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May 14, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:10
Edition 112 - Warminster UFO Hotspot

This time we talk to UFO writer and researcher Kevin Goodman about his lifelong interest inwhat has been happening in a small area of one of England’s most picturesque counties since 1964.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, before I say anything about the show or reflect on what's going on in this world of ours, what I must do is say thank you to the at least 200 of you so far, most of you I will never meet, who've been so kind following the death of my dad.
It's been, as I know that you appreciate, and some of you have said such kind things.
It's been a very difficult couple of weeks, one way and another.
We had my dad's funeral in Southport, not far from Liverpool, a week ago, and I managed to be able to speak there because he was such a big character and such a good dad, I really had to.
And even though I found it daunting, although I'm used to broadcasting, that's a completely different experience.
But it was a beautiful day, the weather was perfect, and we gave him as good a send-off as you could.
And some of his old police colleagues were there.
And one day, I'll sit here and I'll talk to you about some of the things that he did in that amazing life.
You know, when I look back on my life when that time comes, there's not going to be as much in the way of content in my story as there was in his.
So thank you so much for the great kindness and the understanding that you have shown at this time.
Now, the last show, which is now, what, about five or six weeks ago, Chris Putnam, Exo Vaticana.
I knew that the subject would be very controversial, and indeed I was right.
A lot of you did not like what you heard, and I can understand why you didn't.
Some of you did, and some of you wanted to hear more.
There were a few emails I got saying that this was clearly an attack on the Catholic Church from that kind of perspective.
I don't know if that was the case, but I hear what you say.
And from my point of view, I think I was probably looking for a little bit more evidence, but we were promised further research and maybe another book.
So we might revisit at some point in the future.
But I think it was worth talking to him.
And bear in mind that Chris Putnam and his writing partner, Tom Horne, have been featured on the likes of CNN and various other places recently.
So it's a subject that is interesting to explore, but I do understand that it evokes all kinds of reactions and reactions that come right down from your basis, from your soul.
And some of you did react very firmly and let me know about that.
But that's what the show's all about.
All about reaction.
It's been an interesting time here in the UK.
We're now well and truly into the spring time and it's sort of sunny now as I record these words.
It's nice to be getting back to everything.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for keeping things ticking over, for keeping the website running and for getting that little message that I wanted to get out to you out.
If you want to go to the website, take a look at it, send me some email feedback, make a donation to the show, go to www.theunexplained.tv.
Just briefly before we get to the subject this time, which is a classic piece of ufology, and I think you're going to like the guest, Kevin Goodman, I'll tell you one story about something that happened to me around the time of my dad's death.
I had been with him, sitting with him as you do, and if you've been through this, and a lot of us have, you'll know what this is like, sitting with him at his hospital bedside, for an entire weekend, really, with very little sleep.
We felt that he was going to pass, but he didn't.
Such a strong man, he held on to life.
So I drove back from Southport back home to London.
And the following weekend, he went through a crisis, and my sister was there at the time, and she went to be with him.
And at the time when they said he was fading fast and would probably ultimately die quite soon, I didn't know this.
He was going into a crisis.
It was two o'clock on a Sunday morning.
And I woke up to see my father lying next to me.
Now, this is an absolutely true story, and you hear these stories all the time.
And I've been told these stories by many people.
And I don't think unless it had happened to me, I would ever have believed it.
But that is proof of something.
So whether there was a mental connection between my dad and myself at that point, or whether he was in the process of beginning the journey to whatever comes next after this life, I don't know.
But I'm grateful I had the experience.
And of course, by the time I realized what I was seeing, he faded away.
But you do hear this a lot, and I swear that is what happened to me.
Okay, we're going to talk to Kevin Goodman now.
And Kevin Goodman is one of a team of people who've been researching UFOs in the Warminster area of Wiltshire.
Now, this is an area that is not only a confluence of ley lines, the Romans were there, Stonehenge is in that sort of area, and many UFOs have been sighted in that area.
And that's not even mentioning things like crop circles.
It is a very strange and almost anomalous kind of area.
Kevin Goodman has spent more than 30 years researching all of this, has at least one book out, I believe, about it.
And we're going to talk to him in just a second here at The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your support.
Please keep your feedback coming.
Let's talk to Kevin Goodman now in the wilds of Wiltshire.
Kevin, thank you for coming on the show.
It's an absolute pleasure, Howard.
Kevin, thank you for doing...
I actually live in the Midlands.
Okay.
And you've put together all of this research over so many years about a place that's about 100 miles away from where you live?
123, to be precise, if you want the actual reading on the car.
You started in the 70s.
Have I got that right?
Yes, you have.
I mean, basically, I'll give you a little bit of background info.
Insomuch that I was a very good little Catholic boy.
I went to a Catholic junior school.
And at about the age of 10, when you've had communion, confirmation, benediction, Mass on a Friday ram down your throat, I started to question actually what religion is.
And they wouldn't have welcomed that, I don't think.
It gets better, trust me.
And obviously being a child of the space age, being born in 1900 and Frozen to Death, you know, I naturally started to look skywards almost for want of a better expression.
And the first book that I ever got was in the early 70s, which my father, of all people, actually managed to pull on from somebody at work where he worked at British Leyland in Longbridge.
And it was the paid-off edition Eric von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods.
And that obviously ignited my interest.
So over the next couple of years, if any of your listeners are of a certain age, they will remember the tandem book reprints of the classic Neville Spearman books from the 1960s, such as Brinty Le Poa Trenches, The Sky People, The Flying Saucer Story.
We have to say that although this stuff is easily accessible these days, and theories like this are easily accessible on the internet, for anybody in this generation, they'll wonder what the hell we're talking about.
But back then, because I remember it, you know, I was at school and a teenager and on my way up then.
If you were interested in anything like this, then you almost had to keep it quite quiet.
And getting the material was also not easy.
I can remember talking to a guy called W. Raymond Drake.
Yes.
Okay, well, I'm glad that you know his name because I've got an interview with him and I don't think he did very many interviews at all.
W. Raymond Drake lived in Sunderland and I traveled by train from Liverpool.
I was about 21, I think, and it was like a student project.
And with this great big heavy recorder, I went on the train up to Sunderland, boiling hot day, and met this lovely, lovely guy who was coming up to retirement.
He was working for the Inland Revenue there.
And he wrote this book called, I think, was it Gods and Spacemen?
In the Ancient East, in the Ancient West.
Yeah.
What a fascinating man.
Now, this was the early 80s, early to mid-80s.
And poor Raymond Drake is not with us anymore.
Sadly, I think he died watching his beloved Sunderland football team on the terraces, which I guess was a good way for him to go.
But he was so into this.
And his poor wife, Marjorie, you know, didn't understand his complete consumption with this.
And he was so consumed with all of this that he had to get those books.
And he gave me a couple of them, somewhere I've got them, that he wrote.
They were printed in India because he couldn't get them printed here.
Now, that's a true story.
And I'm telling you this because it's just an illustration and an indication of what things were like then.
And people got to know about W. Raymond Drake only through book lists and mail shots and those sorts of things and Rone-Ode newsletters.
Rone-o'd, there's that date to me.
But these days, it ain't like that.
We've got portals like this, and you can go on the internet, and if you want information, you've got it.
Yeah, I mean, we are talking, dare I say, of a bygone age almost.
I mean, again, I remember Drake's books, I think, were actually published by Sphere Books, because I'm a bit of a biblophile myself.
But going back to what I was saying, you know, I was obviously devouring all these tandem reprints.
And I was at an age where I was, you know, not sent to bed, but, you know, it was made quite clear that you should, you know, it's time for your bed.
And my mother one night came up, found me hunched up under the Eiderdown, reading a book by Torchlight.
And she actually whipped the cover off.
And I don't know if she was more horrified at the fact that the book I was reading was something like, oh, I don't know, the Sky People, or it wasn't a copy of Fiesta.
Well, that again dates both of us.
Not that I ever saw one, of course, but Fiesta.
Fiesta, I think, was a sort of, what would you, you wouldn't even, by today's standards, you wouldn't even call it soft porn.
It was a girly magazine, wasn't it?
Yes, yes.
But you weren't doing what our teenage boys were doing.
You weren't interested in that.
You were interested in all this other stuff.
What a shock for your poor mum.
It was.
It was bless her, you know.
I mean, I think then she realized I'd gone to Satan and basically, you know, there was no hope for me at all.
But, you know, as I say, and then, as I say, these tandem books were coming out near enough one reprint a month.
And I used to save my pocket money up and I used to go down to the local bookshop in the town.
And one day there was a book there called The Warminster Mystery.
And it had obviously got the tandem logo on the spine.
So I, you know, immediately picked it up.
And I took it home and I didn't give it a second thought for a couple of days.
And then I saw the byline at the bottom, which was dramatic UFO sightings in England.
Because, of course, most of us then used to think that these things only happened in Arizona or Utah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, I mean, my parents had a caravan in Wales and we used to go down there, obviously, for summer holidays.
And for about the next two years until about, I think it was 1976, I kept badgering them, you know, I don't want to go to the caravan.
I want to go to Wiltshire.
And they're going, no, we've got the caravan.
You go in there.
But in the end, I actually managed to go to Warminster after reading the book a number of times.
And from that day on, I've never looked back.
And so between then and now, and we're talking about a few decades, how many times have you been on research trips there?
Can you count them?
Let's put it to this way.
I've lost count.
Okay.
So you are a devotee.
And thank goodness there are people like you.
Because all sorts of people are going to that area.
I believe that Richard C. Hoagland, who is a guest on this show, you know, he's a famous American space expert, very well known in the States and becoming more well known here.
I think he's been to that area a number of times recently doing measurements because there are anomalous measurements in that area that he's been aware of.
But for people in the US and other parts of the world who don't know what we're talking about, we're almost talking about a UFO equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.
Not that things disappear there, quite the opposite.
Right in the heart of the most beautiful, lush green part of the United Kingdom.
Down south, shifted slightly west, a lovely, lovely area, but an area where Stonehenge is, where ley lines converge, lines of energy, fields and forces, a very mysterious area.
So exactly the kind of place that if there were to be UFO sightings, that's where they would be.
Absolutely.
I mean, I remember Shuttlewood in one of his earlier books, I think it might have been Warnings from Flying Friends, his second book, postulated that there were at least 12, if not 13, lays which converged over Warminster, which, according to Shuttlewood, was a record.
Okay, so you certainly as a boy, you put a lot on the line to do all of this.
You got your parents to take you down there on holiday.
You risked the rough of the Catholic Church.
Good Catholic boys shouldn't be getting involved in the devil's work and all the rest of it.
You must have wanted to find a result.
You must have wanted to be an experiencer.
Were you?
Yes.
I mean, for example, the very first time I went down was with a friend from college.
We saw what Arthur Schluttle would have referred to as a lit, a light in the sky.
Two lights traveling parallel to each other, did a 90-degree turn and then came overhead and then just sort of winked a couple of times and went out.
And the interesting thing about that is, you know, some people might say, oh, yes, they were satellites or high-flying aircraft.
But this is in the days of when the UFO detectors, if you remember those.
UFO detectors.
Yes, they work or they worked or works work on the principle of that UFOs tap into the Earth's magnetic field.
And basically, it's a battery-powered device with like a compass needle.
And over the compass needle is a hoop of metal.
And if the magnetic field fluctuates, the needle moves, touch the contacts, and a buzzer goes off.
Well, you know, not exactly high science, is it?
This was cutting-edge stuff in the sense.
So were they from Radio Shack, Tandy, as we call them here?
Probably, yes.
Oh, Lord.
Okay, so you had a little piece of equipment with you.
Well, no, I didn't.
Other people on the hill did.
But the interesting thing is there were two of these separated by, oh, must have been 15, 20 yards, sheltered from whatever wind was going on.
They both went off simultaneously.
And then immediately.
So that removes the possibility of error.
Well, technically, yes.
And then that was in the summer of 1976.
I went back down in the autumn with some more friends.
And again, we are talking cutting-edge technology here.
We took some cassette recorders down with us.
And we decided to do like an audio diary of a walk around the cops area, which is at the top of Cradle Hill, which is where all the sky watches were being held.
And we got some anomalous noises on the recordings, which weren't actually audible to us at the time.
And when you say anomalous recordings, listeners to this show, of course, will be familiar with spirit recordings, EVPs, that kind of stuff.
They don't appear to be there at the time.
And then you hear these voices.
Were these voices?
Were they beeps?
What were they?
Well, initially, it was like an intermittent Geiger counter going off, that type of clicking sound.
And then later on, we think we actually recorded what appeared to be the sound of heartbeats.
Okay, now we have to say that to affect an old-style magnetic recorder, a cassette recorder, there has to be a certain amount of power there.
And I can remember I've only ever been to one place where a cassette recorder was affected.
I was doing an interview at the top of the Empire State Building, where there are, these days after the fall of the Twin Towers, and I was there just after 9-11, most of the big TV transmitters and radio transmitters relocated there.
And there was so much RF, as they call it, electromagnetic energy in the air, that it affected the recorder.
And the recorder started slowing down, speeding up and recording funny noises.
But you need a hell of a lot of power to do that.
You do.
And the interesting thing is, the cops at the top of Cradle Hill, let me think.
I would imagine that the golf club, which is on Elm Hill, is about near enough a mile away as the crow flies.
The next nearest form of any type of electrical power would be the army base, which was about three quarters of a mile away.
Now, we are talking stuff in my mind, at least, in the 1970s, that if there was no power up there, which there wasn't, if it was any form of microwave radiation to affect a recorder at that distance, it would probably fry you.
Yeah, it would have to be incredibly targeted because these were robust systems.
They were not easily affected.
You know, if you've got a nice clean tape, you clean the tape heads in the days when we used to with a cotton bud, put the thing in, if it was a good tape, you wouldn't have any problems at all.
In fact, I used to use cassettes until just a couple of years ago for all my recordings because I trusted them more than digital media.
So there you are.
You've got these recordings.
And of course, there must be an element in you because you were young then, we all were, of wanting there to be something, of wanting to find something.
Yeah, I mean, I hate to say this, and I, you know, over the years, my research has thrown up one or two questions that need to be asked about Arthur Shuttlewood's writing and the way that he did, you know, quite not blatantly, but he embellished things.
But you go up to that hill as an impressionable 17, 18 year old, having read the book, read the books, and you're, to a degree, primed for something strange to happen.
But on saying that, I now hold what's known as the anniversary Sky Watch on Cradle Hill every, it's normally every August Bank Holiday Saturday, but it's tending to migrate to the first Saturday in September now.
And a couple of years ago, a chap who works for the BBC, who's a keen amateur filmmaker, brought some friends up for the Sky Watch.
And these people had got no idea about what had happened on the hill.
And they, A, were very seriously spooked when they went up into the Cotts area.
And B, one of them actually got a set of dowsing rods.
And the rods just went crazy up there.
And as I say, these people had not read any of Shuttlewood's books.
Basically, this guy had said, you know, I'm going out for the evening.
I'm going to go to what's called a sky watch.
Do you fancy coming up?
And they came up.
And as I say, they were spooked.
So what do we think was happening there?
Do we believe this was some kind of homing beacon for extraterrestrial craft?
Well, again, if you read Shuttlewood's books, they're not necessarily Cradle Hill, but a couple of miles away, there is another hill called Clay Hill, which is opposite the Longleat Estate.
And there is a report of a luminous object apparently shooting An object or something into the side of the hill.
And, you know, again, we are talking, you know, many years ago now, somebody postulated that it possibly could be some form of homing beacon.
But a lot of the sightings that happened in Warminster actually happened over or near Cradle Hill itself.
I'm sure being a UFO guy, you're familiar, as many listeners to this show will be familiar.
In fact, we talked to somebody involved in it with the famous Phoenix Lights.
What you've just been describing is almost the same, perhaps on a smaller scale, as that, where you have apparent craft apparently homing in on something on a hillside.
I mean, obviously, I mean, to anybody that hasn't sort of been to Cradle in particular, I mean, you've got directly in front of you, if you stand with your back to the cops, there's a hill called Battlesbury Hill, which is an ancient Iron Age fort.
There is another burial ground over to the right called Cop Heap.
So as you said earlier on, the whole area is steeped in ancient lore and mythology.
Now, the one thing about the Warminster phenomenon is that it happened just on the cusp of the hippie movement.
So the youth of the time, their perspectives were changing.
And as I said, you know, people came there wanting to see something.
Now, if one person or one group went there and saw something, they would go back, tell their friends, wow, you know, we saw this, that, and the other in Warminster.
Then those friends would go and the whole thing to a degree was self-perpetuating.
Now, Warminster has, over the years, had its detractors.
But the one thing I will say in all honesty is because I was there towards the end of it and I experienced things.
There's no smoke without fire.
Something weird definitely did happen in that town.
And beyond the readings, and we'll talk about visuals in a moment because we talked about the sound just a second ago.
How did you feel?
I mean, that's not a daft question.
We are magnetic beings, all of us.
We're all affected by solar flares.
We're all affected by the ebb and flow of the moon and all the rest of it.
Actually, that's an important question, isn't it?
How did you feel when you were there?
At the time, I think probably apprehensive more than anything else, because when some of the weird stuff actually happened, which was in the October, it was the season of mellow, misty fruitfulness, et cetera, et cetera.
And I mean, we were basically in a grey hemispherical bubble up on the hill.
You know, and your imagination does tend to play tricks on you and the mind plays tricks on you.
But we were staying at a place called Star House, which was being run by a couple by the name of Peter and Jane Paget.
Now, Peter Paget later on wrote two books, The Welsh Triangle and UFO UK.
And he was a researcher, and we played these sounds to him on the cassette player.
He hadn't got any form of explanation for it.
So the following night, we took up a different cassette player, brand new cassette, and exactly the same thing happened again.
So, yeah, it's difficult now to sort of, you know, to put it into, shall we say, our type of context now.
But at the time, it was exciting.
It was an adventure.
But at the same time, we felt that we were taking footsteps into the unknown.
Footsteps they were.
If I'd been you back then, it's easy for me to say here now, isn't it?
Maybe I wouldn't.
I'd have tried to get some hard scientists involved.
Did you?
Well, in those days, as it is today to a degree, scientists and the scientific community do tend to blase the whole thing.
So at the time, all we had was people like Peter Padgett and Arthur Shuttlewood to report things to, and then, you know, hopefully that they would investigate it further.
One of the things I read on your website, and we will plug the website towards the back end of this, of course we will, was that it wasn't so much the sightings and it wasn't so much the audio as things that happened subsequently to people who went there.
What did you mean by that?
I think it affected a lot of people's consciousness.
Whether it's, you know, I mean, there's a very good friend of mine, Mike Oram, who has written a very interesting book called Does It Rain in Other Dimensions.
Now, he was down in Warminster.
And the interesting thing is that, you know, every now and again I'm contacted by people who have come across the website by accident and they will say, yeah, I was there and it was amazing.
And I'm a different person for it.
You know, it was almost like a spiritual thing.
Maybe I've got this wrong, though.
Wasn't there somebody who subsequently claimed to have what the movies call a close encounter?
There have been a number of close encounter cases allied to Warminster, but I think with the benefit of hindsight, you do have to take one or two of them with a little bit of a pinch of salt.
I mean, there is a very, well, not a famous one.
There is one that somebody was commanded by telepathy to go to the Heavens Gate area of Longleat, where he was met by a UFO, which was the size of a suit plate.
And then it landed and it sort of expanded to full size.
He went on board while the lady stayed outside.
And then he went back down to miniature size and flew off.
But this apparently now has, I've been told, it was one of Arthur Shuttlewood's sky watching comrades who he and the lady made the story up to see just exactly how far Arthur would take it.
And unfortunately, before they could sort of retract the statement and sort of say, oh, sorry, Arthur, we're actually having a bit of a laugh with you, it ended up in print.
So, you know, it couldn't in some respects be retracted.
And that does nobody any favours, does it?
Precisely.
And so for you, and we can talk about sightings or even audio evidence or just the way that you felt or anything else, what over those years that you've been going back there, and then it must be a hell of a compulsion to make you keep going back for so many decades, What have been the most amazing things that you've come across?
Right.
The most two spring to mind.
Both happened in 1977.
The first one was at Easter.
We were walking down from the Cotts area, a friend of mine and I, with a young lady who was the daughter of the woman who we were staying with.
And she had got little or no interest in UFOs at all.
And over from the direction of the golf club, which when you're walking down from Cradle Hill, as I say, is on your right-hand side, came four red lights, equally distant spaced apart.
They carried travelling on over to Battlesbury Hill, where they stationed themselves in a line.
Just these red lights were just pulsing.
Now, it was a beautiful moonless night.
It was just getting dark.
There was no wind.
The stars were starting to come out and it was such a clear, crisp evening.
You could hear the trains going through the station in Warminster, which was about a mile away.
Now, these babies, whatever they were, totally silent.
And after about a minute or so, the left-hand object then shot off horizontally at speed from a standing start, performed a flawless 90-degree turn without stopping and shot straight upwards, up and out of sight.
And then about a minute or so later, the remaining three objects then just shot straight up into the sky.
And these are, for those who research these things, classic UFO sightings, things that move radically fast upwards, shoot off in all directions, do things that craft that we know of can't really do.
Well, again, we're talking at a time when the height of military technology was the Phantom jet.
And anything that could perform those kind of maneuvers in those days would be old technology now.
And even though these things were, shall we say, stationed over the military base in Warminster, they didn't make a sound.
And the interesting thing about the military base in Warminster as well is that I've been contacted over the last few years by a couple of people who were stationed there in the 60s and the 70s.
And they said, you know, that they'd either been out on stag duty, which is guard duty, or they'd been out sort of just doing night maneuvers.
And they saw things that they couldn't explain, which have nothing to do with the armed forces.
I wonder if they've been in touch with Gary Hesseltine, who, you know, runs that organization and a magazine now for people in uniforms who have experiences and things that perhaps they didn't want to talk about when they happened.
Well, that I don't know because we are talking about two or three units.
Yeah, it's a while back.
You said there were two things that stood out in your mind.
That was one of them.
What was the other?
Well, the second one happened, let's have a think.
That would have been about July 1977.
We were staying for the last time at this place called Star House, which was being run by the Padgetts.
And my friend and I, another friend and I, were in our room in mid-afternoon, nice summer's day.
And my friend was lying on his bed, which overlooked the window.
I was on my bed, which was tucked away in the corner.
And he jumped off his bed and ran to the window and in good old-fashioned English said, what on earth is that?
But in not quite so as you do.
So I went to the window and traversing the sky from right to left over Copeab towards Elm Hill where this golf club is was a silvery cigar shaped object.
Now I had just passed my ear level in photography so I ran down the stairs with my camera screwing on my massive 400mm telephoto lens.
I hadn't brought a tripod with me unfortunately because obviously coming down by train you had weight constrictions.
So I went into the garden and braced myself against a clothesline, clothespost that was in the garden and shot off four shots of this object before it went behind the trees.
Now again we're talking in the age of pre-digital photography.
If anyone again is listening that remembers these type of cameras, have a ground glass screen that you look through.
There is a focusing ring.
I focused, got the exposure completely correct, shot off four shots.
While I was doing this, my friend yelled down from the window, look, this thing's got to be real.
There are actually people on the hill over there and they're pointing at it.
Well, cutting a long story short, due to the infamous world of UFO politics, I decided not to get the film developed when I was in Warminster.
So I came back home to the Midlands.
Hang on, let's just unwrap that point.
Why wouldn't you get it done locally?
Shall we just say that the ugly face of UFO politics had hit Warminster in a big way?
There were so many groups vying for supremacy.
Did you feel that the film might be sabotaged by somebody?
Wouldn't be, well, not sabotaged, but I think it might be used for financial gain.
Oh, really?
So if those photographs got out there, somebody would be flogging them off to a...
Exactly.
And, you know, I mean, at the time, I thought to myself, you know, wow, I finally cracked it.
I've got proof.
You know, because as I say, this thing was dead center in the viewfinder.
Anyway, say, cutting the long story short, got back to Starbridge.
And again, this is in the days even before super snaps or happy snaps where you could get your films done in 24 hours.
I had to wake a week to get the films back.
God, I remember those days.
Don't we just...
Walmart does them there and then.
But not then.
Not then.
So I remember walking back home with the envelope with the prints in it, and I sort of opened it up.
And yes, oh, there's us at Glastonbury, there's us at Stonehenge.
And, you know, I didn't go straight to the photographs, you know.
And I got to them.
And there it is, blue sky, high grey cloud on the last shot, tips of the trees in the corner of the picture, but there's no bloody object.
And yet there were people pointing at it.
Yep.
Now, as I say, I just passed my 011 in photography, so I'd actually got an enlarger at home in my bedroom.
And I actually put the enlarger on a table and I put a whiteboard on the floor and I cranked the enlarger up to its highest setting.
So you effectively projected it.
Yep.
And there was no break in outline on any of those four negatives.
How do you explain that?
You're sure the camera was pointing in the right direction?
Absolutely.
So it wasn't like a parallax problem, as they used to call them.
No.
No.
As I say, I had that object directly in the viewfinder each time.
The only thing I can think of it, was it some form of psychic event?
But saying that, then how do you equate to the fact is that there were people on the hill about a mile away pointing at it?
Well, that's equally amazing if you were all experiencing the same thing at the same time.
I suppose what would be interesting would be to find those people.
It would be, but I mean, you know, despite what I've done, I mean, the one interesting thing about the people of Warmister is these days, although the population of the town has doubled since the thing started in 64, the people of the town are very reticent to talk about it.
In fact, a lot of people in the town now don't even know what happened there.
So what sort of research is being done now?
Because this was the glory days of young people using film and people being willing to have an experience together.
These days, people think they're far too savvy for all of that.
And people do things alone, don't they?
They've got electronic means, they've got browsers, computers at home.
They don't feel they have to get together in groups of people and have a communal experience like that.
I think that's the sad thing.
It's only us old farts, if you'll pardon me, Swear.
You speak for yourself.
Okay.
It's only us oldies with the thinning blood now that actually sort of get out on the hill and sort of...
I mean, the anniversary Skywatches are more of a nostalgia theme more than it is.
You keep going back there, hoping to repeat something that happened in the 1970s.
There are some people who would find that a bit odd.
Yeah, I suppose they would.
But the way I look at it is, you know, the experiences that we had, it's a bit like a drug.
It keeps pulling you back.
And let's not forget, Kevin, that there are people who are researching this.
I mentioned Richard Hoagland, who's been around that area, but there are other people who are doing serious scientific research about this right now, aren't there?
There are, but I mean, again, I mean, Warminster is a bit like, I don't know, Rendlesham or possibly Roswell, in so much that far too much water has passed under the bridge now for any real objective research to be done into the past of it.
Now, Warminster is about as ufology active as any town now.
You know, I mean, for example, where I live up in the Midlands, I mean, nearby there's a town called Dudley, and there is the infamous Dudley Dorito, which is seen quite often.
I lived in the Midlands for a while.
I know this area very well.
Dudley Dorito?
Yeah, it's a triangular-shaped craft which is seen over the skies in this area.
I'm trying to think if there's a military airbase anywhere near there.
There isn't.
I think Cosford's.
Cosford, yeah, RAF Cosford, if it's still there.
That's near Wolverhampton, isn't it?
Yeah, it is, yeah.
But then again, if it is, I mean, my argument about the Dorito is that if it is secret military technology that's being tested, why do it over one of the most densely populated parts of the country?
Well, maybe because people will see it, but they won't believe what they've seen.
And perhaps even more importantly, other people won't believe that they've seen what they're reporting, if you know what I'm saying.
I know what you're saying.
I mean, again, you see, the other interesting thing is that a while back, I think it was a book called Area 51, which I read when I was reviewing stuff for UFO Matrix magazine.
And this author postulated that apparently Area 51 in the States, which was where the, oh, not blackbird, yeah, the Blackbird and U2 were being test flown and flown out of, in the early days of the U2, the plane wasn't actually black, it was silver.
And because it was flying so high and so fast, the CIA supposedly perpetuated the myth that the public were not seeing the U2, they were actually seeing U-Foat.
Okay.
So there's all sorts of disinformation going on here.
But the great thing about being in the position that you're in now is that back in the day, back in the 70s, you might have been duplicating sheets in the old-fashioned way.
I'm sort of making a cranking action here with my hand, which you can't see.
But you know, the way they used to do it at school, because that was the only way to disseminate information.
And I used to be very much into the pirate radio scene here, and I used to subscribe to all these newsletters, and they'd be produced in exactly that way, and they'd come through the post.
These days, of course, you're in electronic contact with the world immediately.
So what I'm getting around to is that there must have been people who've contacted you to say, Kevin, you're on exactly the right track way to go.
Or Kevin, why are you still doing this?
I think most of the comments are, Kevin, why the hell are you rehashing an old case that's getting dawn towards 50 years old now?
But it's because, as I said earlier on, whatever happened in that town touched me.
And it's, you know, I just feel duty bound to a degree to sort of, you know, bring Warminster's history to an entire new generation to, you know, to make, you know, to make people think, as I did in the 70s and the 60s, you know, that UFOs are mainly an American other problem, as it were.
And these people who experienced all of this with you at that time, presumably some of them are still friends, do they still feel as captivated by it as you are?
Oh, God, yes.
Absolutely.
You know, I mean, the friend that I was with when we saw those four red lights, he and I, we always go to the Skywatches together, the Skywatch together.
And I mean, we don't need an excuse to go down there.
You know, if we're both free, we think, you know, okay, we're not doing anything on Saturday.
Let's go for a trip down to Warminster.
You've got at least one book out.
Yeah.
Tell me what's, I've seen that on your website.
Tell me what's in that.
I mean, you know, a book is 300 odd pages, isn't it?
262, I think, without going to get a copy.
Well, close enough.
All I'll say is that it is not exactly my life story.
That's the wrong thing to say.
But it's my experiences of what we went through in Warminster.
Shall we say, I'm only going to do this as a teaser, the fallout that happened beyond, and the reason why I got back into the subject.
You know, and it's a sad reason, you know, but I don't regret doing it.
All right, well, we don't want to spoil the book for people, but give me a clue as to what would bring you back to it.
It was my wife's death.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
No, no, no, not at all.
Not at all.
No, I mean, she had cancer for four years, bless her.
And I was basically sort of, well, not nursing her because that makes it sound as if she was permanently ill, but I was sort of basically doing everything around the house and looking after her and just being with her for those four years.
And after she went, there was a great void in my life, a great gap, because all of a sudden, this might sound very selfish.
I got my life back suddenly.
No, that's quite understandable.
I know what you mean.
And in the early 1980s, before we were married, we actually went on holidays in North Yorkshire.
I took my mother's little portable typewriter and I started writing up our experiences.
And after about 18 months after we got married, I ran out of steam and I thought I'd throw the manuscript out.
Well, about a year before my wife died, we actually moved and a lot of the stuff was in the garage in boxes still after she died because the house was much smaller than the one we were used to living in.
And I started clearing out these boxes and right at the bottom of one of these boxes, I found this yellowing manuscript.
And I did what all blokes do.
You know, we do a lot of our reading in the smallest room of the house.
Yes.
Yes, we do.
And I saw, you know, I got this.
I started going through it and thinking, I could do better than that now.
And consequently, I started to rewrite it.
And completely by accident, going back to what you're saying about living in the electronic age, I started to Google Warminster a bit more.
And I came across a site called Deconstructing Warminster, I think it was called.
And there were some extracts from this book that were being written by two chapters, Steve Dewey and John Rees.
And I thought, Steve Dewey, that name rings a bell.
And believe it or not, in October of 1976, on my second visit, Steve Dewey and my friends and I actually went up to the hill together.
Anyway, cutting long story short, again, consequently, Steve Dewey is now my writing partner.
He edited the book for me, bless him.
Actually knocked it into some form of readable shape.
So when you said, you know, I asked you, are these people still captivated?
Well, you know, there's one great example.
There's somebody who is still as into it as you are, and he comes back into your life after 30 years.
Exactly.
But the interesting thing, Steve is my ying to his yang, if you get my drift.
Steve is skeptical, which is not a bad thing because, you know, in all of these things, you know, my feet are kept very sort of firmly planted on the ground.
Okay, so you, like we said at the beginning, there is this inclination to want to believe.
He is the guy who's going to say, come on now, do a reality check, Kevin, whenever you say, my God, that's amazing.
Exactly.
Precisely.
And I mean, the other interesting thing about Steve is that he was actually born and bred in Westbury, which is, and lived in Warminster for many years.
Westbury's only about four miles away from Warminster, you know, and he used to say, you know, I used to got these ills every bloody week and I never saw anything.
So if he's such a sceptic, why is he still on this track?
Why is he still doing it?
I think because it interests him.
You know, I mean, I'm not saying that he's an uber sceptic, but he's got a very logical mind, you know, and he will look for a logical explanation to anything that, you know, you put forward, which is entirely his own choice.
And as I say, we do work exceedingly well together.
Now, it's 2013.
We know this.
It's May as we record this very nearly summer time.
So it's a good time to go down to Wiltshire.
Well, anytime's a good time to go down there, really.
So what have you got planned for this year then?
Right.
Well, for this year, it's just the anniversary Skywatch.
I think it is going to be on the first Saturday in September.
Which anniversary is this?
36, 37 more?
Well, again, going back in history a little bit, the Warmister thing actually started officially, for want of a better word, on Christmas Day, 1964.
1964, you said that.
So it's pretty much 50 years.
Let's get on towards 50 years.
And I think it was the following year in 65, because there were so many sightings and so many reports of this mysterious noise that people were hearing that the town council called an extraordinary meeting over the August Bank holiday.
And thousands of people, due to the publicity that had been generated, descended on the town.
And it's the only time, apparently, in the town's history that the pubs actually ran dry.
Now, for that, for a garrison town, you know, an army garrison town, you know, that is some record.
I would say it probably is.
So basically, I mean, I started these Skywatches about six years ago now.
You know, I mean, it made sense to have it on a bank holiday.
And I thought, well, what better than, you know, the August bank holiday when everybody descended on the town?
So that's basically how it started.
And in your heart of hearts, are you hoping something will happen?
Are you hoping that, I mean, presumably you're going to, what do you measure with these days?
Let's start there.
You can't take a cassette recorder.
Who uses those now?
What do you take?
Well, I mean, people come armed with night vision cameras.
Yes.
Yeah.
Have you got one of those?
No, I haven't, unfortunately.
Oh, you've got to.
I interviewed a guy not so long ago about night vision.
And he's absolutely, he's in Western Supermare.
He's absolutely committed to this.
And you know, there are gradations of night vision that are very highly refined.
And some of them we're not supposed to own in this country.
They can buy them in the States because they show you too much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Night vision is the way forward.
Yeah.
You know, and obviously digital cameras, you know, some people bring telescopes, which, you know, I do think is a little bit due to the field of view, it's a bit counterproductive.
But yeah, I mean, we're not sort of just standing there with a notepad and a piece of paper in our hands and a polar audio instomatic.
You know, I mean, a lot of the people have actually embraced the new technology.
What I'd like to do for next year, which will be the 50th anniversary, I'm speaking at the Bufora conference, which is going to be held in Glastonbury.
All right, Bufora is the original, and this goes back an awful long time, original British UFO organization.
I mean, in America, they've got MUFON, haven't they?
But Bufora is the big one here.
Yeah.
I think the big person behind that is, what was her name?
Jenny Randalls.
Jenny Randles was originally involved with it, but now, obviously, with a lot of these things, you know, people leave, new blood comes in, and, you know, that's not a bad thing either, because obviously it's keeping it alive.
But what I would like to do is, in conjunction with Bufora, hopefully, because they intend to hopefully hire a minibus to take people from Glastonbury to Warminster, which isn't too far away.
For the 50th anniversary, I would like to have a three-pronged attack on the Skywatch front, insomuch that we would have people on Cradle Hill, we'd have people on Clay Hill, and we'd have people in Upton Scudamore.
Now, if anything is seen, then obviously somebody, shall we say, on Clay Hill sees something.
They call somebody on Cradle to say, look, we're seeing something.
Is it coming over towards you?
So everything can be triangulated.
Exactly.
You've got triangulation from those three points.
Yeah.
I mean, again, it's a sobering fact that, you know, when I was up on those hills all those years ago, I mean, it was pitch black for starters because there's no street lights.
It's a lot different now because obviously the army camp has actually expanded and there is a lot more lights up there now.
But if you got into trouble up in that hill, if you say fell over and broke your ankle, your mate would have to walk a mile to go to the nearest phone box.
Yeah, yeah.
At least you don't have that problem these days.
No.
No, and again, with, again, going back to the curse of modern technology, you know, if people have got laptops and everything else, then, you know, I mean, basically, if anything's seen, it could literally hit the internet within 20 minutes.
Which is a good thing in one sense and a bad thing in another.
But the interesting thing about what you're talking about is you're going to have a lot of people, all with a common intent.
And I wonder if it's possible, because you read about these things, that having you all together on this big anniversary, doing it properly with the best equipment that you can lay your hands on, maybe you might encourage something to come to you.
It's quite possible.
I mean, you just don't know.
You know, I mean, it's quite interesting that some people sort of do poo-poo it and say, oh, you're nothing more than a bunch of aging hippies, you know, sort of going up on the hill and reliving your past life.
Well, yeah, fine, fair enough.
But like I say, these days it's more of a social thing.
It's interaction.
And, you know, it's amazing who the people that come out of the woodwork.
It's a very, very British thing.
I mean, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but it has sort of shades of Wallace and Grommet to it.
It's very, very British.
Yeah, not quite as Heath Robinson, I think.
Well, not these days, anyway.
No, no, absolutely not.
But, yeah, as I say, and again, it's amazing going back to, you know, as you were saying about in the 60s and the 70s, that, you know, you kept your interest very much under wraps, for want of a better word.
But now you can be a lot more open about it.
When you've been there and you're looking back to 1964, is there anybody still around there who might be sitting there with a pint of beer and the local public says, I was there in 1964.
I will remember what happened then.
Well, again, it's funny you saying that.
Very sadly, a lady by the name of Molly Carey, who was around in the 60s and the 70s and was part of Arthur Shuttlewood Skywatching Group.
She recently died.
But a gentleman by the name of David Simpson, luckily, did a video interview with her a few years ago, and at least her memories have now been sort of recorded for posterity.
So there are very few.
I mean, I look upon myself as a Warmister researcher, at least, second generation, because I was there towards the end.
But now the second generation are the older generation.
Now there's nobody left.
And what about the third generation then?
Presumably there is one.
You've already indicated that.
There is one, thank heavens.
I mean, there's a lovely guy, Danny Warmister, by the name of Steve Wills, who is carrying the flame.
I mean, I think he's the guy that got you in contact with me in the first place.
You know, he's keen, he's, you know, and he keeps his finger on the pulse.
And, you know, I get sort of regular updates via Facebook and everything else, you know, regarding that, you know, regarding if anything's going on down there.
So, yeah.
In our media in this country, I know this from having been home to the northwest of England recently and looked at a couple of the local weekly newspapers that we used to read, and they're now owned by one big company.
And I'm not sure whether they, I presume they have, you know, have proper archives and all the rest of it.
I'm just wondering if you ever fancied the idea of trawling the archives of the local papers there, if they still exist, to see the sort of stuff they might have on file.
I mean, I'm lucky in the respect that, I mean, I have the respect of people up until a few years ago who I put up on a pedestal.
People such as David Clark, Andy Roberts, Phil Mantle.
These people now treat me as an equal and they've been very, very open in letting me have what files they've got, what information they've got.
There is a museum down in Warmister called, believe it or not the Dewey Museum, no relation to Steve Dewey.
And the late Ken Rogers, who died in, I think, in 1993, bequeathed all his paperwork and all his research notes to the museum.
And again, I mean, if I was living in the area, the curators have already said that I could actually take the stuff away and catalogue it for them correctly because it's just in one hell of a mess at the moment.
Sounds to me like you might need help doing this.
It's a bit of a solo job to a degree.
I mean, again, John Hansen, the author of The Haunted Skies books, has been more than helpful in supplying me with little bits and pieces of information which even I didn't know about.
So, you know, I think what I suppose as Well, those people who are in it for the love of the subject quite freely exchange information.
But, you know, it's like anything.
I mean, I'm not going to mention a particular author, stroke, personality, whatever you want, who's now living in the States.
Whoops, I've given something away there.
It's not a gravy train job.
It is a labor of love.
And you are convinced at this many years distant, and you must be because you're still doing it all, that you experienced way back in the 70s, which was an amazing time.
I feel very sorry for a lot of young people who didn't see the late 70s, very, very exciting time, all sorts of stuff happening.
You are convinced that you came into contact somehow with something that is A, unexplained, and B, potentially extraterrestrial in origin.
All I'll say is read the book.
And what's the book called?
Go on, tell us again.
The book is called UFO Warminster, Cradle of Contact.
And you do have a website, so here is your chance.
Right.
The website, if I can remember the address without getting it, is www.ufowarminsterco.uk.
Okay, there is also a Facebook page.
If you just type in UFO Warminster into a Facebook search engine, it should take it to the Facebook page where we do put up quite often a few light-hearted items just to make sure that we do, again, as you say, keep our feet grounded on the, you know, in the real world, as it were.
Okay, and if anybody listening to this, and you would be surprised at the number of people in the number of places who listen, if they have any stories that they feel that you ought to know, are you happy to hear from them, from them to get in touch?
Yes, they can contact me via the website.
There should be a contact the author button on there.
And as I say, they can contact me via Facebook if they go onto the UFO Warminster Facebook page.
You know, I mean, if there's anybody out there that does have any stories about Warminster, which they feel are worth me having a look at, I'm more than happy to do so.
And finally, as a TV newscaster over here used to say, and finally, if I could give you the money to buy a holiday in any one of the great UFO hotspots in the world and experience what you might experience, where would you go?
Warminster, you're going to say.
I am going to say Warminster.
I am going to say.
And the reason why I'm going to say Warminster is I hate flying.
What?
A man who's interested in flying saucers hates flying?
Okay.
I don't like heights.
It's a long way down when you're up there.
All right.
Let's park it there.
Kevin Goodman, really nice to talk to you.
Please keep in touch with me.
And I wish you well in your trip to Warminster.
And next time I go to Stonehenge, which presumably is somewhere else that you go, I'll think of you.
I go to Stonehenge, you know, just to feel peace from time to time.
It's about an hour and a half's drive from where I live.
And it's just a place that I have to go because I cannot explain it, but I feel peaceful when I'm there.
It's very odd, isn't it?
That is exactly the how Cradle Hill makes me feel.
Kevin, good to talk to you.
Thank you for doing this.
Thanks a lot, Howard.
Been a pleasure.
Kevin Goodman.
And if you want to know more about him, I'm going to put a link to his website from my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
The website designed and created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
One quick thing to say before I go this time, I'm going to be filling in in Liverpool for the legendary Pete Price at Radio City 96.7 and City Talk 105.9 from May the 19th.
That's every night from 10 p.m., four hours.
And if you're listening to The Unexplained and would like to listen to that, you can get it online at the Radio City website.
Or if you live in the Merseyside area or the northwest, you'll find it at 96.7 FM or 105.9 FM.
And I would love to have you there.
I need all the support I can get.
More Unexplained coming soon.
Thank you very much for your ongoing support and I'll see you very soon.
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