Preserving UFO history -Gavin Gibbons

From my colleague Phil Hoyle of the Shropshire UFO Group.

'Reports of UFO sightings in the newspapers used to be a rarity but now there doesn’t seem to be a day or week go by without some reference to UFO’s in our skies and no more so than in Shropshire?

What factors could be at play that now makes Shropshire one of the top ten UFO hot spots in the country. It has been determined by scientific analysis that ancient sites such as stone circles or burial chambers and fault lines in the earths crust are areas of high intensity for UFO sightings with up to an 80 percent increase in activity in these areas compared to other locations.

There is a known fault line that runs from the Wrekin through Much Wenlock all the way down to Church Stretton, Marshbrook and Craven Arms.

During the late eighties 60 percent of all sightings reported to me were from the Wrekin area and numerous UFO encounters by people driving along the old A5 between Overley Hill and Uppington.

In 1957 a man called Hubert Lewis claimed he encountered human looking beings just outside Church Stretton while cycling to work early one morning. Another encounter reported from Church Stretton by a man driving over the Burway late at night in 1978 encountered a large structured craft hovering over his car with multi-coloured flashing lights before disappearing at high speed. When he reported it to the authorities he claimed he was interviewed by two intelligence officers who took him to a government establishment in Birmingham and showed photos and films of alien craft filmed from around the U.K.

He was also told that Church Stretton for some reason had the highest degree of UFO activity in the country?

To many readers it will now become clear that the UFO phenomena is nothing new and been around for a very long time with some archaeological evidence suggesting not thousands but hundreds of thousands of years?'

One of the early UFO investigators of the 20th Century was a Shropshire man by the name of Gavin Gibbons; a linguist and scholar who wrote two books documenting UFO sightings around the U.K. in the 1950s to the early 70s. He is shown in the black and white photo.

The other photos show his brother Robin and wife Margaret.

One of the earliest known UFO reports in Shropshire was made by Mr Phillips, a miner of Weston Rhyn in North West Shropshire, and when retired he became a member of the Special Constabulary. He reported that he saw an unusual object in the sky early in September 1912, when he and his mother saw a strange machine hanging motionless over Selattyn Hill on the borders of Shropshire and Denbighshire. He recalled it was orange in colour, and of a bottle shape, having a strange cylindrical extension rising from the top of it.

This sightings was documented and published in the book The Coming of The Space Ships by Gavin Gibbons, (1956)