A UFO researcher from Shrewsbury reopens his fascinating Shropshire UFO casebook for Shropshire Live to investigate the Cosford Sphere!
Part 6 – The RAF Cosford Sphere
Global awareness of the UFO phenomenon grows with each passing day. Around the world, professionals are working on protocols for the disclosure of an alien presence—an event that would mark the most profound moment in human history.
As the reality of disclosure becomes more tangible, witnesses from all walks of life are stepping forward to do what many wished they could have done years ago: tell the truth. The following case files represent just a small sample of testimony from residents of Shropshire and the bordering counties who now feel the time is right to share their encounters with intelligences beyond our present understanding.
My colleague, leading investigative researcher Peter Jones, placed an advert in a local Newport newspaper, hoping to hear from anyone in the area with UFO sightings or experiences to report. One of the responses came from Roger Erdington, a resident near Newport, Shropshire, who described a series of remarkable—and unsettling—encounters from 1978.
RAF Cosford
It happened in the dead of night, just outside the RAF Cosford perimeter fence. A narrow country road wound past an old Gothic-style pumping station sunk in a hollow. Roger, who ran a small plant nursery and sold at Birmingham’s Rag Market, was loading his van for the early trip to the city. It was around 2:30 a.m.
As he and his assistant worked, a brilliant light swept in from their left, gliding silently over a hill. It stopped, hanging motionless in the sky, then drifted toward RAF Cosford. The object was no more than 150 yards away, a hundred feet above the ground inside the base fence—spherical, the size of a bus, glowing against the darkness. At arm’s length, it would have been about five inches across.
Without warning, the van’s lights cut out. The engine coughed and died. Roger and his assistant stepped into the night air. “God, look at that,” Roger breathed. The object lit the road in front of them, silent and unnatural. Slowly, it slid into a bank of cloud, and as it did, the van’s lights flickered back on. The engine roared to life.
They drove over the hill to a V-junction and stopped outside the Foaming Jug pub. A pair of headlights approached—police. Waving the car down, Roger told the officers they’d just seen something hovering over a military base. At first, the police thought it was the moon… until they looked. It wasn’t the moon. The glowing sphere still hung below the clouds.
The officers took their report. Roger and his assistant pressed on to the market, excitement running high. They were certain it was no helicopter, no aircraft at all—both men had lived their lives under the flight paths of military planes and knew their shapes and sounds. That night, RAF Cosford was quiet.
There was no missing time. Just the memory of a silent, glowing sphere that should never have been there.
Around the spring of the following year, Roger was contacted by the police. They asked if they could visit him so he could recount his sighting once more—this time to a police officer from Newport and a police inspector. Roger agreed, and two officers came to Ray’s home to interview him. They asked him to repeat what he had seen.
Roger recognised one of the officers, a local constable, who told him he had already heard about the incident from a report by the Wolverhampton Police Force. This constable is now retired and still lives in the area, so Roger is considering contacting him in the hope that he might remember the exact date. Roger admits his own memory isn’t as sharp as it once was. He also had the impression that the police interest in the matter was handled “behind closed doors” rather than as part of a standard inquiry.
At that time, Roger was working for a large company just outside Bridgnorth, tending the flower beds and hanging baskets for the summer—a job he had done for many years. One day, while talking with the Managing Director, Mr. Alex Davenport, Roger heard a story that caught his attention. Alex told him about his sister, who had been forced to leave her home, which was located in an old sand and rock pit in Cosford. When Roger asked why she had left, Alex explained that she had grown tired of strange lights hovering over her house.
She had first noticed them around November of the previous year, near the Gothic pumping station. On one occasion, she had reported the sighting to the police after seeing two men get out of a transit van and point toward the light. Roger was astonished—he realised that one of those men had been him, meaning Alex’s sister had likely witnessed the same UFO sighting in its entirety.
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
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