OF THINGS SEEN ON THE GROUND

Busty Taylor

 

My involvement with UFOs began at an early age, when I was at primary school in Thruxton. One summer's day I witnessed hundreds of little teeny balls in the sky and and these were all very, very high. Consider - in 1948 if anything was flying high it would be leaving vapour trails. These didn't leave any vapour trails, but they were playing tag and chasing one another. These were hundreds of miniature silver balls at a very high altitude, and there were one or two large ones in there as well, but not very many - they were mostly little teeny ones. And they were coming from the north-west, going to the south-east. Of course, later on during my research I came across quite a few reports, including footage, of silver objects that have been captured on film around the world. That's the earliest recollection that I have on the UFO side of things.

Not long after that my father, who worked for the Ministry of Defence at the time as a crane-driver, was with some colleagues when they witnessed a stationary object in the sky - and, of course, the talk of the Roswell incident was still in everybody's mind and people were seeing UFOs. And what they did was to line up the crane like a gun-sight. Now, the old-fashioned crane was just a simple jib with a pulley over the top and a pulley at the bottom. And a guy stood behind the crane and he lined up the two pulleys like a gun-sight on this object, to see if it was going to move. They left it there while they had their tea-break and the object sat absolutely stationary in that position for over ten minutes. And it proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that it wasn't a weather-balloon, which a lot of people said it could have been - because it would have moved, and it didn't. Of course, while they were talking away, it just vanished. Literally vanished. So that was another incident at a very young age.

Not long after that, while playing late one night at Weyhill I witnessed what I would say was a "scanner" type light. We were out looking across the farmer's fields, and coming through the trees about 800 yards away you could see a light that was literally right across your peripheral vision, left and right. As it was crossing the field this light could only be seen coming along the ground. It was about a metre wide, just like a band - and we had just enough time to say, "Coo, look at that," and then it passed us, so to speak, as it came across like a line of light on the ground. And we turned around and watched it go across the buildings behind us. It was just like a scanner-type thing and in those days, of course, I don't know if anyone could say they'd seen this kind of light. We couldn't see where it came from or where it was going, but it just literally went across the ground behind us.

Soon after that I moved up to the village of Quarley, which is not far from Thruxton airfield. It was some time in October, November, in the early fifties. We were indoors one night. We had an old Rayburn fire and we were listening to the radio and all of a sudden the fire started to glow as if something was vacuuming it up the chimney. At the same time as this started to happen, we heard this noise, which was similar to the early Sputniks - "dee, dee-dee, dee, dee-dee" etc. At first it sounded like it was outside the building, but as the fire drew on louder, it started to increase in noise as well. In other words, as the fire drew louder, the noise got louder. The object, whatever it was - we were all looking at one another, wondering what the hell was going on - passed right over the house. The fire at this time was drawing like a furnace. The noise was at its loudest point this time. It then passed over the house and went off from the east to the west. The noise from the fire went down and at the same time the object's noise got less and less.

Not long after that the Sputniks were put up and we could see what satellites looked like, and we used to go out and watch them. And I asked my father a very simple question not long after this: "What would you do, dad, if a spaceship landed out in the field behind us?" And he said, "I'd go with 'em." I asked what he meant by going with them. He said, "Well, if they've got the technology to do that, son, we'd be far better off getting in there and going with them. Just imagine how it's all going mad on this planet. You'd be able to go anywhere you like. Boundless power."

Now, he was a radio ham. He'd built his own crystal set at the age of 14 and he was a self-taught electrician. He understood electronics and could work on radios and TV sets. This was all early in the fifties. When I'd got my driving licence I started to teach people to drive in 1961.

My grandmother lived at Fox Farm, just past Amport House. I was sitting in her house one day and I could hear this low-pitched resonant hum. This has stuck in my mind all my life. I said to her, "What's that noise?" and she just turned around and said, "That's the ley lines talking to you, son." I asked what ley lines were and she said, "You will understand one day." And it's stuck in my mind ever since, that she just simply said it so off the cuff: "Never mind. It's there and you will understand." And that's all she ever said about it.

Now, coming up through the seventies there were a lot of UFO reports in the national press, especially round the Salisbury and Warminster area, about these mysterious objects. And there were one or two shown on the TV at the time. While I was driving the car with pupils we began to witness things as well. The next notable incident I can quite honestly say was astounding. It was about 1977 and I was teaching people to drive - it was November again and a lovely moonlit, starry night. A good observation night. We were coming down into Bishopdown, which is on the east side of Salisbury, and while we were going down a slope across the valley to the right we could see Portan Down. On this particular night everything was switched on at the camp and you could see all the surveillance lights. All the buildings had lights. Everything was lit up.

I was looking there, and at the top right-hand corner of the windscreen a very fast object came out of the side in an arc. It came down the windscreen towards the A30, and it was just light enough, with the starlight, for us to see the far horizon. Now, this object came down below the far horizon and it followed the contours of the ground and went straight towards one of the big buildings they had there - down in an arc, along the ground and towards the building in the space of about three seconds. And as it got to the building it slowed down, and as it slowed down it literally went out. By the time it stopped, it was out. And the people in the car with me said, "What the hell was that? Did you see it as well?" They all saw it. There were three people in the car and they all witnessed it, because we were talking about the UFOs that had been in the paper and we were all looking round. That was about 1977.

In 1969, by the way, while I was coming back from Salisbury - this was about September time - around seven in the evening while it was still light, on the northern horizon as we were passing Middle Wallop airfield I noticed a very bright moon-like object. It looked like the moon, sitting just above the horizon, and which, considering it was still daylight, was very, very bright. And I thought, it can't be the moon - not normally in that position, coming up on the northern horizon. I kept watching it as we were going up and down the dips going back towards Andover.

A Mr. Bacon, who I'd just taught to drive at that time, also saw this object and reported it to the police, and they in turn admitted they'd had numerous reports of it. This was in 1969 and no-one realised it then, but looking through the UFO books now you can find this particular object, which seems to occur on a very regular basis and it actually looks like the moon, but very large.

Now, going through the eighties: again at Portan Down I witnessed another object sitting there as we were coming up the A30. We took a u-turn to go off to Pitton. We were coming up a slope and an orange ball was sitting in the sky above us and it seemed to have a cone of light underneath it, which had bars going across it. And the interesting thing about the bars was the fact that it was a light coloured bar and then a dark bar - in other words, if you look at the keyboard on a piano, this was the effect. But even more interesting was that these bars were stepping down to the ground in a series of jerks, similar to the flicker you get when you move your fingers in front of a television. And my mate said, "Come on! Put your foot down and let's get up the road and get a look at this!" Of course, as soon as we entered the cone of light it just vanished - and that's a mistake I said I'd never repeat. Once you see the object you should stop in the most convenient place possible and observe. Do not make the mistake of trying to get as close as you can. That was in 1980.

Some time later another object came out of the sky, flickering through the clouds, looking like a car headlight. It was going on and off as it was coming down. This was near Andover and it went down in the Chilbolton area, which is where I saw my first crop circle in 1985. I'll never know what that was. It came down through the clouds and went below the horizon. I don't know if anybody else saw it.

Now the interesting thing about the crop circle we found on 3rd. August 1985 (a quintuplet, at Goodworth Clatford, Hants.) was that other people on the airfield also went to see it, and they were dowsers. They said it dowsed very well and it had a "crossroads" in it. And I said, "How do you do dowsing?" but they were reluctant to show me for some reason. I wish they had at the time. However, after witnessing my first crop circle and being an amateur archaeologist - I'd been on digs and I've got video of this as well - because I'd been photographing the tumuli rings around the Andover area and giving it to the Andover Archaeological Society, I showed them things they never knew existed, and they're still following up a lot of stuff I took in the eighties. The result of my observations in 1985 was simply to wait for them to cut the field and plough it and I immediately flew over the field, especially after it had just rained, to see whether there were any archaeological type things under the ground.

The only thing that's interesting there, in that field in 1985, was that it looks like there was an ancient track that ran around the slope where the actual markings were, and there's a very large chalk pit. That's the only thing that's really visible from the air. And this is what I've done, really, each year when there have been major formations: I've flown when they've ploughed the field back up to see whether or not there are any ancient markings, and there are quite a few in close proximity to circles.

And, of course, in 1986 I met Colin Andrews, who I used to work with in the sixties and we measured all these ancient marks and compared them to crop circles in the early days and they all seemed to be pretty close. Of course, they were the "golden days" when you could go into the fields and get farmers' permission and have a real good time, and the five of us - Don Tuersley, Dr. Terence Meaden, Pat Delgado, Colin and myself - used to go off at 7 o'clock in the morning, after my aerial observations, and literally go round investigating crop circles up till 9 o'clock at night.

Now, a lot of people are under the impression that all I actually did was take photographs. Wrong. We went into formations that were really interesting and we would spend three hours literally measuring, cross-checking, taking the crop circle to pieces, finding out all the different lays and how it could possibly occur - having disagreements amongst ourselves on quite a few occasions as to what happened and how it happened. And because we had no outside interference from people trampling it to death, from 1985 to 1990 it was a very good scientific study. We went into great depth. The only things, of course, that we were lacking were expert facilities with regard to technology to cross-check samples, because it was very expensive.

In 1985 we sent samples to a laboratory and we were actually amazed how much a simple little study cost - just to have a preliminary check - and, of course, nowadays it's all changed. There are people taking samples which are being tested here and tested there, which is all good fun. However, in 1986 I made the statement, "All we need now is last year's and this year's crop circles put together" - and that actually happened. I also noticed in 1985 that Celtic symbols seemed to be replicated in the corn through the markings that I found, which were only three. And I went to the British Museum and everywhere else to photograph these symbols - and, of course, we were amazed to see all the symbols I'd photographed actually appear in the crops over the next five years. And being as this was never in print it never triggered off anybody to go out there and do it. There wasn't any reason for them to do that. So we got to work on all these crop circles and all over these years and came to many conclusions.

Then in 1990 at Alton Barnes it changed into the large pictogram formation. But in 1987 we had an avenue coming out of crop circles at Chieveley, up near Wantage, and, of course, we had avenues also at a formation on the A36. So these could have been forerunners to the pictograms. But, of course, the public got involved in a very big way, and from then it has been more difficult, I would say, to carry out scientific study. And as the years have gone on it's got worse and worse because people - like myself - need to get into formations when they're fresh, in order to see them in their better condition. It's making life difficult for an old hand like me to come to terms with the fact that people are now beating me to it, and it's become hard. This is one reason why I've decided not to go into so many fields now - simply because if I'm not the first one in it I can't answer the question I get asked all the time: "Is this a genuine formation?" I can no longer answer this with truth and I can only say, "Well, it seems to be in reasonable condition. It looks pretty good. However, I can't say whether it's genuine or not because so many people have been through it."

A lot of the clues we found in 1986, with regard to the white musk on the side of the green corn and on the rape - there were no marks, nothing, not a scratch mark, not a marking. When we did find markings we catalogued that - some of it's been shown. It could be planks of wood. We saw on one of them where it could have been saw marks on the crop - and that was a really smashed up one. So all the survey work that we did in the past, most of it has never been exposed to the public - yet - simply because people are going off now on the symbolism side of things. And this is what I did, and people are interpreting all sorts of things into what crop circles mean and it's a very interesting study now, being as we've got people from all over the world - Czechoslovakia, Russia and America.

We've got them down in Mexico - in sugar cane. But the one thing I will say that happened in - I think it was 1988 when I videoed it - was the tree circle which was in the local area. I'm not going to say where it was because the local farmer doesn't want any more publicity out of it. but we did find out from Canada that there was a tree circle there - unfortunately not witnessed with a photograph, but this guy described it in detail, these 40' pine trees were all bent over. We put this in the local paper as an interesting item and we had a local farmer come up and say, "Well, that's strange. We had a tree circle like you described in our trees and it's still there." This is in 1988 and it happened in 1984. And sure enough, he took us to the spot and there it was, all laid down, anticlockwise, half of it still laid down in this formation. But unfortunately in the other half a hawthorn tree had grown up through it and pushed it all up. The hawthorn tree was about 4' - 6' tall.

And while we were filming this - it was a lovely crystal-clear blue sky there - I noticed in the sky a very large object, flickering. It was a long, tubular object and it was rotating end over end and, of course, at certain angles, because we were there at 7 o'clock at night, it was catching the sun like a mirror and then going out. It's all on video. I shouted to Colin, Pat and Don, "What the hell's that up there?" And you can hear them on the tape saying, "Where? What?" And I said, "Straight up. There's something up there flickering on-off, on-off and it's a hell of a way up." Someone said, "It's enormous! What the hell's going on?" The others couldn't see it at the time, but Colin managed to lock onto it and he videoed it. And the interesting thing is that Michael Hesemann (editor of the German Magazin 2000) showed at the Glastonbury Symposium in 1995 a piece of footage which they could not explain and it was exactly identical to the object we saw that night while I was videoing the tree circle. And I'm trying to get that because it would be nice to insert that in a future video that I hope to make.

Also, Fred McMurray had a UFO experience and I must point out here that Omar Fowler also came into the light in 1985 and he's been into UFOs and we've been friends ever since. And he investigated the Fred McMurray case because it was on his doorstep, at Guildford. We went to the site where this had all happened and lo and behold, the tree that he said the object was hovering over - and I've got this on video - half the tree is dead, the right hand side of the tree looking at it, the western side, is dead, completely shrivelled up, but the eastern side is still green. It just looked like something had sat above it with a lot of heat because all the leaves on the western side were all completely shrivelled up.

And I met this man, and I chatted to him. He did automatic writing, of the information that came to his head and he just simply wrote it down. While talking to me he just wrote on a book at high speed and I thought, well, that's going to be a load of scrawl - and it was the most perfect writing you could ever think of. It seemed to be a map reference and when we cross-checked it out, the map reference came out to Hurstbourne Priors, the oldest church in England.

Because of the things I've seen, I know UFOs exist, and travelling around the world in the last few years I've met people who have had encounters and, of course, there are certain things and certain information that I have been given by professional people so that I can talk to people and actually prove whether or not they are telling the truth. Now, a lot of people say, "Tell us all these secrets." If people know all the iffs and ands and buts about a cross-check, people can then adapt their story to make it sound credible. There are certain things that must always be kept to an individual few, and everybody's got their own way of doing things. I've been given a certain clue that when people say to us that they had encounters, you can start to talk to them and if they come up with all these clues then you know you've got a genuine case on your hands. And a lot of top UFO researchers know these clues and they will never divulge the secrets, because that's one way of proving you have a genuine case.

With regard to the crop circles, a lot of people now know the secret of the musk, of the bent stalks and also the blown nodes (which, as far as I'm concerned, has still got to be researched, in order to prove a point). The research has gone into the scientific stage and scientists will have to gather at least three years' information before they could start making what I would call "positive statements". And I will even say that it will be at least six years of hard work, cross-checking, running into dead ends, finding out that what you thought was a good thing isn't, because someone else has taken up your work and proven to you that something else can be doing it besides what you think it is.

I'm all for the scientific side. Unfortunately at the moment I'm not working with scientists, except this year I've had contact with somebody I sent samples to. He wants to remain anonymous and he is quite willing to work on future samples I can send to him. he has got a high intelligence value and he's got the facilities to cross-check a lot of things out. Now, the phenomenon has moved on to such a stage that with all the people coming from around the world it's now running into the problem that it's being over-exploited by people who just simply want to make a name for themselves, by being sensational. I don't mind this, providing the sensational thing is at what I would call ground level - none of this hyping up, making something very big when it's very small. This is a complete waste of time because you will eventually be caught out. And then when you are caught out you are then pulling the whole phenomenon back down, because you've discredited not just yourself but the other people working with you as well, and this is not the name of the game. There have been many instances where I have found something out that's very interesting and people just simply ran off with it, exploited it, only to be caught out. And I'm just warning people - be wary. Don't be caught out. Cross-check all your facts before you open your mouth. You might be a bit slower getting it into the media, but at least you'll have credibility if you can prove your points.

The nine-inch circles I've been working on since the early nineties and I didn't say anything until last year, when I showed this. There may be a simple explanation to it, but the locations of them are very interesting, and I've got lots of photographs with these on. Unfortunately, I haven't been flying as much this year (1996) and haven't actually had the chance to locate any - simply because my flying side has been cut down to the bare minimum and also because information's not forthcoming in my direction at the present moment, at the rate that it used to be. However, I will continue. I'll work at a slower rate. I've done my fair share and it's just a pity that over the last few years I haven't been given the chance to put a lot of this actually into print. I've lectured on it, all over the world, and I've held my ground with some very important scientific people and I hope I can continue to do so in the future. Let's just hope that things work out very nice in the end, for us all. We're all in it together and as long as we work together and pull together we can always achieve something. If we fragment ourselves and fight each other, the biggest problem you're going to get is that the bullshitters will pitch in and eventually they will destroy the system.

People say it's human nature to do what they're doing. Is it possible that we're all under a test? Are we all being given little clues to see how we react and how we share the information? And if we are under a test, I'm going to try to pass this test. I am not going to fail it. And I consider this is really what's happening here.

In early '91, '92 an incident occurred on the airfield at Old Sarum which shows you how deceptive some people can be. While I was there the person who owned the fleet had a bet that he could, in fact, sell me an aeroplane to go flying in less than two minutes. I had the word to go and talk to him and when I got there I was told there was a circle west of Salisbury, given the location and asked, was I interested? And I said, "Sure I'm interested." So I got a plane and someone said, "Being as it's out there, you know, you can use it. I'll cover for you while you're away."

So I promptly got all my cameras, got on the plane, flew out to this location, found the circle, videoed it, photographed it and came back. They asked, "What was it like?" and I said, "Great," and it all went quiet. I couldn't make out what was going on. And, of course, no one said anything for about a year. And then they told me that they'd sent me on a wild goose chase deliberately just to sell me an aeroplane, and that somebody had been flying in the area prior to me taking off and were absolutely convinced that there was absolutely no crop circle at this point. But I took off, went out there and found it at the point where they said it should have been.

Now, what we have to realise here is - the person flying the area, was he good at observation? He said he was, because apparently he was looking for old markings in the crops for archaeological reasons, so he must have been pretty good. Or did the phenomenon listen in, just to pull a fast one on the people that tried to pull a fast one on me? But that's absolutely what happened and they didn't tell me for over a year that they'd sent me on a wild goose chase. And this is something I've noticed about the phenomenon on people that have decided to - how do I say? - pull a fast one. In fact the phenomenon always seems to kick back. It seems to know what we're doing, what we're talking about and it always seems to kick people straight back in the teeth if they decide to do something which is negative to any other person. And I think really what's going on here - it is something that is studying our reactions. We're just guinea-pigs in a goldfish bowl. This is a planet stuck in a void and it could be just an experiment. The whole human race could be one big experiment and the people carrying out the experiment are setting us little teeny tasks. Could be the fact they show UFOs. "Let's see how you react. Oh, we'll take one or two people on board. Let's see how they get on, how people treat them. Or let's make a few markings in the crops and see how people react to that." And that to me is exactly what's been going on - it's just one big experiment. And as far as I'm concerned the governments know all about it.

Well, in 1996 we had quite a few formations but a lot of people are saying that bird-damaged circles are the genuine phenomenon. Very early in the year we were notified of a marking in a field along the Everleigh-Upavon road from Ludgershall, which was on Ministry of Defence land and we went to investigate and were actually watching the birds at work, and we decided to film it. The whole edge of this field was cut right back in ten to fifteen feet by birds, where they'd gone in on the edge of the field and flattened it all down. Bird circles are very simple to spot: the crop tends to go in all different directions and you'll find that most of the corn has gone out of the actual husks, because the birds just jump up, grab the corn, shut their wings, and it falls down and then they peck it away and then they jump up and grab the next one. What normally happens if they get in the middle of the crop is the fact that if a little bit of wind damage occurs they can start eating it and then they will just simply jump up at the edge of the standing crop, grab the next stem, pull it down and in, eat the crop, and then as the hole gets larger more and more birds go in and in no time at all this hole can be increased to quite a large size. And being as they're all working outwards, they will actually form a circle. So what we did in 1996, we spotted this one early and decided that what we would do was say nothing, to see who would come along and say that this was the genuine phenomenon.

And there were quite a few of us there on this day and I know another researcher was filming it on a two-day basis, how it progressed in size and things, and even the farmer came along and had a bit of a laugh when he thought it was a real "croppie" standing there, looking at this happening, who when he was questioned about it by the farmer said, "We're filming it because we know this is actually a bird circle." And the farmer said, "Thank God someone understands what's going on here. I'm absolutely fed up with the people who say that this is a crop circle. It isn't. It's a bird circle." So the farmer is absolutely sure of it because he drives out every day and he's watching it and he understands it. I have to admit, there were quite a few bird circles in 1996, out in the middle of nowhere. In very good fields you just suddenly find there is a bird circle. In most cases what happens here could be the fact that there's been a hole dug into the field previously - an indentation. And what happens is, when the wet and the wind come along that particular section, if the roots are not strong it'll fall down. So the rest of the field would be perfectly alright, but when there's an indentation you can get caught out with an old fashioned dew pond - we've got them along here at Fox - it will always fall down because there's not so much soil so the root structure is weaker. So the result is, it will collapse.

You also get ring circles - the old fashioned rings can work the other way round too, where you have ancient ring markings. If there's a lot of chalk there will be a weak root structure and you'll get a perfect ring form as well. And the interesting thing is it will also go down in one direction, strange as it may seem. It just has a domino effect and you get the impression then that you've got an anticlockwise or a clockwise ring that suddenly appears. You've got to be very careful on this one. And if you're not flying on a regular basis you don't catch it, you just suddenly find there it is. "Oh, look. That's interesting." But again, it's something you have to be a little bit wary about. But that's what we did in 1996, to see how many people would write up on this "magnificent circle".

The interesting thing about what's happening now with the whole political side of the crop circle phenomenon - it has become fragmented. People have complained above all that they never seem to get enough information out of the system, but they in turn have never given information back into the system. And this seems to be like, "You tell me everything you know, but what I know, I keep to myself." This is unfortunate, because all that happens in the end is people find out and they think to themselves, "Well, I'm going keep quiet. I'm not going to say anything." So now you've got a domino effect where it's going to become fragmented, there are going to be individual groups saying all sorts of things and then the other groups are going to trying to prove them all totally wrong. And it's silly, because instead of everybody working as a team, everybody is working against each other. And the result of all this is very simply that everything is going to get totally distorted - possibly destroyed. So as far as I'm concerned the only thing we can do is let the pebbles roll along, to see where they all stop.

 

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