UK UFO CASE #2: A DAYTIME UFO LANDING IN 1955?
Additional material by Dave Partridge
HERE AT UAPMEDIA UK we trawl through our archives from time to time and look at some of the older cases and those researchers who came before us. One name that stood out recently was that of Margaret Fry. Born and raised in the Indian Himalyas until the age of 21, Margaret moved to the UK with her husband due to the increasing violence which led to the partition of India and Pakistan from the British Empire in 1947. Margaret lived most of her life in North Wales but while living in East London she reportedly witnessed one of the most extraordinary UFO landing cases in the UK.
In July 1955, Margaret Fry was on her way to her GP's surgery in King Harold's Way, Bexley Heath from her home in Hythe Avenue on 17th July 1955. She, along with her doctor Dr Thukarta, noticed a group of children playing in the street, and then they saw it, a strange object with three spheres on its underside. Mrs Fry described it as saucer shaped with a "blue/silver/grey/pewter texture, yet none of those colours".
The object descended to the ground, landing at the junction of nearby Ashbourne and Whitfield Road. The nearby group of children had stopped playing and were now curiously moving towards the craft for a closer look. Then, almost straight away, the object lifted off the ground, and rose up into the sky before eventually disappearing. Years after the incident, attempts have been made to track down the children, and Dr Thukarta, without success.
However, there was one other witness to the bizarre case, Rodney Maynard, who was 15 at the time of the sighting and was working on a nearby building site. Mr Maynard said: "We were on our lunch break when we heard something was happening in King Harold's Way. So we went up there to have a look. This thing had landed in the road."
Artist’s illustration of the Bexley Heath UFO witnessed by Mr Maynard and Mrs Fry.
He added: "It took up the whole width of the road and overlapped onto the pavements. It wasn't on the ground. It had about eight massive suckers. The centre was still, but the outer rim was spinning slowly and it had white lights flashing, like a camera flash."
Mr Maynard recalled: "It had what looked like windows, but the glass was concave and moulded together so you could not see in. A couple of us went forward to try and touch it, and it began to spin faster."
He said the craft then lifted slowly, tilting lightly and hovered above their heads. Then it moved slowly until it was over Bedonwell Primary School, where it hovered again for about a minute.
Following the incident Margaret Fry became entrenched in the UFO subject. In 1964 she joined BUFORA, and in 1967 she was a founding member of Contact International UK, a group started by Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, a Senior Member of the House of Lords. Later on in her life, the outspoken veteran investigator co-founded the Welsh Fellowship of Independent Ufologists after falling out with BUFORA hierarchy and can lay claim to having debunked the infamous Berwyn Mountain ‘crash’, near Bala. Her book Link To The Stars is a must read for anybody interested in UK cases.. After many years of investigating and researching hundreds of UFO cases she wrote the book Who Are They, where she recounts her experience on that day back in 1955.
But that wasn’t the only strange sighting in 1955. Among the more interesting reports we found included this from a few months earlier, in March. As a baker's delivery van was parked on the A36 in the village of Woolverton, Somerset, 9 miles south of the town of Bath, a young customer was being served, when one of the men serving happened to glance upwards and saw a cigar-shaped objects (100-200m estimated length) travelling at around 200mph. It was reflective and had no windows. The witness also saw saw two fighters (he thinks they were Mosquitoes) diving to intercept the craft.
Weeks later, in April 1955, the UK Air Ministry announced that the conclusions of a five-year investigation by the Royal Air Force looking at the flying saucer problem, had been submitted to high-ranking officials, but for reasons of national security the findings were “never to be revealed to the public.” Enquiries made to the Under Secretary of State for Air of the time, The Hon. George Ward 1st Viscount Ward of Witley, about whether the report would be released was responded to in the negative. Ward further remarked that 90% of sightings could be explained away with the remaining 10% suffering from a lack of data to provide a sufficient conclusion.
Whether Margaret Fry’s report was ever investigated by the RAF, or indeed made its way to the mysterious Room 801 at the former Hotel Metropole - which was utilised as offices for the Ministry of Defence during and after WWII - we wait to discover. One thing is for certain though that this sighting ignited a fire inside Mrs Fry that led her to become one of the UK’s eminent UFO researchers, and one of whom we will discuss further at a later date.
