chapters in a ‘history of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes’ published in the USA by McFarland & Co. That’s the subtitle of The Martians Have Landed! the latest from the sceptical pen of Robert Bartholomew and Ben Radford. This book features case studies of three dozen media-driven scares from the 17th to the 21stcentury, including some notorious hoaxes perpetrated by newspapers, radio, TV and via cyberspace.  There are historical examples such as the Orson Welles Martian broadcast and accounts of more recent Satanic cult scares and Pokemon panics. The book highlights the serious impact sensational media coverage of hoaxes and false belief-legends can have on our lives.

My contribution to the book concentrates on media-driven urban legends, including miraculous photographs of Jesus and the infamous ‘curse of the crying boy’ painting, spawned by News International’s tabloid The Sun in 1985. Co-author Bartholomew taught sociology at universities in Australia and is a former journalist, while Ben Radford is deputy editor of The Skeptical Inquirer and a prolific author of numerous articles on a variety of topics including urban legends, critical thinking and media literacy.

2012 will also see the publication of a new edition of my book The UFO Files – The Inside Story of Real Life Sightings. Published in the summer of 2012 by Bloomsbury, who acquired The National Archives list last year, the expanded version will mark the release of the last remaining MoD UFO files. The book first appeared at the beginning of the disclosure programme four years ago and the second edition will update the story and include much new material.  Watch this space for more details.

Since I began work as consultant to The National Archives UFO project in 2008 media coverage of the ongoing file releases has reached an estimated print/online readership of 25 million people across the world. If those figures were not amazing enough, the TNA’s UFO website has now been visited over three million times by curious people from 160 different countries (source: TNA).

Public interest in ‘Britain’s X-Files’ appears to be undiminished and during the coming year it may yet break more records. In the meantime, look out for me discussing the UFO files on the BBC TV programmes Stargazing Live (presented by Professor Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain) and The One Show in January.

Ignore the doomsayers and have a happy new year!

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Roswell? It’s all balloony, says RAF

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Dr David Clarke

First the White House formally denied it was hiding any secret evidence of visits from extra-terrestrials.

Now it seems the Royal Air Force has made it known that one of UFOlogy’s key legends – that a flying saucer crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 – was a Cold War military experiment after all.

This revelation came not from a Top Secret document, but in an educational display at the RAF’s Cold War museum at RAF Cosford, near Wolverhampton.

On a recent visit to the museum, which features all three of Britain’s surviving V-bomber force, I came across a familiar photograph on a display covering aerial espionage during the early part of the Cold War.

It was taken at Fort Worth, Texas, on 8 July 1947 and shows Major Jesse Marcel holding pieces of debris recovered from a ranch in the New Mexico desert. This was less than 24 hours after the Army Air Force announced it had recovered the wreckage of a “crashed flying saucer”, a statement quickly retracted and replaced with the cover story that it was a weather balloon.

The RAF caption agrees with the USAF conclusion that the wreckage was from a balloon after all, but not an ordinary balloon:

“This was an unsuccessful experiment to use balloons carrying instruments to detect Soviet nuclear tests which led to claims of a spaceship having been found.”

It is evident the British military played a role in these and later ‘experiments’ as the display also features images of the giant helium-filled balloons used for more extensive espionage operations targeting Soviet facilities during the 1950s.

The joint USAF/RAF Project Moby Dick employed balloons as tall as a 20-storey building, carrying gondolas packed with photographic equipment. The cameras took one photograph every six minutes in strips 65 km wide by 3100 km long. This operation, like that which led to the Roswell incident, was classified.

Moby Dick was abandoned in 1957 without significant success; by that point balloons had been replaced by Black Project aircraft such as the Lockheed U2.

Such is the level of distrust attached to all official statements on the subject of UFOs and Roswell that the RAF’s conclusion will be treated as just another example of the cosmic Watergate to conceal ‘the truth.’

In November the US Government responded to online petitions calling on the Obama administration to disclose evidence of “an extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.”  As neither the US government or the scientific community has any such evidence, whatever it said was unlikely to make any impression upon the faith of those who wish to believe otherwise. Or, in the words of a British MoD official who briefed on a similar campaign in 1958:

“As it is not possible to release official information about something which does not exist, it is difficult to satisfy those with preconceived ideas to the contrary.” (TNA DEFE 31/118).

One final irony is that RAF Cosford itself now has a secure place in the UFO mythology, thanks to a classic “sighting” of lights in the sky made by military personnel at the base in the early hours of  31 March 1993. The “Cosford incident” now rivals the Roswell incident in the lists of classic UFO cases cited by some as the best evidence of ET visitations, in the UK at least.

As with Roswell, there is a perfectly good explanation for the lights seen from RAF Cosford – and once again, the Russians are in the frame. They were caused by the burning rocket body of a Russian Cosmos satellite that re-entered Earth’s atmosphere over the British Isles at the precise date and time as the “UFO sighting.”

But, to recycle a favourite phrase coined by a believer in UFOs: “you can’t tell the people.”

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Scared to Death

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Dr David Clarke

The Fortean Times Unconvention 2011 – billed as the world’s weirdest weekend – returns to London in November.

I’m on the bill for both days (12 and 13 November): on the Saturday I will be speaking about my research into a case of alleged ‘death by supernatural causes’: the death from fright of Sheffield woman Hannah Rallison in 1855, the result – so it was claimed at her inquest – of a close encounter with a ghostly woman in white.

The fatal experience will form the centre of my new book project on Victorian ghost stories, appropriately titled Scared To Death. On the Sunday, I’ll be sharing the stage with long-time sidekick Andy Roberts for a talk on cursed stones. This will examine cases where people have linked hauntings and other supernatural experiences with cult stone artefacts such as Celtic stone heads and other stone objects, such as the Hexham Heads and the Tigh nam Bodach shrine in Scotland.

In the meantime, diary columnist Colin Drury has published a pre-Halloween interview with me in my old paper, The Sheffield Star, on my research into the Rallison story. You can follow the link here or read on:

“There are few people more sceptical of the paranormal than media personnel, although they know it will always make a good story,” claims spookologist Andy Owens in his new book, Yorkshire Stories of the Paranormal. And he’s absolutely right…for while The Diary has never yet been told a ghost stories he believes, it’s certainly always worth hearing them, if only for a giggle. It is thus, in that spirit – and to celebrate Fright Night on Sunday and Halloween on Monday – here presented are a trio of South Yorkshire’s most intriguing tales of the unexplained…

Scared to Death on Campo Lane…The background:

There are certain irrefutable facts about the death of Sheffield Mormon Hannah Rallison in Campo Lane, in 1855. She collapsed in front of several people after entering a cellar said to be haunted. She claimed, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she had seen a ghost. And experts at an inquest could not find a rational explanation for the healthy 48-year-old’s sudden demise.

“This is one of the most fascinating mysteries I’ve come across,” says David Clarke, former Star journalist, author and all-round expert in the unexplained. “What’s intriguing is that, unlike many of these stories, it is all document in newspaper reports and the inquest – but still no one really knows what happened.”

What we do know is that the Campo Lane cellar – below the home of fellow Mormon John Favell – was said to be haunted after John himself claimed he spotted an old woman there. As neighbours gathered to investigate on February 24, Hannah temporarily entered the cellar alone. There, in front of several witnesses, she was seized by terror, shrieked she had seen a ghost and collapsed. She died in her South Street home the next day.

“This was all recorded as fact,” says David, who has researched the incident for an up coming book on Victorian mysteries. “It fascinated so many people it actually ended up being reported in several national newspapers at the time.”

Research by David shows that within a couple of weeks The Sheffield Independent claimed to have found an explanation. “We have been informed,” it said, “that some of the alleged appearances resulted from the operations of a magic lantern by the occupiers of adjacent premises, who knew that Favell and his family were Mormonites, and determined to have a lark at their expense.”

David asks anyone with possible information about Hannah Rallison or the Favells to email furnival.news@googlemail.co.uk

The up-coming book mentioned by Colin is my book project Scared To Death: Victorian Ghost Stories from Yorkshire. The book will include the fruits of 20 years research into the folklore of the county and primary accounts of hauntings sourced from 19th century newspapers.

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Watch Out – there’s a flying pig about!

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Dr David Clarke

Pink Floyd’s giant inflatable flying pig has appeared once again above the London skyline to celebrate the reissue of the band’s back catalogue including the classic album The Dark Side of the Moon.

The 30 foot long porker is a replica of the original stage prop that featured on the sleeve of the iconic Animals album, floating above the towers of the Battersea Power Station.  The pig was constructed in Germany by the same company that made the Zeppelins. When it was launched in December 1976 a hired marksman was on hand, armed with a rifle loaded with dum-dum bullets. But as the band and assembled photographers watched in horror, one of the guiding lines broke and the pig floated off into the sky.

This triggered off one of the strangest UFO flaps on record, courtesy of a band who cut their teeth in London’s underground UFO club during the sixties. The first sighting came from a pilot who reported having spotted a flying pig on landing at Heathrow airport. According to some reports, he was given a breath test before his sighting was taken seriously. Minutes later the pig was spotted by a police helicopter which followed it to 5,000 feet above the capital.  People in Croydon and Brixton were also watching a strange object in the sky and called the MoD to file UFO reports.

The Civil Aviation Authority put out an alert to all pilots that “a 40 foot long, pink flying pig” was on the loose over the city and it was last seen on radar near Chatham in Kent at a height of 18,000 feet, heading east towards Germany (was it a homing pig?).

Hidden within the thousands of UFO files collected by the Ministry of Defence and held by The National Archives in Kew is one curious folder titled “UFOs – 3 December 1976: Watch Out, there’s a flying pig about.”

But this UFO quickly became an Identified Flying Object. The pig came to earth in a field at Chatham in Kent and the rest is history. Pigs might fly….

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The Inconvenient Truth is Out There…

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Dr David Clarke

The truth about the British Government’s interest in UFOs has been released by The National Archives.

In what I believe to be the most important revelation so far in the British disclosure programme, the MoD’s Defence Intelligence Staff admit that “lack of funds and higher priorities” had prevented any detailed study of the thousands of reports they had received since the end of the Second World War.

The frank admission is contained in a formerly secret memo dated July 1995 and written by the UFO desk officer at DI55, the branch of the DIS responsible for the assessment of UFO reports for defence threat.  The officer – a RAF Wing Commander – concludes the lid had already been blown on secrecy surrounding defence intelligence interest in UFOs by a series of media revelations. But he said the public perception of DI55 as “defenders of the Earth from the alien menace” was “light years from the truth”. And he told his opposite number on the MoD’s public UFO desk that few people would believe the “embarrassing truth…that lack of funds and higher priorities had prevented a proper study of UFO sightings.”

Another formerly secret document produced by the head of Sec(AS), the MoD’s UFO desk, in the same year underlines the MoD’s lack of  interest in UFOs. The official admits that no research had ever been done on UFOs either by DI55 “or anyone else” and adds:

“We don’t do research into the phenomena; we haven’t done any; we only would if there were some good reason for doing so – ie. evidence of a threat.”

These embarrassing revelations led MoD to approve a DI55 plan for a retired intelligence officer to produce a report on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”  (code-named Condign) that was based upon a computerised study of UFO data. Work on the study began in 1996 and a copy of this report was released under FOIA ten years later.

The DI55 smoking gun is just one of 8,600 pages of material within 34 MoD UFO files opened on Thursday 11 August by Britain’s National Archives. Read my detailed summary of the contents here. You can listen to my interview with Sanchia Berg on BBC Radio 4 Today programme here and read a bylined feature here.

This is the eighth and possibly penultimate release of files in a rolling programme that began in 2008. Visitors to the UFO pages can download the files free of charge for the first month. By Friday 12 August the site had received more than half a million visitors and 125,000 downloads.

Other highlights include details of MoD’s continuing interest in photographs depicting “unidentified aerial phenomena”. The files include:

  • Image analysis experts working for British intelligence were asked to examine a transparency that clearly shows an “elliptical object” in the sky above Retford in Nottinghamshire – click here for details (DEFE 24/2060/1)

    UFO over Retford 2004? (Copyright A. Birch)

  • The remarkable first-hand testimony of retired RAF Fighter Controller Freddie Wimbledon on the role he played in the famous 1956 UFO incident at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. (DEFE 24/2031/1).
  • The truth about a bogus story published by two tabloid newspapers in 1998 that claimed the early warning station, RAF Fylingdales, had tracked a UFO “as big as a battleship” moving at fantastic speeds (DEFE 24/2047/1).
  • Papers on the unexplained sighting of two cigar-shaped UFOs by pilot Ray Bowyer and passengers on a Trislander aircraft near Alderney, in the Channel Islands, in April 2007 (DEFE 24/2081/1)
  • More than 70 pages of censored documents containing the MoD’s internal discussions surrounding the clearance of Nick Pope’s book Open Skies Closed Minds, published in 1996 (DEFE 24/2091/1).

All 34 files can be downloaded from The National Archives UFO page, along with a podcast I have prepared with Pennine Productions.

The release was covered extensively by print and broadcast media. Here are just a few of examples of the coverage on 11/12 August:

New York Times: ‘The Truth is Out There: UK X-Files Put Online’

British Forces News Worldwide (Top Story): ‘Secret MoD files containing UFO sightings released’ [link to broadcast footage]

BBC Radio 4 Today: ‘The Truth Isn’t Out There’; interview with Sanchia Berg on Today programme, 11 August .

BBC News: ‘UFO Sightings were not investigated’ [link to broadcast footage]

BBC News Online: ‘Ministry of Defence files on UFO sightings released’.

Metro: ‘UFO sightings of Mork and Mindy over East Dulwich detailed by MoD’

Daily Mail online: “Mork and Mindy came to visit.’

Daily Mirror: “UFO sightings revealed”

Daily Star: ‘Aliens spotted by the sober at Glastonbury’

Daily Telegraph: ‘UFO files’

Copyright David Clarke 2011

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Hilary Evans 1929-2011

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Dr David Clarke

Archivist, author, intellectual researcher into the source of a range of Fortean phenomena and an eloquent exponent of the Psycho Social Hypothesis.

Hilary Evans was all of these things and more. Above all, he was a real gentleman and a friend. I’m saddened to hear of his passing just a year after the death of his wife Mary (read obituary here), who co-founded the Mary Evans Picture Library with Hilary in 1964.  He also helped to co-found ASSAP, the Association for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena, in 1981. He was a towering intellectual presence in a field bedevilled by sensationalism and controversy.  The loss of his moderating influence will leave a void that cannot be easily filled. Hilary passionately believed that we could learn from the study of extraordinary experiences, whatever their ultimate source.

But he will also be remembered for his books, which were a key guiding influence for me and other young researchers from the 1970s onwards. Titles such as Visions – Apparitions – Alien Visitors, Gods – Spirits – Cosmic Guardians, Seeing Ghosts and Other Worlds will remain standard introductions to the interpretation of UFO encounters and other extraordinary phenomena as culturally shaped visionary experiences (the Psycho Social Hypothesis).

Hilary’s work will also survive in the care of his friends at UFO Sweden, and the wonderful AFU Archive. Since 2003 the volunteer staff at AFU have slowly become the curators of his vast collection of books, periodicals and papers. More than five tons of his collection has been shipped from MEPL’s HQ in Lewisham, south London, to the Archive near Stockholm, during the past decade, where it will be preserved for use by future generations of Fortean researchers. I visited the AFU collection in 2006 and marvelled at what the organisation modestly describe as “one of the most complete repositories of UFO data and UFO folklore in the world.” I can testify to the care and dedication of its staff to the preservation of archive material that no other organisation appears to value, at least not at the present time. Hilary’s legacy is safe in their hands.

A fine tribute, penned by UFO Sweden’s Clas Svahn, can be found here. You can also read more about Hilary Evan’s life here.

Rest in peace, Hilary.

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