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Aug. 25, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:38
Edition 477 - Craig Bryant

More deeply strange stories from Craig Bryant in North West England...

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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.
Thank you very much for all of your kind emails.
I'm catching up with all of them right now after the last crazy couple of weeks.
I think I'm beginning to find myself again.
Of course, we are still in the middle, as I record this, of a massive heat wave.
So if I don't quite sound like me, it is because I have never had to record in temperatures this high before.
And if I tell you, the paper that I'm holding at the moment with notes for the conversation with the guest we're about to speak to is actually covered in perspiration.
I've never known, wherever I've worked, I've never known anything quite like it.
Of course, in our homes here, you're probably laughing if you're listening in the US, but in our homes here in the UK, we don't have air conditioning.
It's not something that we've ever needed here.
You know, mostly we need protection from the rain, and our winters used to be quite cold.
They're not anymore.
So this is the weirdest thing.
And a weather record was broken yesterday, and that was for the longest consecutive period for years, I think 60 years or so, of temperatures at more than 34 Celsius, which is, I think, somewhere in the mid-90s-ish Fahrenheit.
So that is just staggering.
There is a park not very far from where I live, and it looks like the Serengeti.
I mean, literally, I keep expecting to see Vildebeest and Giraffe there.
And, you know, zebra.
Weird, weird, weird weather.
But anyway, we're going to get through this one.
No matter how hot it is, I'm not going to look at the temperature gauge at the bottom of my clock here.
Like I say, thank you very much for all of your email communications recently.
Very gratefully received, and I am catching up on all of them.
If there is something that requires a response and you haven't had one yet, please let me know and I will get back to you directly, as they say, in customer services all over the world.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his work on this show.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests, who include the man we're about to catch up with again here.
I think he's in a slightly cooler part of the UK, couple of hundred miles north of where I am right now.
Craig Bryant in Lancashire, we're going to talk about ghosts and UFOs and so much more coming soon.
Very quickly, just a couple of emails to address.
Phil, thank you for your email.
A great suggestion about dark forest theory.
Something that's new to me, but I'm going to find out about it.
And Steve in Las Vegas says, I work as a power plant operative.
I started listening to you years ago after hearing about you on KFI when the Art Bell show used to run on that station.
Anyway, just remembered an old show from years ago, Whatever Happened to Guy McCourt.
That's a very good point.
And the bones that were found and the weird paranormality in his home.
I need to catch up with Guy McCourt.
Good call.
Thank you, Steve.
And I wasn't aware at any time that I'd be mentioned on KFI radio.
I wonder when that was.
And in what circumstances, as they say.
Okay, let's get to the north of England.
Craig Bryant in Lancashire.
Thank you very much for coming back on my show here.
Thank you for having me, Howard.
So, Craig, how is life with you then?
It's been not that long since we last spoke, but I know that there are all sorts of things that we need to be speaking about.
But are you getting by?
Yeah, I am still very much working from home in my normal day job.
I'm still doing the research in my spur time into all things paranormal.
And now I've sort of moved into the UFO sphere of things as well.
So yeah, you know, we are getting by in very strange times.
So remind my listener of the area that you would cover, things that happen in that particular area.
Okay, well, I live in a place called the Ribble Valley, which is in Lancashire, in northwest England.
We are quite close to the county border of Yorkshire.
We are very close to a hill called Pendle Hill, which is a very famous place in its own right due to the very famous Pendle Witch Trials of 1612.
So it's an area of outstanding natural beauty.
It's quite rural and it's an absolutely beautiful place to live.
It is, and it's also steeped in, I suppose you could call it paranormality, but it's much more than that because it's got, as we will discuss, it's got a history of witches and ghosts and UFOs and all sorts of things, all concentrated in that area.
Yeah.
Well, the Pendle Witches is an entirely different discussion all in itself, and it's quite a long, involved, complicated story.
But it has become interwoven over the years with paranormality and legends and ghosts and all that sort of thing.
But the area of sort of East Lancashire itself, and in fact, as I've been discovering right across to the west coast of Lancashire, which borders onto the Irish Sea, the whole area really is rich in both paranormal and UFO activity.
And it has been for many, many years going back, you know, certainly with the paranormality, it's been going back hundreds of years.
And the UFO things that have been recorded obviously have been a little bit more recent.
So, yeah, the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 is a very famous event that happened in this area.
And because of that, the whole area of Pendle Hill is sort of steeped in mysticism and paranormality.
And it's an area that people love to come and visit and just soak up the whole atmosphere.
The witch trials themselves are quite a complicated story.
There are many different characters involved.
But in effect, it was two families who lived in the area in 1612.
You've got to realise that Lancashire at the time and the area around Pendle Hill in particular Was quite sparsely populated.
It was well known for being quite a dangerous place to sort of travel through if you were a merchant, for instance.
And in fact, the local authorities actually said that the people who lived in this area were quite dangerous and had very dubious morals.
So it was quite a dangerous place in the 17th century.
And the Pendle Witch Trials really revolved around two families who were implicated in various acts of satanic rituals, devil worship, murder, witchcraft, and that sort of thing.
And they were tried and executed at Lancaster, which was Lancaster Castle, which was sort of like the administrative centre for the county of Lancashire at the time.
And during the trials, there were all sorts of wild and weird stories came out.
There were accusations being thrown around left, right, and centre of even things like cannibalism, for instance, and child murder, unfortunately.
I mean, none of these were ever proved.
And we have to remind ourselves that for a very long period, not only Pendle, but also the United Kingdom was famous for the fact, and not only the UK, I mean, these things happened in Germany and I think in France as well, that a lot of people were accused of witchcraft and satanic activity on very flimsy evidence.
And they were tried and sometimes executed in horrendous ways when there was nothing really very much to substantiate it.
No, with the Pendle witches, the main witness for the prosecution, if you like, was a young girl.
She was about eight or nine years of age.
And she was actually the daughter of one of the accused.
And her mother, her brother and her grandmother were of the accused.
They were one of these families.
And she was sort of the main witness for the prosecution.
And she came up with all sorts of wild stories.
Looking back at the trial records, it's quite obvious, really, that she was coaxed into saying these things.
And also, it was quite almost as if, because these people were obviously very poorly educated and all of a sudden they were sort of like the center of attention, you know, they were in a trial situation, there were people asking them questions left, right, and center.
It was almost as if they were sensationalizing and admitting to things themselves because either A, they believed themselves or B, it was almost like a sort of exciting thing that was happening to them because they were the center of attention.
They obviously didn't realize what the consequences were.
And in fact, they were executed by hanging.
It was very rare that they burned witches at the stake in this country.
So yeah, it sort of seeps itself into local folklore.
And whenever you mention the words Pendle Hill, people immediately think of the witch trials.
But there is so much more to it than that.
There is, and that's what I want to talk about.
We've talked about the Pendle Witches before, but I just wanted to give people a little bit of an overview.
Now, personally, you know that I'm from Liverpool.
That is a coastal area, not very far from where you are, but it might as well be a world away.
It's a very different area.
And I always used to find whenever I came across into Lancashire proper, and if I went to places like Pendle or where you are, for me, there was often a feeling about it.
You know, it's steeped in a kind of history that I don't think Liverpool has.
Liverpool has a different history because it was a maritime place.
But there's an uneasy feeling about some of those places.
I hope you don't mind me saying this.
Not only, you know, West Lancashire and East Lancashire.
You know, I think there was always for me an uneasy feeling that I could never put my finger on.
And I know that I'm not alone in feeling that.
No, it's interesting you should say that because it is an area which I think is very atmospheric.
I grew up in the town of Accrington, which is probably about 15 miles away from here.
And we used to have day trips out in the car with my dad and my mum.
And we used to drive up the road and we used to drive past Pendle Hill.
And you always get that feeling when you see Pendle Hill looming up in the distance.
It always seems to be, even on a day like today when it's been, you know, 30 degrees and hot sunshine, it always seems to be a very atmospheric, very foreboding place.
And to me, it almost seems like it's a sort of sleeping giant, as it were, which is sort of waiting to wake up.
It's got that feeling and that atmosphere about it.
Yeah, but you keep expecting to see cavaliers and roundheads appear.
That's how I used to feel when I was a kid, when my dad would take me for day trips.
Well, it's interesting that, yeah, it was certainly an area where there was quite a bit of Civil War activity.
And in fact, Clitheroe, which is the local market town not too far from here, there is a Norman keep on a hill overlooking Clitheroe.
We call it Clitheroe Castle, but in fact, it's not a castle, it's just a keep.
And it was used basically as a food store during the Middle Ages.
But there are stories actually of roundhead and cavalier ghosts being seen in and around the castle itself and the castle walls and the castle grounds.
There was a group of soldiers, I think they were cavaliers actually, who decided to build it themselves there during the Civil War and they were set upon by a small army of roundheads.
The area of Lancashire was very much, it used to swing one way or the other because there was a lot of parliamentarian support, but there was also a lot of support for the king as well.
And so depending on which sort of landowning family, because obviously there's a lot of landowning families in this area, a lot of stately homes, depending on which side of the conflict they came down on, depended very much on how the skirmishes in Lancashire, as it were, went.
So, yeah, there are stories, actually, quite well-documented stories of ghostly figures being seen in and around the castle area of both Round Deads and Cavaliers, because they had this battle and there were deaths and so on.
So, yeah, that's one of the local legends that we have.
But there are all sorts of things, and we will talk about this in this conversation, around that whole area.
Pendrel Hill, for example, and I didn't know this until you told me, but it's at the confluence of some ley lines, some lines of energy.
Yeah, no, this is interesting.
This was some research that I did recently since we last spoke.
And it's a sort of thing when you're doing research like this, when you suddenly discover something which makes sense, which makes it almost like a jigsaw and the piece is all falling into place.
There are two ley lines which cross very close to Pendle Hill, just actually to the northwest of Pendle Hill by probably only about a quarter of a mile.
And one of them, which runs north to south, runs from Castle Rigstone Circle in Cumbria, which if people don't know, that's sort of like a smaller version of Stonehenge.
It's supposed to be dated around the same time, and it's near Keswick, which is on the north side of the Leight District in Cumbria.
And that ley line runs all the way down the country and it actually terminates on the south coast at Beachy Head.
But the one that runs from west to east, where it intersects, as I say, just northwest of Pendle, very, very close to it, is a more interesting one.
Now, this runs from Preston, which is on the River Ribble estuary on the west coast of Lancashire.
And in fact, the area around there seems to be quite a hotbed for UFO activity.
The more research I've done into that particular area, the Fyld Coast, up to Morecambe Bay area and around there.
This particular ley line then runs east, east to west, and it terminates over on the east coast of England, very close to Whitby and Ravenscar, which is on the east coast.
And that, of course, is nearly Paul Sinclair country.
Absolutely.
When I worked out where this ley line was finishing, I immediately thought of Paul and the work that he's been doing over on the east coast.
And the interesting thing about that particular ley line is when you follow it, it actually is very close to two very well-known military installations and quite secretive military installations.
One of them is Filindales, which is up on the North Yorkshire moors.
Which is a tracking, we have to say it's a tracking station and it was best known, or it's still in use, of course, but it was best known for being the place kind of of last resort.
If the Russians were going to fire a missile, the old Soviet Union, at us, then Filindales would be the place where they would detect it first.
Yeah, exactly.
It's high up on the North Yorkshire Moors.
It's overlooking the east coast.
It's got, you know, sort of, I would imagine, a radar scope right across the North Sea.
The other one that it comes very close to is a similar installation, which is near Harrogate in West Yorkshire, and it's called RAF Menwith Hill.
Now that is a radar installation, and in fact, you can drive quite close past it.
There's a road goes past it, and the installation itself are like huge white golf balls.
There's about half a dozen of them.
And they obviously enclose the radar installations.
But when I was a child and we used to drive up that way, my dad always used to say all the golf balls are coming on the horizon.
You can see them for miles around.
And the whole area is actually colloquially known locally as blubber houses for some bizarre reason because it's miles inland.
But yes, so this particular leir line is quite interesting.
And as I say, it intersects remarkably close to Pendle Hill.
I won't say that it intersects right on top of Pendle.
It would be fantastic if it did, but it is extremely close.
Now, the interesting thing about Pendle Hill is that you'll probably remember a while ago you spoke to one of your guests, Jenny Randalls, who is a well-known UFO researcher from this area.
One of the founding people of Bufora, the British UFO research organisation.
Yeah, that's right.
And I remember the interview that you had with her very well because she was talking about why she felt that there were certain areas of UFO activity, certain hotspots.
And she was talking about an area which is just south of here.
In fact, it's sort of in between where I live and Manchester called the Rosendale Valley.
And there's quite a lot of UFO activity down in that area as well, or there have been over the years.
And Jenny seemed to think that it had quite a lot to do with the geology of the area and whether there were sort of natural magnetic fields that were drawing these, you know, unidentified flying objects, these objects down into that area.
And when I was doing some research into Pendle and looking at the area around Pendle, one of the first things I did, because I soon realised, you know, there's been a number of documented UFO sites.
In fact, I saw one myself, which I spoke to you about a couple of years ago.
The geology of Pendle itself is very interesting.
Now, you know, I won't profess to be a geologist, however, but from what I can gather, the hill itself is made out of sandstone and millstone grits.
The area around it is limestone.
And there seems to be some school of thought that there is an interaction between the different types of rocks which produce these magnetic fields that seem to be drawing in more UFO activity in certain areas than others.
Almost like a battery.
Yeah, like a magnet, in effect.
Okay.
So, I mean, I am aware of people reporting things in that area.
Can you think of any notable sightings?
Well, there's been a few, actually.
There was one in 2010, which was a sighting from the other side of the hill, from a town in Burnley.
And there was a report to the local police of a blue orb, which was hovering over the hill.
And it was hovering there for about two hours before it was seen just literally shooting off up into the air.
There was quite a few people who saw it, quite a few people reported it to the local police.
It made the local newspapers.
One particular gentleman who rang the police was interviewed and he said that he saw it hovering probably a few hundred feet, as he said, over the top of the hill for a good two hours.
It was a blue, pulsating white light.
There was no noise.
It didn't move.
It was perfectly stationary.
And then, as quickly as it had appeared, it literally just shot off right up into the sky and disappeared.
So that was quite well documented in the local area at the time.
What about your own sighting?
Well, December 2018, it was early one Sunday evening, very, very clear night.
Dark because obviously it goes dark quite early in the northern hemisphere in December.
So it was a cloudless night.
And I'd actually gone out into my garden to look up at the stars because we don't get an awful lot of light pollution around here because it's quite rural where I live.
And I saw an object behaving very strangely in the sky.
I watched it for probably about two or three minutes.
It was south of where I am towards Pendle Hill.
So it was almost over Pendle itself.
It was a very, very bright light that at first, because of the way that it was moving from west to east, I thought it was a satellite or the International Space Station or something like that.
What the object did then was really bizarre because it stopped and started tracking back the same way again, the way that it had originally come from.
And it then started doing a loop and it went into a clockwise loop, did maybe a dozen or so loops and then this object also just shot off into the sky and disappeared at such a speed from virtually being just stationary to shooting off at high speed.
And the interesting thing about that one was that there was actually the in the news the day after, in the national news, there was an article which was reported that the RAF had had to scramble two tornado fighters from Lossymouth up in Scotland because there was an object seen which was heading from west to east,
heading up over the North Sea, again, the area that Paul Sinclair is interested in.
And by all accounts, it had sort of come from over this particular area, from this western side of the country, and it was heading at speed out towards the North Sea.
And the RAF had deemed it of such interest that they actually sent two tornado jets out.
So whether that was the same thing that I saw or not, I don't know, but it was certainly a very peculiar object, whatever it was.
And as you say, the whole area has form.
All sorts of things happen in that area and indeed in adjacent areas.
You sent me a list of some things that happened in 1979, it's 41 years ago now, the Royal Ordnance Factory, which is a sort of munitions, I guess, production factory.
1979, you know, a lot of documentation and police involvement.
Yeah, well, the Royal Ordnance Factory is, sadly, it's not there anymore.
It's been demolished and it's now a housing estate.
But back in when this incident happened in 1979, it was very much a working factory.
It was a munitions factory in effect.
And there were actually quite a few in this area.
And in fact, during the Second World War, many of them were bombed by the Luftwaffe.
This one managed to stay intact.
Yeah, freedom of information requests on this one, which is interesting because I've got the report from the police officer, the sergeant who witnessed this object.
There's a very strange report or it's actually from, it says S4F Air, room 8239, main building.
And that's all it says on it.
And it says reported sighting of a UFO at ROF Blackburn on the 24th of February, 1979.
I wonder if that was Nick Pope's operation.
Well, again, that's something that I thought of.
It just says it's signed by, again, I've got this from FOI, you know, from Freedom of Information Request, so anybody can get it.
And it's signed by W. Stephen of OF Stroke Section 2.
And he just said, we spoke today.
I'm attaching a report by the MOD police of a sighting of an unidentified flying object over the ROF at Blackburn on the 24th of February 1979.
And what happened with this one was that 2.37 a.m. in the morning, the police station at Blackburn, which is sort of the adjacent Town to Darwin.
Darwin's a smaller town to Blackburn, but the ROF was actually sort of on the border of the two.
So some people say it was Darwin, some people say it was Blackburn.
There was a sergeant and a constable who were both on duty at the time, a sergeant Headley and a constable Hargreaves.
And they had rung through from Darwin Police Station to Blackburn Police Station and they said that they'd received a report from a member of the public of a bright light hovering over the ROF facility.
And from where they were in Darwin, the police station in Darwin, they were less than a mile away from the factory.
So they could actually see the light themselves.
Now, the sergeant managed to get a pair of binoculars whilst they were watching this object.
And he described it as a sort of soft or dull light traveling in a north to south direction over the factory.
And he said that one minute the light was on, the next minute it went off, then it came on again and it continued to sort of go on and off, you know, at regular interviews for quite a while.
The interesting thing with this is that he's actually, he made a drawing and attached it to his report.
And it does look like a sort of classic flying saucer.
He said that the bottom half of the object was saucer shaped with a light bulb shaped dome on the top.
And he said that the illumination seemed to be coming from inside the object and that there was a black coloured ring around the saucer part and black ribs stretching up from top to bottom.
And he said that in its weight there was a sort of vapor or smoke, but there was no sound.
And he said that it was about 400 to 700 feet in the air above the facility.
And he estimated it was roughly about 30 feet across.
So there was himself and Constable Hargreaves saw this.
And then there was a third officer who also observed it, who was a police constable Dean.
So there's three police officers also, they all wrote reports to say what they'd seen.
The sergeant rang the incident through to Blackburn Police Station, which I say was the neighbouring town with a larger presence.
And there was also independent witnesses from the public as well.
There was a report written by a gentleman called Mr. MacDonald, and he wrote to the director of the Royal Ordnance Factory on the 28th of February 1979, so about four days later.
And he stated that he too had seen the object.
And it's quite funny that he stated that the three witnesses, i.e.
the police officers, were in Inverted Commas sober, steady and reliable.
Well, that's always good to know, isn't it?
Exactly.
So yeah, that was quite interesting.
But yeah, this was obviously logged.
It was reported by the police officers.
It obviously found its way to a government department, you know, whatever ministry.
That report.
Is there any record that that government department, bearing in mind that London is, what, 240 miles away in a southeasterly direction, is there any report that somebody from there came up to check this out?
Not directly.
I did try and do some research to try and find out what this S4F air ministry was.
And I did find quite a lot of different records of various different scientists from all over the country which were attached to this particular ministry or department.
So it's entirely possible that it was one of the government departments that New Pope was involved in at one time.
Well, I don't think he was a part of it in 1979.
I need to check back.
I think he joined later.
But, you know, there's evidence that they were investigating these things, as we know, in World War II.
So this could be the same outfit.
Yeah, it could be.
With this one, there is no evidence that anybody from the ministries sort of came up to interview these people.
Although I'm sure that, you know, given the veracity of the reports and the fact that there were, you know, quite a few people saw this and there were drawings made of the object that was seen, I would imagine that they were involved.
Unfortunately, I've not been able to find any evidence of that.
I have found evidence of men in black, as it were, involvement in another incident, which was the Winter Hill UFO.
Just before we leave this one behind, though, we have to say that there have been many incidents in ufology where whatever it is, whatever the phenomenon is, takes an interest in military installations, things to do with weaponry.
That is pretty, in fact, that was arguably at the heart of Rendlesham Forest, that there was some interest in that.
But we know that there's a long history of these things.
So from your freedom of information request, then, Craig, I guess this was just filed as unexplained, unidentified.
Yeah, it was.
It was just filed away with the dozens and dozens of others that came up when I did a search looking for this particular ministry.
But the most telling thing of all is that a member of the public decided to write a letter which remains on file.
I mean, how many people bother?
When you saw what you saw, did you bother to write to somebody?
Did you bother emailing anybody about it?
Maybe you did.
The only person I emailed you, sorry, was you, Howard.
I didn't sort of contact the local police or anything like that.
It's got to be significant, I think.
When people take the trouble to do that, it always adds a certain credibility.
And it's 41 years on now.
Maybe, you know, just from putting this out now, Craig, maybe somebody is listening who knows something about this.
So let's see.
It's the old ordnance factory.
And what was its exact location?
It was in Darwin, which is a small town near Blackburn.
The interesting thing, though, if you think about the date of this, sort of 1979, there seemed to be quite a lot of well-documented UFO incidents, sort of around 1979, 1980.
Absolutely.
That is, you know, Rendlesham Forest people think that it is just those nights around the Christmas holiday.
It wasn't.
There were things that happened building up to it, and there were things that happened after it.
And I think there were things that happened in 1979.
I would need to check back.
Now, Winter Hill is known to all of us who live in the Northwest because it is a large, bleak scar of a hill on the landscape.
You can see it from the motorway.
If you're driving up from Cheshire, you can see it sticking up there.
And if you're about to peel off left to Liverpool or right to Manchester, you can see this huge tower, the television broadcasting tower there.
But it is a bleak place.
It's a place that often is cut off in winter.
And it's a mysterious place, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
It's high up on the part of the West Pennine Moors.
And it's above the town of Bolton.
So it's sort of to the northwest of Greater Manchester.
But it's an area which is often cut off during winter, especially if there's snowfall.
But it is a very bleak, not a very populated place at all.
And indeed, that television transmitting tower was surrounded a couple of years ago when temperatures got hot like they are now.
There was a fire, and it looked as if they may have to close down the TV tower for a while because it was surrounded by flames.
Actually, they didn't.
It carried on broadcasting.
But, you know, Winter Hill is a place that, unless you're a serious hiker, you really don't want to be going there unless you know what you're doing.
It's bleak and it's remote.
Yeah, it's very similar in that respect to Pendle Hill.
And in fact, it's probably even more remote because of its position.
Okay, so there was a sighting, a case there.
There was.
In fact, there's been quite a few sightings over the years, but the most interesting one was going back to November 1999.
And it was actually investigated by a local UFO researcher from Manchester, who I'll just call Steve because I did try to contact him through Facebook, actually, when I discovered this incident.
And I tried to contact him through Facebook, but unfortunately, he's not replied to my emails as yet.
So we'll just call him Steve for ease, if that's okay.
And he had been contacted by Greater Manchester Police because they, in turn, had been telephoned one Saturday afternoon by a gentleman by the name of Mr. Murphy, who works as a farmhand on a farm up near Winter Hill.
And he was, Mr. Murphy was actually Irish, quite a thick Irish accent.
And the police were having, as they said, they were having trouble understanding him because he was really sort of excited.
He was talking very quickly and it was very difficult to understand what he was saying.
Steve, the investigator, managed to contact him by telephone.
He'd given the police his telephone number, Mr. Murphy, and the police passed the number on to him.
They contacted Steve because they knew that he was a local investigator and they thought that he would be better to sort of speak to Mr. Murphy because the police really didn't believe in UFO sightings and that sort of thing.
So Steve had contacted Mr. Murphy, telephoned him back, and Mr. Murphy had relayed the story of what had happened.
And he said that he was basically out in the fields trying to bring the cattle in late one Saturday afternoon.
And he said all of a sudden there was a bright light in the sky appeared out of nowhere in front of him.
And this was accompanied by a sort of droning noise.
And he said it was quite low.
It was only a couple of hundred feet off the ground.
And he said his cattle just scattered.
They started running around, obviously very frightened.
And he was initially more concerned about the safety of the animals than he was about the safety of himself.
So he ran back up the field, back up towards the farmhouse, trying to bring the cows in as he was going.
But he said that the object followed him and it hung around above him as he entered into the farmhouse.
And now he said as he looked out of the window, this particular object had gone back over the field and resumed its position where he'd first seen it over the fields.
And at this point, he rang Greater Manchester Police, so I said didn't really take him seriously.
And because he was so agitated and he had this strong Irish accent, they passed his details on to the investigator.
Now, what happened next was quite interesting.
According to Mr. Murphy, shortly afterwards, he was visited by what he described as three suited gentlemen who claimed to be from the Department of Agrifil, sorry, Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
And he described them as looking like men in black, in effect.
They were covered from head to toe in sort of black suits and black sunglasses.
I wonder why people from the agriculture department would want to visit about that?
That's a very good question.
Unless, of course, they weren't from the agriculture department.
Well, their behavior becomes even stranger as the story goes on.
Apparently, they were extremely interested in Mr. Murphy's story, and they insisted that he didn't tell anybody else, and that if he did, the farm would be closed down.
Now, interestingly, when Mr. Murphy spoke to Steve, he said that although he'd taken these threats really seriously, he felt like he needed to speak to somebody about this, and that's why he initially rang the police.
And not long afterwards, actually, Mr. Murphy Decided that he and his family should move back to Ireland where they came from, and they cut all contact with Steve, which is interesting in itself.
Now, gentleman Steve tried to investigate what had gone on, but he kept hitting dead ends.
Everybody talked to just seemed to didn't want to speak to him about it.
And it was during this time that he was trying to locate the farm for the first time.
So he was out driving up around Winter Hill area.
He had a rough idea where the farm was.
But he said that in his report, he said that he was followed by a Jeep.
And when he pulled into a small car park, the Jeep pulled in behind him.
And he said a man got out dressed in jeans and a jumper and a cap.
He said he was aged about mid-30s.
And he walked up to Steve and he asked him what he was doing, which in itself is quite a strange thing to do.
Well, out of the blue, yeah.
Steve was quite taken about by the fact this guy approached him.
He told this guy that he was looking for a farm that belonged to a friend of his.
And the man sort of asked him which farm it was and then said, okay, you know, good day.
Got back in his Jeep and drove off.
So Steve was obviously a little bit, let's say, freaked out by this because it was a strange thing to happen.
Anyway, he managed to locate the farm near, there's a village just on the eastern side of Winter Hill called Tockholes.
Strange name for a village.
It doesn't sound a bit Lancashire, does it?
No, it doesn't.
It's actually quite Yorkshire-ish in the way that it is.
Anyway, this farm that he found, it was known locally as Andrew's Farm.
Now, as he approached, he said that he could see a field towards the back end of the farm and he could see a burnt patch in the middle of the field, a circular burnt patch.
So he pulled his car up at the gates of the farm and he got out and he started walking up the farm track.
And as he was walking up, there was the farmer walking down towards him.
Now, Mr. Murphy had told him initially that he'd worked on the farm for about 15 years and he'd never seen anything like this particular incident before.
So when Steve introduced himself and spoke to the farmer and asked if Mr. Murphy was around, the farmer denied all knowledge of ever knowing a Mr. Murphy or in fact of ever employing a Mr. Murphy.
And as he was talking to the farmer, he said that a number of vehicles drove up the road and arrived at the bottom of the farm track, including the same Jeep that he'd seen earlier in the day.
And he said that a number of, again, suited men got out, including the Jeep driver.
And one of the suited guys came up to him and asked him what he was doing in the area and did he know the farmer.
And the farmer seemed quite agitated at this point.
Obviously, you know, he was uncomfortable with the situation for whatever reason.
Perhaps he'd been spoken to by these people before.
And Steve reported that at this point he thought, right, you know, discretion is the better part of valour.
He bid his farewells, got back in his car and drove off, documented the whole incident and didn't follow it up any further because he felt it wasn't prudent to do so.
Right, so somebody was clearly interested in whatever it was that had appeared there and was interested in making sure that those who had seen what they had seen just forgot about it, it seems.
Yeah, well, Mr. Murphy was obviously spoken to.
He was told not to speak to anybody.
If he did, then unpleasant things could befall him and his family and the farm would be shut down.
Obviously, the owner of the farm was spoken to by, you know, by the way that he acted when Steve approached him and asked about Mr. Murphy.
He obviously didn't want to speak about it.
It would seem that he'd been spoken to about the incident as well, not to mention it.
So yeah, it's an interesting one, that, because there was obviously something more to that incident that was just a sort of normal, well, I say normal, you know, your sort of usual UFO sighting.
It was obviously, there was something a lot deeper in that one.
Yeah, it seems that they were trying to gather information, maybe, on something that they were sort of aware of, but didn't want anybody else to be.
And that's a story we've heard a million times before.
There's been a little bit of further information, hasn't there, about something we've discussed before, the Accrington Triangle UFO.
You've had some further contact about that.
Yeah, this was a really good one.
I had an email following when I was on your show last and the podcast that you kindly put me on.
I had an email through my website from a chap and he said I could mention his name, Noel, Noel Southcott, who was, hi Noel, if you're listening.
He lives in Ireland now, but he was actually an old school friend of mine.
We used to, believe it or not, play together when we were about seven or eight years of age.
And then we lost touch as we went to secondary schools, high schools.
He went to one school, I went to the other.
But we used to play together a lot as very young children.
So it was really, really nice to hear from him.
And it was great that he, you know, heard the interview that I did with you and immediately put two and two together and thought, that's the Craig Bright that I used to play with when I was a child.
He sent me an email about a triangular shaped UFO that he'd seen in 1987.
This was obviously before he moved over to Ireland.
And it's strange when you look at a lot of UFO sightings, a lot of them do tend to be triangular shaped, or at least three lights, you know, sort of very close together in the sky.
Whether or not it's actually a triangular shaped object, or whether it's just the lights, is difficult to tell with a lot of them.
But he said that he'd seen a triangular object which was quite low in the sky hovering over the town of Osletwistle, which is quite close to Accrington.
It's virtually the town next door.
And he was leaving work at the time.
And he said he thought it was roughly about 800 to 1,000 feet above the ground.
He said there were three definite lights in a triangle shape, and occasionally there was a fourth one right in the center of the triangle, which would flicker on and off.
Again, he said there was no sound.
He thought that there was more to this object than just the three lights.
He said, although it was dark, he could sort of make out that there was a larger object which these three lights were part of.
Kind of mothership.
Yeah, and he said it wasn't completely silent, but he could hear a very, very faint humming noise.
He actually said in his email that it was like the noise you hear when you stand too close to an electric substation.
So that sort of low humming, droning noise.
And he said he did some research himself, looked on YouTube and various other places.
And he said he found one that had been reported in Belgium a few years later.
And he said when he saw the picture of the craft, as he's put in his email to me, he says the hairs on the back of my neck stood up because he said it was almost identical to what I thought I saw that evening.
And he said the object sort of, you know, shot off again at speed, which is which is what, you know, it's a sort of classic sort of UFO behavior in effect.
You know, some objects will hover there for a while and then it'll shoot off at high speed, almost defying the laws of physics or gravity, you know, and certainly not behaving in the way that any aircraft or anything that we know, you know, the RAF or the military have.
So, yeah, that was an interesting one.
And as I say, he said, you know, when he looked at these pictures from the one in Belgium from a few years later, he said it was absolutely identical.
Right, well, it was good that he got in touch with you and rekindled memories of your school days.
It was, yeah, fantastic.
Yeah, really good.
Yeah, really nice.
You were also contacted about something that happened over Morecambe Bay.
Now, we have to say that Morecambe Bay is a great sweep of a bite of a bay that is north of Blackpool.
It is just underneath the lake district.
So if you stand on the beach at Southport, which is very close to where my parents lived, and if the conditions are clear, if you stand on the pier at Southport, you can look up, you can see Blackpool Tower and Blackpool.
Then if you look further up, you see the great bite of Morecambe Bay.
And then beyond that, you've got the Lake District and the hills, the mountains almost of the Lake District beyond there.
So it's a great big area.
And you were actually contacted with somebody who lives in the bay, effectively.
Yeah, well, on the northwest end of the bay, where the coast goes around and heads north up to the Cumbrian coast, is the town of Barrow-Infurness.
And there's an area called Walnley Island.
And we have to just say to our listener here that Barrow-Infurness is famous for nuclear submarines.
It is indeed.
And in fact, there is still a nuclear submarine base there.
They build nuclear submarines, test them.
And in fact, just around the coast, going north up to the Cumbrian coast is a nuclear power station, which is Sellerfield.
And a little bit further south, actually, on Morecambe Bay, just north of Morecambe, is Heesham Power Station, which is also a nuclear power station.
I'd forgotten, actually, I'd forgotten that Hecham was nuclear as well.
Yes.
So literally, you've got two huge nuclear operations, plus a submarine base.
Yeah, exactly.
So it is, you know, it's an area which is, you know, could possibly be sort of really central to UFO activity.
And in fact, the guy that contacted me, I was putting some feelers out on various UFO websites, you know, asking people to talk to me about experiences they'd had.
And he contacted me from Walney Island.
He'd been fishing with his cousin.
And he explained this particular UFO incident to me.
He also sent me a link as well, which was on YouTube, which I had a look at.
And the footage was very sort of jumpy and grainy and quite difficult to make out.
But I don't, you know, I'm not saying for one moment that it wasn't a genuine sighting, the YouTube one.
I think it was just the fact that it was being taken on a phone and it was quite shaky and obviously it's difficult to sort of focus in.
The one that he mentioned to me when he was out fishing with his cousin, so you know, he said his cousin could corroborate what they saw.
Looking out over Morican Bay itself and bearing in mind that when the tide is out, it's a huge area of mud flats and sand flats and that sort of area.
And in fact, it is very atmospheric in its own right.
It's one of those areas, again, very similar to Pendle Hill, that has got that sort of atmospheric feeling about it that you can't quite put your finger on.
He said that they both saw an extremely bright, yellowish-white orb, which just suddenly appeared over the bay.
It appeared in the sky, sort of in between them and where they were looking south back towards the opposite side of Morecambe Bay and sort of Morecambe and the Heesham area.
So it's entirely possible that it was around about Heisham Power Station area.
And he said It was a very, very unnaturally bright yellow-white object, like a very large orb, which just hovered there.
And he said it was remarkably still.
Occasionally, it would blink out and then reappear again in the same place.
He said it would then move quite low to the sea.
So, at the time, obviously, the tide must have been in.
And then he said it would move back up a little bit higher again, back to its original point.
And he said they watched it for a good 10-15 minutes, and then it just blinked out and disappeared.
And he said he's seen several similar objects while he's been out fishing from the sort of Walney Island area, that northern end of the Morcombe Bay.
And he said he's seen several objects over the years.
Unfortunately, he didn't document many because he didn't feel that people would believe him.
But he said he knows of other people who've seen objects in that area as well.
So it's obviously an area which has quite a lot of UFO activity.
Does it have anything to do with the submarine base?
Does it have anything to do with the two nuclear power stations?
I would suggest it probably does.
Yeah, well, it has indeed happened so many times with these things.
I mean, the UFO stuff is great, and that's a whole new area of research for you, Craig.
And that's how we got talking, isn't it, some years ago?
It is, absolutely.
I know that we've just about got time for one ghost story, because I know your ghost research goes on.
And let's pick one.
The Grindleton Bridge Ghost.
I mean, that could almost be the title of a play or a documentary or something, a radio play.
The Grindleton Bridge Ghost.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, the name itself is fantastic.
Grindleton is a village on the other side of the valley, the River Valley, the River Ribble Valley, to where I live in Chapburn.
So there is a road bridge which crosses the river and that was built in about 1930.
And this is one of those ghost stories that I mean, I really wanted to talk to you about this because it's fascinating.
The research that I did after I was told the story, again, it's one of these where all the jigsaw pieces fall into place.
And in fact, I found some photographs which I've put on my website so people can go and have a look and see what I'm talking about.
And I'll give you the website address at the end if that's okay.
I was talking to a guy in the village who is really interested in local paranormal stories.
And he told me that when he was younger, his uncle had told him a really interesting story about when he was down by the river near the bridge at Grindleson.
And he was just on the downstream side of the bridge.
And he was fishing very early in the morning during the summer.
He said it was about half past four or five o'clock in the morning.
So the sun was just coming up.
Excuse me.
And he was actually crouched down quite close to the water's edge because he was fishing in an area, shall we say, that he shouldn't have been fishing in.
And he looked up at the field behind him, fields on both sides of the river, and he noticed that there was a woman and a child walking across the fields towards the riverbank.
Now, first, he immediately thought this was a bit strange for two reasons.
One, it was very early in the morning.
But secondly, he knew being a local guy that there was no path across the field that he knew of in that particular area.
And as they came closer, he said he noticed that they were both, it was, the child was a young girl, so she was wearing a long floor-length sort of linen dress almost.
He said he could see it that clearly.
And the young lady who was holding a hand was dressed in the same sort of attire.
And he said that they looked like they were dressed in old clothes.
And to me, it sounds sort of Edwardian or Victorian.
And that may well sort of link in with the stuff that I found out about the mill in Chapman that I spoke to you about the last time we spoke.
But anyway, going back to the story, he noticed this lady and this young child.
And as they got closer, he thought it's really strange.
Anyway, he sort of popped his head up from behind the bank and he shouted, good morning.
And they ignored him and carried on.
And at this point, they got to the edge of the riverbank.
And there was a bit of a drop, probably about five or six feet.
So the river was quite low.
And they continued crossing the river in mid-air and continued across the river to the opposite bank and disappeared into the bank.
Now, obviously, because it's such a local bridge to where I live, I've been down, I've had a look, I've taken some photographs.
And I did some research into what the area was like before they built the Stone Road Bridge.
And amazingly, there was in almost exactly the same spot as where I think this lady was seen crossing because of the description of where this guy was fishing.
There used to be a wooden footbridge that went across the river.
And on the opposite side of the river, on the Grindleton side of the river, was a mill called Green Dale Mill.
And again, the mill was there because of the water source of the river.
Now, interestingly, I found a photograph from about 1930 which shows because it's an area of the river which floods quite a lot, it shows the wooden footbridge half washed away.
But you can clearly see on the photograph, it's a black and white photograph, and it's up on the website if people want to go and have a look at it.
And you can see just to the right of the footbridge, you can see the stanchions of where they were starting to build the stone bridge, which is still standing today.
So it would seem that the ghosts of this lady and this young girl were actually crossing the river where the old wooden footbridge used to be.
So they were replaying a scene that would have happened thousands of times there?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Because that was, at the time, that was the only way they could get across the river.
Now, interestingly, prior to them building the footbridge, there was actually a ferry that used to go from one side of the river to the other.
So, you know, a rowing boat.
People used to get on the rowing boat and go to the other side.
But they obviously built the wooden footbridge because there were people needing to go across the river to go and work in the mill.
So again, we're talking sometime in the Victorian era.
And in fact, the mill, part of the mill is still there now.
Quite a lot of the areas now houses.
But part of the old mill is still there and still working.
It's True Tex Mill now.
I think it's owned by True Tex.
So where the lady and the little girl were crossing the river was where the old footbridge used to be.
Well, that's fascinating.
I wonder if your correspondent saw this, then presumably other people have seen this too.
I've asked around the village and unfortunately nobody else has seen it.
It was just this, but because it was so early in the morning, if it's a replay, shall we say, if it's a sort of recording type ghost, then it's more likely to sort of replay itself early morning, you know.
At the time when they might have been going to work.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Well, if anybody else has experienced that one, then I'd be very pleased to hear from you and so would Craig.
So would I. That sounds like a work in progress, though, Craig.
That one's not finished, is it?
No, I want to do some more research on that.
And I certainly, as I say, I've gone down there, I've had a look at the area, I've taken some photographs of the area.
You can clearly see where the old footbridge used to go into the opposite bank, the bank side at Grindleton.
And, you know, I would love to sort of do a stake out very early in the morning to see whether I can see anything because you never know.
Well, you never know, but sometimes if you're primed for it, it's not going to happen for you.
In fact, a lot of the time, most of the time.
And, you know, like the guy who saw that apparition, he wasn't expecting to see anything.
And when I saw mine, my one and only, I definitely wasn't expecting to see anything.
Just one of those things, scenes that replay themselves sometimes over and over again.
Yeah, and of course, I spoke to you a while ago about the Shadow Man that I saw.
Yeah, the Shadow Man.
Shadow Man of Accrington, which is the book.
Yeah, it is indeed, yeah.
So refer back to my past works for more information about the Shadow Man of Accrington, I think.
Craig, it's always good to speak with you, and I know that you're always doing further research.
The UFO thing is fairly new for you, but good luck with it all.
Thank you.
Well, can I just quickly mention the website?
Thank you.
It's craigbryant.co.uk.
There's a link for the book that I wrote last year.
I'm working on a new book at the minute, and as I say, there's some new research on there with photographs and stuff if people want to go on and have a look.
Well, that's enough to be going on with, I think, Craig.
Listen, thank you very much indeed.
I don't know about you.
I'm going to have to go and cool off now because it's gone down one degree.
I think it's 33 where I'm speaking now.
And it's, what, coming up on half past 7 p.m.
I've never known anything like it.
So I think you're lucky to be further north than me.
You're a couple of degrees cooler.
But let's hope this crazy weather calms itself down a bit.
Otherwise, I'm going to become an apparition.
Or just disappear in a cloud of steam, I think.
Craig, good to talk with you again, Dave.
And you, Harry, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Your thoughts about Craig and any guests that I've had here gratefully received.
Guest suggestions, stories, whatever it is.
Just email me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there about anything.
If you want to tell me a story, then just mark it listener story and then I'll put it in the place where I put listener stories, if you see what I mean.
I'm trying to get organized here.
I'm trying to break the habits of a lifetime.
It's probably not going to work.
I don't think I've ever been organized, but I've always been me, but I'm trying to be.
I hope you're coping with the ups and downs of the weather.
And by the time you hear this, I hope that this heat wave has abated somewhat, as they say.
In other words, cooled down a bit.
And one way or another, I hope you're getting by.
Nice to hear from you.
And if you've made a donation to the show recently, by the way, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay calm, stay safe, stay cool, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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