Colin Saunders and his family had a remarkable "UFO encounter" in Leicestershire two decades ago ... a strange "flying triangle" - the event had many very unusual aspects that caused Colin to research similar reports and phenomena in his new book "Triangular UFOs of the UK" from Philip Mantle's Flying Disk Press. You'll hear Colin's story - and some amazing ones he's been sent.
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 Unexplained.
Well, recording this as some flakes of sleet and snow, if sleet comes down in flakes, are just touching my window at the moment.
Seems that winter is going out with a bang in the UK.
By the time you hear this, probably it's going to be sunny and warm.
But at the moment, we're getting a last little taste of winter here.
And that's happened quite a few times in my lifetime, where winter decides to show us a little lesson at the end of it all, just to say bye-bye.
So I'm fully expecting very soon things will improve.
News on the TV show.
As you know, I haven't known very much about what's going on.
I was due to have a meeting about all of this.
So I may know something about the TV and the radio show, and you may be aware of it by the time you hear this.
So I'm not going to say any more about it because it'll probably be out of date.
But you can always check the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of the Unexplained With How It Used, the one with the logo on it on Facebook only, and you will see the latest news about whatever is happening with this show, whether it continues on radio, whether it continues on television, whether it doesn't continue anywhere as a broadcast.
It'll continue as a podcast, though, you'll know as soon as I know through that Facebook page.
The website, of course, theunexplained.tv, all the podcasts are there.
So if you don't find the newest ones on your podcast portal, you should.
But if you don't, they're all at the website designed and created by Adam.
If you want to contact me, thank you for all of your emails.
And if you've made a donation to the show recently through the website, thank you very much.
Vital for us to continue.
The website has a link that you can send me emails.
If you send me a story and you're thinking that maybe at some point I might be able to include that in a broadcast, you know, only too pleased to get them.
But so I know where to put them, if you can mark in the subject line my story, my story in the subject line, and then tell me what you've experienced.
And if you can keep it, and I'm going to sound like the late and great art bell here talking about the length of faxes that he was sent, if you can keep it to two paragraphs, I'd be very, very grateful.
Two paragraphs, my story.
And thank you very much indeed.
And guest suggestions, the usual place for those, of course, via the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link for emails and you can send me an email from there.
I'm going to shut up now because I think I've probably said enough.
The guest on this edition, Colin Saunders, who had a remarkable triangular UFO experience that literally changed his life.
It was back in 1999, and you will hear his full story here, plus the many stories, or some of them, that people have been sending him that were similar to his.
His book is one of the ones published by Philip Mantle's excellent Flying Disc Press.
It's called Triangular UFOs of the United Kingdom.
Colin Saunders, the man, as I say, we're going to be speaking with.
The book is officially out on the 31st of March, although Philip Mantle tells me that it's already available through Amazon.
Triangular UFOs of the United Kingdom.
I have the hardback copy here.
And once again, I thoroughly, totally recommend this if you're interested in this kind of thing.
This is not going to disappoint you in any way.
I think that's probably about all of it, really.
I hope that everything is okay with you.
And the next time we speak, the sun might be shining.
Let's get to the guest now in the English Midlands, Colin Saunders.
I'm going to talk about his experience and his book.
Based on that experience, Triangular UFOs of the United Kingdom.
Colin, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Thank you for inviting me, Howard.
I've been an admirer of yours for many years.
Well, thank you.
Thank you for that.
That's always nice to hear.
Your story, of course, I am well aware of because in the pantheon of UFO stories in the United Kingdom, it's pretty famous and you've got a lot of local newspaper coverage.
I don't want to talk specifically about the story just yet, but you are well known in this field because of this, aren't you?
Yes, yes.
I'm one of those people who can't keep a secret.
Once we had the experience, I just had to tell everybody about it.
I couldn't help it, you know, irrespective of what their points of view may have been.
But I have to say, most people were going with it.
It was nobody really knocking the experience that we had, the encounter, the sighting.
So I got talking to people, started meeting people.
And then when the internet came along and Facebook, it was easy then to get in touch and find out what other people were doing around the world.
That's exactly what happens, isn't it?
It has a momentum of its own then.
It has, yes, yes.
And I was just so taken by it all that I had to start joining UFO groups and going to UFO conferences.
And because I'm a draftsman and I've worked in the aircraft industry, I decided to build models.
I thought that was the best way of showing people exactly what we saw that night.
It makes it more tangible rather than just talking about it or showing a 2D picture.
So once I made the models, I started getting out and about a bit more.
And then I noticed in the local newspaper, the Hinkley Times, that a guy had seen a triangle.
There was a report on a triangle.
So I wrote in with my own experience and then asked others if they'd seen anything to share their experience with me.
And I was surprised just how many people in that small town of Hinkley have had encounters with triangular craft.
And amazingly, some of them were over what we call Transco.
It's the headquarters of the gas distribution for the UK.
They've got a huge antenna array out the back.
Now, on separate occasions, triangles have been seen hovering above these communications mass.
So Hinkley has been quite important as far as triangle cycles are concerned.
And it plays into the whole narrative, not only in the United Kingdom, but in the US and other countries, that whatever it might be, assuming it's a phenomenon that is not from here, is somehow interested in power, is somehow interested in electromagnetic radiation.
You know, that ties in very much with that narrative that we get from everywhere.
It could be also that they're interested in the distribution network of the gas supply of the UK.
The other thought that crossed my mind, the antenna is it's absolutely massive and it's got all sorts of dishes on there.
Now, I would assume that some of those may be used by GCHQ or somewhere like that.
So maybe the craft wasn't charging itself up with static electricity.
Maybe it was taking a sweep of the information that was coming backwards and forwards from that particular mast.
And for international listeners, GCHQ is essentially the high-tech spy center in Cheltenham in the United Kingdom.
We interviewed, if you go back from my podcasts, I had the former head of it, Sir David Omond, who was very lucky a couple of years ago to get an interview with him.
So if you want to know about what GCHQ is and what it does and why it is so super secret and why we depend on it, that's in that conversation.
Okay, let's wind you back to the beginning then.
We know that your background is engineering, effectively.
So you are going to take an interest in anything that appears to be sophisticated of that kind.
So that's your background.
Were you a UFO guy before the experience we're about to talk about that kicked all of this off in 1999?
That's a good question.
No, not at all.
I had no interest in UFOs at all as a hobby or just as a passing interest.
But, you know, I enjoyed going to see Star Wars at Pictures when that first came out back in the 80s.
That was good.
But since then, I've not gotten involved with the UFO community at all.
So I had worked in Germany on the Airbus and I worked in Sweden for a couple of years on civilian aircraft.
So I do know quite a bit about aircraft.
I worked in avionics.
I'm an electrical design draftsman by trade.
But I'd also worked in the North Sea for Chevron Petroleum.
I've been out a few times to the platforms, the Ninium Field.
So there was a lot of flying on helicopters, a lot of aircraft experience.
So on the night when this craft materialized in front of us, I mean, I knew straight away it was not from this world.
It was just absolutely fantastic to see.
It was beautiful, absolutely amazing.
You worked in the aircraft sector.
I've known people who've worked in the aviation sector too.
And some of them, when I mention the subject of UFOs, they tend to look at you a little askance and hint, although some of them cannot say, that there are many exotic craft that belong to us that simply the public are not told about.
Yeah, I do touch on this on the book, you know, obviously the alleged TR-3B, for instance.
But I know from my own experience, when you work in the aircraft industry, you manufacture an aircraft to a certain standard, and then you have breaks in the manufacture.
So you go from zero to 78.
Anything that's implemented after that goes from 78 to 150.
Then again, we have a break at 150.
Anything new that comes along then gets in from the next batch of aircraft.
So there's very little change between each of the craft.
So if you look at all the aircraft basically in the world, they've all got wings and fuselage and tails, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're all made by Boeing.
You know, they could be made by Airbus, etc.
Now, my thoughts are when you look at triangles, I mean, the reports in my book, I've got 130 different close encounters that people have seen triangles and not one of them is the same as another.
They're very similar.
I'll give them that, but they're not the same.
So in any manufacturing process, you wouldn't be creating thousands of different triangles because we're just talking about the UK at the moment.
But worldwide, there are thousands of these triangles and they're all different.
I've never seen two exactly the same.
So to say that these are coming out of Area 51, it just wouldn't make sense.
I mean, they'd have to have a manufacturing light lying, like a Model T4.
They must be jurning them out all day long, but everyone being different.
Well, I agree with you.
I agree with you totally on that.
It has to be something else.
The only thing that people differ on and still differ on is that, you know, there's something else.
Now, there are many shapes of UFOs.
And as I record these words, you might be aware of a Calvine UFO is back in the news here.
This is something from 1990.
A couple of guys took a photograph of a diamond-shaped object in Scotland supposedly being escorted by or followed by, we don't know which, a military plane.
It's a famous case.
It's made the news once again here.
There's been some more work by Dr. David Clarke on that.
And the latest thing is that some of the newspapers have a name for the person who took the famous picture, which they've been looking for for the last three decades.
The Calvine was a diamond shape.
I wonder if you could give me an idea if you know how common we're talking about triangles here, where triangles fit in the listings of UFOs, because it seems to me that most of them are either sort of wedding cake or discs.
And then you get the triangles and the diamonds and sometimes the pyramids.
So whereabouts do triangles fit is what I'm clumsily asking here.
Well, from my own research, I think that triangles, they've become more apparent, more prolific in the last few years, in the last 20 or 30 years, shall we say.
I mean, we do know there's lots of saucers, there's lots of cigar-shaped craft out there.
But by and large, I'm starting to think now the majority of sightings these days are triangular craft rather than the traditional saucer-shaped craft.
Now, Dr. David Clark has kindly contributed towards the book, and we've got a section on the Calvine UFO, and that picture appears in the book as well.
Now, I'm not quite sure what to make of that craft.
I mean, it's a diamond shape for a start.
I've never seen a diamond shape.
I have heard about pyramid shapes, and we will touch on one of those in a while.
But one thing I have noticed about all craft, whether they're cylinders, discs or triangles, people talk about the surface being smooth, you know, like jet black like tar or metal or silver foil, for instance.
The Calvine UFO, when you look at that, it's got lumps and bumps all over it.
It almost does look like the top of a mountain.
And the people are saying, you know, it could be the top of a mountain sticking out of a lake with a little man rowing on a boat.
Now, I don't believe that's necessarily.
All kinds of things.
They say it's the same shape as a fishing lure.
And if you get it out of perspective in the photograph, you know, that's precisely what it is.
Yes.
Now, if it is a craft that's flying, one thought that came to me is that we live close to Hinkley.
Now, Hinkley has got a place called Myra, Motor Industry Research Association, where they test a lot of cars.
Now, over the years, I've seen manufacturers sending cars there to be tested on the road, but they disguise them.
They put false spoilers on and false bits onto the wings and make the car look totally different whilst they're driving it up to Myra, just so people don't know what the car is.
And then at Myra, obviously they test the car, and then eventually it gets released as whatever it is, Aston Martin, etc.
If this is a man-made craft, it looks to me like they've almost tried to disguise it in some way.
It just doesn't look to me like a smooth run-of-the-mill UFO.
No, it does look like it's got either portholes or giant rivets in it, doesn't it?
Yes.
Now, hi, when we get into the book, because there is some strange stuff, the paranormal comes into UFOs as well.
I believe there's a definite link.
Now, I know from the viewing of the craft that we saw, and there was some close viewing, which we need to go into, there was no nuts and bolts, there was no rivets, and there was no welding.
It was just absolutely incredible.
Although there were dissimilar metals, there was a central core to our craft.
It was like a milky white colour.
Top and bottom were grey, and they were joined together to this central core, and the edges rolled over like a hovercraft skin or the pie on a pastry.
But where they joined the silver central core, there was no welding.
Like I say, nothing that you could see how it had been put together.
It had been sympathetically joined together, like it had been glued with super glue invisibly.
In a way that we would find hard.
But certainly no nuts and bolts, no rivets, no mechanical bits like that.
Although it was a mechanical-built craft.
Having said that, I've always said as well, it did look like when it when it reared up in front of us, it looked like it was organic.
It looked like it was alive, but clearly manufactured at the same time.
And that is a facet of UFO reports, some of them, some of the most interesting ones from around the world.
Does it have some kind of sentience, some kind of life force within it?
We'll get into that.
Before we talk about your story, though, can I ask you one quick thing?
I don't know if you're banging the desk sometimes when you make a point, but I wonder if you could try to avoid that, Colin, because it gets.
You're the same as me.
I talk with my hands.
You know, when I was on TV, people kept telling me you talk with me.
I do.
I always have.
So you're the same as me.
All right.
I'm going to let you talk and I'm going to shut up.
Tell me the story then and the experience that you had that changed your life in March 1999.
Okay.
So we've been out for a bar meal.
There was eight of us in the party on two separate cars.
So I was in a car, a Ford Fiesta.
My wife was driving and it was my mother-in-law's birthday.
She was 72 that day.
She was in the passenger seat in the front.
And in the back, on the near side, was myself.
And then next to me was my daughter, Victoria.
The second vehicle was a Range Rover with my brother-in-law in.
And he's got a French partner.
And his French partner's grandparents came over.
So we all went out as a group for a meal.
And we left the White Lion at Paleton, which is in the Warwickshire countryside.
And as we got into the fiesta, my wife was driving.
I remember looking around and seeing the old French lady struggling to get into the Range Rover.
So we pulled off in front of the Range Rover whilst they were still loading the older French people.
And I thought, well, they'll soon catch us up.
So then off we went through the country lanes.
So to get back to Hinkley, we'd go down the Foss Way.
So we drove from Paleton through the countryside, which is absolutely pitch black, same as the Foss Way is, until we came up to the Foss Way.
And then somebody said, oh, we're turning onto the Foss now.
And coincidentally, my daughter, who was 12 at the time, said, oh, there's been talk of headless horsemen down here.
And we all laughed and said, oh, we'll keep our eyes open for him then.
And then as we turned the corner, there are some lights hovering by the side of the road.
Now, I went back and measured the distance the next day.
It was exactly half a mile away from the junction where we turned onto the Fossway.
There was no lights, no other cars, no nothing.
And just these fantastic lights hovering by the side of the road, really low down.
And we all go, what on earth is that?
It's obviously not an airplane.
It's too low for an airplane.
It's too many lights for a helicopter.
There's never any lights up and down the Fossway.
We've been up and down there for many years and never seen anything like this.
So we drove towards the lights, obviously quite slowly, just talking about it and just fascinating.
And we pulled up alongside the lights.
Now, I would say they were 100 feet away in the field next to us.
It was like a horse's field and there was a gateway actually into the field with a gate on there, but you could park your car there.
We stopped initially outside the gateway and stared at these lights.
Now, there were four big red lights at the back, and they were not horizontal to the earth.
They were actually tilted at an angle of about 30 degrees.
Now, each of those four lights looked a bit like a traffic light.
It got crisscross effect on the lenses.
But I believe it wasn't etched into the lens.
It looked like it was a byproduct of the light coming from out of the red lights, whatever the red lights were, like a laser light.
You liken it to Newton's law of ring interference.
But that's the effect he was getting off the rear four lights.
Now, as I looked at those four lights, I could also see a smaller red light off to one side underneath the four red lights.
And as I was staring at these lights, and I was looking at one of the big lights in particular, looking at the crisscross effect, I noticed the sky all of a sudden started to ripple around the lights.
And at that point, I thought, oh my God, there's actually a craft.
There's something around these lights.
It's not just lights on their own, because initially there was no crack whatsoever, just these lights.
And as soon as I thought there's something there, it materialized.
It was just like Star Trek, you know, just like it decloaked in front of our eyes.
Then the rear end of the craft stayed where it was and the nose rose up in the air in front of us.
I mean, it was bigger than a house and it was really close.
It filled the total field of vision.
And it was so low, you know, Howard, if it had turned, if it had tilted from the center of the craft, the bottom would have struck the ground.
It was that low.
So the bottom, the rear of the craft stayed where it was and the nose rose up in the air like a horse rearing up in front of you.
Was it making mechanical noise?
No, no noise whatsoever over the noise of the end.
The car engine was still running.
We hadn't got the radio on, but we couldn't hear any noise from the craft whatsoever.
But also, once we got out of the car, there was no smell of any aviation fuels.
Now, I'll carry on at the moment with the nuts and bolts, but something strange happened when the craft floated up in front of us.
So, with the nuts and bolts side of the story, as the craft floated up, we're going, it was just amazing.
And I was going, let me get out, let me get out.
But my wife, very sensibly, she was the only one who didn't see the craft because she was driving.
She'd seen all the lights, but me, my mother-in-law, my daughter saw the craft materialize.
And my wife, being very sensible, drove forward to reverse into the gateway where the UFO was hovering.
Now, the effect of driving forward, there was a big hedge that blocked a view.
And I remember thinking, oh, if it's going to go, it's going to go now.
And of course, we reversed into the gateway, jumped out, and it had gone.
It couldn't see it at all, but there was no smell of any aviation fuel.
And it was quiet.
It was so quiet, it was what they call the Auss effect.
You could hear the pin drop.
Now, I stood there and looked into the distance.
Now I've seen a craft with four red lights on the rear of it going away from us.
Now, it was difficult to judge.
Maybe it was a mile away and the size of a football pitch.
It was incredible.
On the end of each wingtip was a white light, which shone up onto the top and lit the surface up.
It wasn't strobing.
So you'd only see those lights from above this massive craft, not from below as such.
And we stood there and said, well, there it is.
It's changed.
And I know in my initial report that I gave to Omar Fowler, one of his questions was, why do you think it was extraterrestrial, an alien?
I said, well, the craft grew from a small one to a big one, almost in front of our eyes.
Because at that point, I didn't know anything about UFOs whatsoever.
It was only later when I started doing research, I realized that probably what we'd seen going away was another ship.
And possibly the small one had either gone back to it or it had just disappeared where it was at that point.
Was the smaller one checking you out, do you think?
I've put this in the book.
I think the small one was a distraction.
I think it was an ambush.
An ambush?
If you look at the large craft, if you look at the direction that was going, I believe it would have passed over the car at some point whilst we were looking at the small one.
Now, the interesting thing is, when we drew pictures, my wife drew three red lights in a perfect triangle.
There is no way we could have seen that from the aspect ratio from where we were sitting in the car looking at that craft.
No way could we see the underneath and three red lights.
And I asked her on several times if that, you know, to draw what she'd seen, it was exactly the same every time.
So I wondered if she'd seen the underneath of the large craft as it came over the car while the other three of us are looking at the small one in the field.
I mean, the small one in the field was definitely a distraction.
It was the brightest, most colourful craft I've ever seen.
The lights were absolutely amazing.
And there was a bit of white mingled in there as well, but I couldn't see where the white was coming from.
So, yeah.
And then after a short while, traffic started up again.
So the normal airplanes come back into the sky and everything seemed to come back to normal.
So we got in the car and drove home.
It was 9.50pm, by the way.
And when we got home, my brother-in-law lives next door to my mother-in-law.
Not only had they arrived down before us, but the old French people had got out of the Range Rover and they were inside the house having a cup of tea.
So we can only assume they passed us whilst we was in the gateway, but we find it difficult to understand why they didn't see the lights.
They couldn't have been far behind us.
But then the interesting point of that is when I went back the next day to measure the distance, from where we turned onto the Fossway to where the craft was, I don't see how we could have seen it because there were trees in the way.
It was almost like the scenery had changed or the craft had been higher and come down as we drove towards it.
But I don't think that was the case.
Now, my wife didn't see the craft.
She went to pick a friend of ours up from New Zealand, from the airport, and she came back down the Fossway to show her where we'd seen the triangle.
Now, when she got home, she said to me, you know, I think the scenery was different that night.
I can't see, she said to say, you can't see how we could have seen it from where we were.
It was almost like we went in another dimension or something.
Although the gateway we reversed into is definitely there, you know.
But that was a strange phenomenon of the evening.
And you said that there was an aspect about it that was, I don't think you said supernatural, but you said was strange.
I mean, was that the aspect or was there more to it?
There's more to it.
But it's the, and over many years, I really just thought about the nuts and bolts of the craft and what I've just talked about now.
And the bit I kept to myself, although I spoke to family about it and I spoke to other contactors, contactees who've had close encounters.
When the craft materialized and then rose up in front of us, it was like all of a sudden somebody put a pair of binoculars in front of my eyes because I could see it close up.
I could see the box sections on the surface interlocking.
And then I got a close-up of the nose.
And it was right in front of me.
It was that close I couldn't see any of the other craft.
I couldn't see any of the lines on the surface anymore, the beams that were on the surface.
It was like I was right in front of it.
I could come out of my body to see it.
And then there was a third view, which was a side view, which I touched on earlier, where there's no nuts and bolts, no welding, no seams whatsoever.
Now, I thought about that for a long time and I decided I'd had an out-of-body experience.
But I couldn't see why I didn't see the craft roll.
You know, from looking at the nose to looking at the side view, why didn't I see the craft roll and see it all move?
Why was it like an instant image?
It was like three instant images that I saw.
So are you saying that the experience of this thing, and I'm using the word experience very deliberately, varies with the experience?
Yes, yes, because this only happened to me.
Now, this is quite important as well, because after the event, over the next couple of years, I had all sorts of strange paranormal events happening, but nothing happened to the rest of the family.
It took me a long time to figure out why that was.
Now, I used to go to conferences in Leeds run by Graham Birdsell and Russell Callaghan.
You used to have the old UFO magazine.
We had some fantastic conferences on there.
And I got to meet Bud Hopkins.
Now, I told Bud about our encounter and I told him about the close viewing.
And I said, I think about an out-of-body experience.
And Bud said to me, No, they were images placed in your mind by the aliens on board the craft.
Now, before he got a chance to expand on that, this lady barged in, this rude lady, and started saying, Oh, Bob, I found this crystal in the forest.
I think it's from a UFO.
That was the last chance I got to talk to Bob.
It was just a brief sentence, really.
Now, that like, I still wasn't sure, that can't be true, surely.
So I cling to the theory.
It was an out-of-body experience.
And I started reading books on out-of-body experiences.
And in a way, it comforted me because I thought you could live without your body, you know, your life force, your soul.
Although I'm not a religious person, and I've always thought that when you die, you die, and that's the end.
But after this experience, I was thinking, you can live without your body.
So you went to a UFO conference and you got interested in OBE's out-of-the-body experiences purely because of the event that you went through?
Yes, yes.
And with speaking with Bud Hopkins and Bud saying, yeah, I went to the out-of-body experience route initially because of the close viewing of the craft.
Like I say, Bud Hopkins said he believed it was aliens putting images into my mind.
Did he think that whatever it was was showing you itself?
He couldn't elaborate because this weird woman came in.
Doesn't that happen so much in life?
You know, you want to have that crucial conversation and somebody butts in and you don't ever get to have it.
You also, I think the book says, spoke to Stanton T. Friedman.
Yes, I met him on a couple of occasions.
I spoke to him here in the UK and Dr. Roger Lear.
Most of these people were introduced to me by Omar Fowler, the great triangle investigator.
We became great friends and Omar.
There's a whole section on Omar in the book.
Now, I went to America because I was so into the UFOs, I actually paid for myself to go over to Loughlin to a conference over there near Vegas, Las Vegas.
And again, I walked in Stanton Freeman over there, like, and had a nice chat with him.
It was good to see him again.
But getting back to the Bud Hopkins theory, over the next few years, I was clinging to the outer body experience, but I've been reading all the time.
Every day I go onto the internet, I have a quick look, see what's going on.
And I've forgetting his name at the moment.
It'll come back to me.
But he was talking about all of the cases of abductees that he'd been.
I think he'd interviewed like a thousand people.
And what was coming out of that was telepathy, alien telepathy.
Now, people who get abducted and get on board ships, they often say that telepathy takes place rather than talking.
I've always assumed that telepathy was words in your mind and you'd send words back.
But I do remember that some of these were Dr. David Jacobs, that's him.
Some of the people were saying that images were placed in the mind rather than words.
And bearing that in mind, then all of a sudden, out of the blue, I get an email from a guy in America.
And I'll put this email into the book.
And this guy had a close encounter with a triangle.
And he starts the email off by saying, just like you, I had three images placed in my mind of close views of the craft.
He said, one was pipe work on the outside, one was another part of the structure.
And then he thinks the third image was inside the craft itself.
And when I read that email, it was like a eureka moment.
After all this time, Bud Opkins was right.
Those three, it made sense.
Those three images were placed in my mind either by occupants of the craft or the craft itself, if the craft had some sort of intelligence to it.
And the only reason I can figure it would do that is for me to draw it and then build a model and get to this point where I am today.
So it was quite, quite a shock.
And it took me a while to calm down from that because I suddenly think, yeah, I've had telepathy with an alien.
How many people would say that?
So you think that they were almost wanting to give you the blueprints?
Yes, yes.
And exactly the guy in America, who doesn't want to be named, he said the same thing.
They wanted him to see the details, to see how the crash was built.
And since then, I've met one or two other people who have had similar experiences, actually.
And again, I've put those into the book.
Yeah, I mean, it's quite an amazing thing.
I mean, I can see now why I've been so taken by this over the last 24 years.
I'm sorry to jump in, but just one thing strikes me that compared with an awful lot of people who've suffered for these sightings, you were in one respect lucky in that you were not alone in experiencing some of this.
Yes, yeah.
I've often thought about that.
I'm glad that the family was with me.
There were four of us.
So, you know, we all had a very similar experience.
Now, when I say something earlier that I went on to have other paranormal incidences over the next couple of years, but nobody else did.
And I couldn't figure out why that would be.
But having then realized that possible alien telepathy had took place, images being placed in the mind, I think they've opened up something in my mind that's allowing these other things to come through.
But because the others in the car didn't have the close viewing, they had not been picking up on any paranormal activity.
So there is a link between this.
Now, in the book, again, because I've got a lot of sightings in there, I started asking people, have you had any paranormal experience as well as UFO experience?
And more than 50% of the people in the book have had extra paranormal experiences either before or after the UFO.
And a lot of people that there is some kind of element of that in all of this.
Did you at the time, just as we round off this section of the conversation, Colin, did you at the time phone the Ministry of Defence?
Did you phone the police?
Did you contact anybody like that?
Next day I phoned Coventry Airport and asked if there were any reports of unusual large craft in the area last night.
And the response was no.
I must admit, the next day I expected everybody to have seen it.
I expected to see it in the newspapers, but it wasn't.
Then I contacted a friend of mine who many years ago had said that he'd seen a UFO.
When I phoned him up, he said, was it triangular?
And I thought, how do you know that?
Turned out his was a triangular experience as well.
He put me in touch with Graham Birdson and the UFO magazine.
So I phoned him.
He put me in touch with Omar Fowler.
But then I've got a group of friends in Hinkley who are ex-policemen.
And we used to go out drinking.
We've been away on holiday a few times as well as a group.
So on the Friday night, I went out with all these policemen and I told them what had gone on.
And amazingly enough, one of the policemen, Wobbo, says, yeah, I've seen a UFO as well and reported it was in the Hinkley Times.
And then another one of the officers had seen a crop circle appear within like 30 minutes.
He'd driven up a motorway in his patrol car, come back the other way, and his crop circle had appeared in the meantime.
But they didn't know who I should report it to.
And that was it, really.
That was it.
But the fact that other people had experienced these things, I'm sorry for jumping in at the end of your sentence there.
But the fact that other people had experienced things and those police officers told you what they told you, did that make you feel better?
It did, yeah, yeah.
Also, like I say, I couldn't help but tell everybody about it.
I mean, it was just crazy.
And the amount of people who were telling me things, not necessarily UFO, but paranormal, you know, balls of light in the rooms and all these odd things, little creatures.
And I thought, well, if I expect people to believe what I'm telling them, I need to believe what they're telling me.
And it's amazing what's going on in this world.
It's incredible.
It is.
Did you decide then at that point, I'm going to do something about this?
I want people to know about it.
Or did the people seeking details of your story come to you?
Well, initially, I started building the models.
Then I sort of laid off it a little bit.
I tried to put it to the back of my mind.
But with this subject, it keeps coming back.
And a friend of mine, John Mills, he came around, knocked on the door and he bought himself a 3D printer.
And he said he wanted to make a 3D model of my craft.
I thought that is brilliant because although I built quite a good wooden model and printed some drawings off to put onto the surface of it, the lines on the surface were not raised off in 3D, like in relief.
But John could do this with his 3D printer.
So I got quite excited about that.
So he printed me a triangle with the lights at the back and underneath and a white one in the centre.
And it was brilliant.
But it didn't show the surface.
The surface looked like it was alive.
It looked like a lake of liquid mercury.
But that surface would have been possibly trapped underneath a transparent skin or something along that lines, because on top of that were these girders, interlocking girders, which were not shimmering.
They were solid, solid silver.
So hang on, the girders were in front of the shimmering aspect.
Is that right?
On top of the shimmering.
On top.
That's a straight line.
Behind the girders was the lake of liquid, which looked like it was shimmering.
It looked like a lake of water at night with the moonshine on it, and it's got a ripple on it.
You know what I mean?
It was catching.
So you've got different slight colours of the warts of the liquid.
Almost, yeah, like something organic that is being held within.
Yeah, now I have a theory on this because I did see a video on quantum levitation where you get a bit of metal and you freeze it down to zero degrees Kelvin and it turns into a superconductor and then you can put it into a magnetic field.
It will just sit there.
Now, I came up with this theory because on this video, the piece of metal had got vapor covered off it because it was so cold.
So I came up with this theory that the liquid on the surface of the craft could be something like liquid nitrogen and the beams that I could see on the surface protruded down inside the craft, inside the liquid.
So those beams became superconductors and therefore created quantum levitation.
And because of the coldness of the craft, when it materialized on the wingtips, there was like fluffy white clouds appeared, vaporization.
And that's when it became solid, this vaporization occurred.
So whether I've got it right or not, but that's part of the theory I've got that some of the liquid could be like liquid nitrogen and the beams are causing quantum levitation.
Take me from there then.
You started getting media coverage about this.
Talk to me about the media coverage you got.
Yes, it was really through Omar Fowler, my good friend Omar, he managed to get me on television for a start.
We went on Central Weekend Live.
And I believe that, you know, because I made a model, people were interested in seeing that model.
It made it far more tangible than just talking about it.
So I appeared on Central Weekend Live with the model, and that was my first TV appearance.
And apparently that went out to 3 million people.
Yeah, no, Central was, well, is kind of still the ITV region for the Midlands.
Great big coverage.
And that programme used to go out.
I think it was Friday night, wasn't it?
And it would cover an awful lot of people.
So were they, you know, were they accepting of your story or were they mocking you?
No, pretty much.
They were accepting the story, to be honest.
But the more professional people, they were having a go at it then, but sort of leaving me alone, which was quite nice.
They certainly had a go at Omar Fowler, saying it was all folklore and this, that, and the other.
And some people started talking about Wendell Schumann saying it was a lighthouse and this, that, yeah.
Well, of course, how many lighthouses do they have in the Midlands?
That's right, yeah.
We know exactly what we call that night.
You know, there's plenty of rivers and canals, but no coasts, as far as I recall from my years working there.
Okay, so that brings us kind of up to the present date, and you decide to write a book about this And include some of the experiences that people have given to you.
Talk to me about that process.
Yeah, so if we go back slightly to John Mills making the 3D printed triangles for me, it was quite an expensive exercise for him and he did it pre-a-charge.
And once he'd made one, you know, he could make them quite easily once he got all the patterns.
So I said to him, you know, I'll sell a few on a well-known auction site.
And if I sell enough, can you make me a large model that shows the liquid on the surface?
And he agreed.
So I started selling these triangles.
And he also got excited about flying saucers and a cigar-shaped UFO by looking at a particular website that I sent him to.
So he made some of those as well.
So for a little while, I was selling small triangles, flying saucers in these cigar-shaped UFOs.
No profit for me whatsoever.
I wasn't interested in profit and never have been.
This thing's far greater than money.
And I sold enough and then John agreed to make me a large model.
So we worked on that.
And the end result was fantastic.
It's just like the real thing.
It's got like a liquid surface with the beams interlocking.
Now, I did say to John, and I did mean it, well, if you make that model, I will go back out and start getting involved in the UFO community.
So he made that model and I couldn't believe how good it was.
So then I started putting pictures onto the internet and talking to people.
And then I got invited basically to the Outer Limit Magazines conference in Hull last year, run by Chris Evers.
So I went there, did my presentation.
I spent a long time getting it ready.
In fact, it took me four years because I got it ready and then COVID hit.
So they kept cancelling the conference.
So it gave me a chance to keep going over the presentation.
And so eventually the conference took place and I went up to Hull and did my presentation, which I was really pleased about.
And again, because I got the models, people were really interested in it.
I started chatting with a couple of guys, Ronnie and Philip Kinsella, Kinsella twins.
Ronnie had seen a triangle of his own and we talked about that.
And Philip sort of said to me, why didn't you think about writing a book?
I said, well, I'm not really an author.
I don't know much about books.
He says, well, just think it was an extension of your presentation.
He says, because people need to know about this.
So I thought, hmm, yeah, maybe I should write a book.
So that's where it kicked off.
That's where it started.
I came back and started writing about my own experience and then about the Hinckley Times, the other people locally who had had experiences.
What happened then was I got all that information together and I checked it and I got 10,000 words.
And I looked on the, I googled it and an average book means about 70,000 words.
So what am I going to do now?
So I decided then I'd had a lot of emails over the last 20 years and go back through them all and go back through all my messages from Facebook and get back in touch with all those people who have had triangular UFO experiences, but only from the UK.
I wanted to keep it to the UK and just to triangles as well.
So once I've got some of those reports in, I then went on to Facebook basically, onto different groups and asked for more information of people who had seen triangles.
And it was incredible, the amount of people that sent me information.
Now, I do believe that all the information that's been sent to me is correct.
I don't think anybody's making it up.
I don't see why you would want to put yourself in the limelight for something that people see as crazy as this.
So I believe they're all telling the truth.
So I put all of those into the book.
Now, because I'd had these other experiences after the UFO, which we could touch on in a bit if you wish, I started asking people if they'd had experiences.
So like I said, there's a chapter in the book which covers UFOs and the paranormal.
And there is a definite link between the two.
Now, the reason I say that, I mean, touching on the experiences I had after the UFO, there's one in particular, the most incredible one.
I was fishing.
I love fishing.
I was fishing down on the River Soar at Rowthly in Leicestershire.
And I was in this field on my own.
Well, I was in a match, but I was pegged in this field alone.
And during the course of the match, I heard some footsteps coming across the field towards me.
But in the past, there has been people down there shooting, the farm workers and that.
So I thought I'll climb up the bank, make myself known just in case they're out there shooting.
So I climbed up the bank onto the towpath and there's no one there, but the noise is continuing and it's coming towards me.
And I think it's a big cat.
And I'm getting really frightened.
I think it's going to have me like.
So it was getting louder.
So in my rod holder, I've got a spike that I use for my umbrella.
And I've got that.
I thought, what am I going to do?
And the game plan, really, in that few seconds, was if it is a cat, I'm going to go back down the bank and get it to jump on myself and impale it on its own weight on this big spike that I've got.
And I was frightened to death.
And this thing came up and walked in front of me from left to right, no more than six feet away.
But there were four heavy footsteps, but no vision whatsoever of anything.
But also no grass was moving, no twigs being broken.
And it walked to the right-hand side and slowly disappeared.
And I stood there and I thought, wow, that's not a cat.
And cats won't make big noise anyway.
So whatever that was, is like one of these space-time contingency things.
It wasn't here.
It's somewhere else.
And that was the day.
And that was the precise moment that I realized that the UFO was dimensional because what I was experiencing had only come after the UFO.
For the first 40 years of my life, I had nothing.
Then all of a sudden, I'm starting to get all this weird stuff happening after the closing counter.
That was weird enough.
What else happened?
I've seen quite a few other lights in the skies, some fairly close, but not enough to be able to take any pictures of them.
But when I was building the model, well, just go, I'll step back slightly.
On the Thursday night, I've gone out to play darts and we'd gone to Burbage to pull there the anchor.
We're sitting out the back, having a drink before the match starts.
And all of a Sudden, I get this splat on my head, and I go, Oh no, birds pooed on my head.
And I put my hand up, nothing there at all, nothing at all.
Look up in the sky, clear blue sky, no clouds, nothing.
That's a bit strange, like some sort of muscle spasm in the top of your head.
That's quite weird.
Didn't think anything more of it.
Then on that was on the Thursday night.
Then on the Saturday, I'm building the model, my first model out of wood.
And I'm in the shed.
And for some reason, I've got to make the corners really round.
And I'm spending ages.
And I'd sit in front of the fire at night as well, just filing away, making this craft like.
It was like a man-possessed.
But I come out of the shed to walk up to the house, get a cup of tea, and then I get another splat on top of my head, just like I had on the Thursday night.
And I look up again, nothing in the sky.
And then when I came back out of the house, I had another splat on the top of the house.
So I had three individual hits on the top of the head.
And I can't explain at all what they were.
Another occasion, I was taking my daughter, who was be about 13 by now, and her two friends, we were going swimming in my wife's car, which was a fairly new car, a fiesta.
I say newish, an old new car, if you know what I mean.
We're driving along, heading towards Market Bosworth, and there's this horrendous crack.
And honestly, I thought the car was splitting in half.
I thought somebody's got two halves of a car and welded it together and it's breaking in half.
The noise was that loud.
So we stopped the car and got out and there were nothing.
There were no visible signs on the car.
No damage.
The car drove all right.
We carried on.
We mentioned it to my wife when we got back.
On its own, you ignore it.
Then about a week later, I'm driving down the same road, heading towards Market Boss, but in a different vehicle this time, I'm in my van that I use for work.
And the same thing again, there's this horrendous crack inside the car.
And it sounds like you've been hit by a lightning or a bullet hole or something along those lines.
So when I got, I didn't stop this time because it was the second time it had happened.
I drove home and I checked the van over and there was nothing.
There were no bullet holes and there were no strikes of lightning, nothing.
But it sounded so loud like an electrical discharge or a whip cracking.
That was very peculiar.
And there's been lots of other smaller things along the way.
I did notice at one point actually, when I immerse myself in watching UFO material and then go out and look at the sky, things tend to happen.
So there is a connection there, I think.
Now, I've been to a UFO conference again in Leeds.
I went to several up there whilst Graham Bird was still producing them whilst he was still alive.
And I came back down on Sunday night and I'm going to bed.
My wife and my daughter are already in bed.
I get to the top of the stairs and I look out across the park and there's this ball of orange light in the park in the cloud.
And it's inside the cloud and it's shining a beam of light, which is coming straight out like a stick of rock.
It's not like omnidirectional, but it's only coming to the end of the cloud.
And you can see the orange ball in the cloud and this beam of light coming to the end of the cloud.
I thought, wow, that is absolutely incredible.
And it's not that far away.
And I'd invested in a camcorder because I was starting to see so many things.
So I went into the bedroom and picked up the camera and I thought, I know what's going to happen.
And sure enough, as soon as I got back to the window, it had gone, just totally disappeared.
There's been quite a lot of lights in the sky, actually.
I mean, one was really close one night, late at night.
And then when I woke my wife up to come and have a look at it, by the time she got to the window, it had gone.
The next day, she says, you know, whatever happened is happening for you.
So if it happens again, don't bother waking me up.
We still make me laugh.
Okay, before we get on to some of the stories that other people have let you have, let me just ask you this.
Did you ever, in all of this process, ask yourself the question, why me?
Yes.
Yeah, and I came up with the answers like, one, I've spent my whole life as a draftsman.
So I'm good for drawings.
And at one time, I was AutoCAD User of the Year, 1992 or something along my life.
So you were an expert, are an expert in computer-aided design?
Yes, yes.
And I'm still doing that today, you know, a computer-aided design, although it's in the embroidery industry.
I'm still crafting, basically.
Also, I've been involved with the aircraft industry and involved in engineering all of my life.
And one of the things about working offshore in Aberdeen, I was based on shore, but I would go offshore for a week to do certain amount of work.
Now, you had to make sure you got all that information correct.
Once you got back to the office, if you'd missed something, you couldn't go back offshore again on the next flight to have a look at it.
So you've got to get it right.
And that was good training.
On the night when this craft appeared in front of us and materialized, I tried to assimilate to my memory as much information as possible so that later on I could draw it, because that's obviously what I would do as a draftsman, but then eventually start to build it as well.
So that's another reason why I think if I was chosen, that's why I was chosen.
But the other point is that out of a, you know, 100% of people I talk to, 99% of the people go with it.
I've even had people say, because of you, we believe you.
You know, people know I'm not one for lying.
I'm not a Walter Mitty.
And maybe they just know I'll carry it forward.
People hearing this, you know, some of them might say, well, you know, he's been experiencing all these things because he's got himself so immersed in the UFO thing and he's going to all of these conferences and reading all these books and meeting all these people.
But what we have to say, don't we, is that you didn't do that until you had this experience.
That's right.
And it's also true to say that after a couple of years, they started disappearing altogether.
And then for many years, I've had nothing, probably for a good 10, 15 years.
But a couple of years ago, during lockdown, I did see something there.
So.
What did you see?
It was a metallic sphere.
I was out walking my dog and there were two aircraft in the sky going in different directions.
And I looked up and I noticed in between them, there was this big metallic ball, basically.
As the aircraft went in different directions, the ball was still there and it came down.
It was definitely in the Earth's atmosphere.
And it was totally spherical.
But on the left-hand side of it, it was flashing.
It got a brilliant white light on it, but like a crescent shape.
It was only flashing at like the rear end in the direction it was moving.
And it was flashing like Morse code.
it was like dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot, dash.
It looked like it was malfunctioning, to be honest.
And I watched it for quite some time, and I did try to video it, but trying to video things on the iPhone is a waste of time, really.
You're taking pictures.
You know, I've got a picture of it, but it's miles away.
It's like one pixel big, and you can't get, you know, get any information from that.
But I did get quite excited over seeing that because it'd been so long since I'd seen anything.
Okay, let's get to the stories then.
You've got a few stories, and I'm sure the ones that you've picked out of the book will be superior to the ones that I've picked out, but they're all excellent, let me tell you.
Can I start then with one that's on page 66, and then we'll do one of yours?
Yes, of course.
Page 66, Police Officer's Flying Triangle, 1984.
This is two pages of the book.
I was searching the net for any information about flying triangles, found your site, says the email, presumably.
I'm a serving police officer, had an encounter with one when I just joined the service.
1984, I think something like October, November.
I was on night duty, posted on the area car, that's the fast response crime car, with my mate Bob, who'd only just recently passed his advanced driving course.
I was the radio operator.
We were in a fully marked Rover SD-1.
It was the very early hours of the morning, 3 a.m., travelling slowly east along the Ryslip Road in Northolt, which is West London.
We were driving away from the White Heart roundabout towards Greenford, very famous bit of road, and going slowly as somebody had been setting fire to park cars along this stretch of the road during the week.
On our right was the estate where the cars had been burnt out.
On our left was an open grass area called Rectorly Park.
Beyond the park is the busy A40, and it is busy.
Beyond that, RAF Northolt, a bit further west, as we drove with both driver and passenger windows all the way down, I noticed a large orange light in the sky.
It looked extremely low and in the area of Northolt Air Base.
I remember saying, what the hell is that, Bob?
And him leaning forward and looking up at the light.
He had no idea.
The weird thing is that as soon as we acknowledged the light, it started moving quickly towards us.
Which sounds a little bit like your story, Colin.
It does.
I do believe that sometimes these craft do want to be seen.
I mean, I know a lot of people don't get to see UFOs and they'd love to see them and people go out all night long looking for these.
But then on other occasions, they just appear to certain people and obviously they did to these police officers.
This is a report I got from John Hanson.
Yeah, I believe this one was from John Hanson.
Okay, well, the end of it all was that it shot up into the sky at speed and the kind of speed that no plane or anything on Earth could have been capable of.
We jumped back into the car, drove straight to Greenford Police Station, phoned RAF Northolt, asked if there were any craft, aircraft, that is, up there, and they said no.
Would you like to report a UFO?
And essentially the officers said no.
So I mean, that's a very common story.
Back in 1984, I mean, my father was a police officer, and he had many strange experiences, but most of them they just didn't report because he didn't.
You know, that's how that was.
That was one of mine.
What about one of yours?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's obviously not good for their career, is it?
You know, for police officers.
The same with airline pilots.
They don't like to report these things.
There are one or two reports in the book from airline pilots, but generally speaking, it could end your career if you do that.
Okay, the first one I'll touch on is Charles B. December 2011.
Now, this is his pseudonym.
It's not his real name.
He's actually a close protection officer.
I've never met him, but he has told me that.
He's quite.
What do you mean for politicians, royal family, that kind of thing?
That sort of thing, yes.
Yeah.
So he'd seen quite a few things in the past, and he was discussing it with his daughter.
And they decided to, there was a light and he decided to go and see if they get a closer look at it in the sky.
And he says, we saw it one night moving over the Moden area of the town.
My ex-partner tried to say it was Venus, but Venus was also clearly visible and the object was also clearly visible.
My ex's daughter, who was seven at the time, became hysterical and said it was aliens.
We pursued the object, which was very bright, but as we followed slowly in the car into North Yorkshire, it seemed to be getting lower.
We both reasoned it was maybe a helicopter, but there was no strobes and no noise.
Somewhere between Cleesby and Manfield, we lost sight of it as it got too low.
We looked for the object, but decided to give up and turn back home.
As we drove back along the A67, I said, let's look down by the river at Low Connyscliff.
With hindsight, I think they told me it was there.
After driving down the track to the river, it was probably about 300 feet above the ground.
It was huge, at least a thousand feet across.
The lights at the apises were dim yellow-orange, and there was a dimmer orange light in the body towards the back.
I got out of the car and stood staring at the triangle.
There was total silence.
I could no longer hear the traffic from the nearby A1 motorway.
The body was black and it blocked out the stars, but I could see stars around it and also a nearby farmhouse on the hill south of the river.
It also seemed to block out the breeze.
I don't know whether it got closer to me or me to it, but I seemed right underneath it.
I could see black channels etched into the inside of it, which would now make me think they are a docking mechanism.
I can't explain how, I've never told anyone until now, but it seemed to be just a few feet above my head.
It seemed to be made of slate or graphite material, very dark grey and smooth matte texture.
I could feel the presence in my whole body and a dental implant was vibrating in my mouth.
I could see channels covering the underside of the craft.
They were probably six feet across and of a similar depth.
Now this is interesting, bit, Howard.
I raised my hand and touched part of the craft's body between the channels.
I was terrified and even thought it could harm me, but did it anyway.
I brushed my fingers over it and then put my entire palm on it.
It felt like a hard kitchen worktop with a matte finish, but it was not cold.
The next thing I remember is my daughter shouted me to get back in the car.