Phil Hoyle Shropshire UFO Casebook Part 4 crafts and crop circles

Part 4 of the Shropshire UFO Casebook investigates the strange crafts and crop circles that were discovered in the county.

Part 4 – crafts and crop circles

Jenny lives twelve miles south of Shrewsbury, near the isolated limestone ridge known as Wenlock Edge. Late one evening, while looking out from the window of her converted barn, a light caught her attention. Hovering above Wenlock Edge was a massive spherical object—not perfectly round, nor egg-shaped, but somewhere in between. From her vantage point, it appeared to be only a few feet above the treetops.

It wasn’t a single solid light. Dozens of individual lights formed its outline, with a brilliant white glow on the top right-hand side.

At first, Jenny was frozen with fear. She watched the craft for twenty minutes, during which it remained perfectly still. Gathering her courage, she went inside to fetch her binoculars (8 x 13).

Through the lenses, the object’s structure became clearer—a black lattice framework, with lights positioned at the intersections. The lights were of varying colours and seemed to oscillate. On the top right-hand side of the craft was an unusual feature, a shape Jenny later sketched as something between a flying swallow and an anchor. Similar forms have been reported in the area before, suggesting it could have been a detachable, smaller craft.

The next morning brought an even greater surprise. A neighbour told Jenny that a crop circle, about 20 feet across, had appeared in a wheat field only a few hundred feet from her home. The stalks were flattened to the ground, as though pressed by something massive from above. Jenny photographed the formation, and its characteristics matched other genuine crop circles I have examined.

An Abduction in the Rea Valley

Another witness, whom I will call “Tom” for confidentiality, lives in Worthen in the Rea Valley, near the Welsh border. In his late fifties and a no-nonsense construction worker, Tom has spent most of his life in the area, apart from years working abroad and a period in the RAF.

He recalls his first strange encounter as a boy of eight, when he saw a cigar-shaped object in the sky over Hanwood, a small hamlet not far from his current home.

His next major incident occurred many years later, while driving along the old A5 from Shrewsbury to Wellington. Near the Shamrock Café, he saw a huge illuminated object in the sky—about the size of a double-decker bus—hovering just above the treetops.

From the craft came a narrow, dull beam of blue-green light. Moments later, the object vanished from sight with astonishing speed.

The next thing Tom knew, it was midnight. Three hours were unaccounted for. He had no memory of what had happened during that time—a classic sign of abduction experiences. For 22 years, the encounter remained buried in his mind until fragments of memory began to surface, prompting him to contact me for answers.

Remarkably, Tom’s sighting occurred only days after the well-known abduction of three women from Telford—Val Walters, Rosemary Hawkins, and Vivien Hayward—whose own UFO encounter took place not far from where Tom had seen the craft above the trees.

Read more casebooks

Casebook Part 1 – The Witness
Casebook Part 2 – The Triangle Mystery
Casebook Part 3 – UFO abductions
Casebook Part 4 – Crafts and crop circles
Casebook Part 5 – Shropshire Animal Mutilations
Casebook Part 6 – The Cosford Sphere
Casebook Part 7 – The Long Mynd UFO
Casebook Part 8 – The Cigar Shaped UFO
Casebook Part 9 – Real Men In Black

Copyright Phil Hoyle 2012