Date: Friday 11th June 1993
Witness: Andy Hillis and others
Early Evening on Friday June 11th 1993, I received a phone call from my friend Paul Vigay. He told me that a crop circle had been discovered in Wiltshire and asked if I wanted to go to investigate it with him that night. I of course, was not going to miss out on the opportunity of seeing and being present in my first crop circle (albeit a hoax, as we later discovered).
We arrived in Wiltshire at around 10:00pm and parked in the Silbury Hill car park. Paul said that the crop circle was in the field opposite Silbury Hill, over the main road and between two telegraph poles and inevitably we bumped into Chris and Bob from the Hampshire UFO and Crop Circle Phenomenon Group, who were making their exit from the field and told us that they thought the circle was a hoax. When we entered the formation, we reached the same conclusion after our scientific testing had seemed to indicate that the circle was not genuine.
After a few drinks at the Wagon and Horses with Chris, Bob and fellow croppies, we decided to do a crop watch and split into two groups with Chris, Bob keeping a watch at Silbury Hill, and me and Paul watching the Carson's East field from the layby between Knapp Hill and Adam's Grave and using CB radio to keep in contact.
We waited there with our 35mm camera set up on a tripod for something to happen. I was expecting something to happen and had a good feeling that we were going to see something. Visibility was good and I was able to see as far as the horizon and the cloud base I would estimate to be between 1500 and 2000ft and the wind conditions minimal. Half an hour passed and we decided to head back to Silbury Hill and see if the other group had seen anything.
When we arrived back we were told that members of the Silbury Hill group had disturbed people with flash-lights in a field near the hill, who had promptly disappeared and we thought them to be hoaxers. After a few cups of tea we decided to concentrate our crop circle watch in the layby overlooking the East field and we all arrived there just before midnight. Paul commented that the optimum time for UFO sightings was between midnight and 3:00am, and at approximately 12:30am a cheer went up as what I would describe as a sphere of bright white light descended below the cloud base in the direction of Woodborough Hill/Stonehenge.
We took pictures and tried to capture the object on video, but were later disappointed when we received the results back from the developers, the object was too far away and the light levels for the film we were using (ISO 400) too low. Using 20x50 binoculars I was able to get a good view of the sphere but I was not able to discern any surface detail on the object.
We estimated that the object was at least 10 kilometres from us and Paul calculated using his hand held computer that the object was approx. 250 feet in diameter. The sphere hovered below the cloud base and made no sound, so if it was a helicopter or a Harrier jet then we would have heard the noise of it's engines in the virtually still wind conditions. The object seemed to glow from very bright to dim several times and finally after a couple of minutes the object disappeared above cloud level. Between sightings we also heard solid footsteps in the vicinity of the layby, the footsteps seemed to be coming towards us so we investigated but we found nobody.
This strange occurrence happened at least three times that night with the footsteps sounding like they were within a few hundred yards of us, again we did not find anybody. I remember Paul saying to me that Alton Barnes, which was just down the road from us was haunted and I thought that what we had heard could have been a ghost.
Half an hour
later the object came down from the clouds again and in the same
location. Again the object glowed bright and dim and appeared for a few
more minutes before disappearing again into the clouds.
At 2:15am the
object made one last appearance. It hovered for a few minutes, varying
it's intensity before disappearing below the horizon out of sight. Paul
then turned in for the night whilst I and a few people from the Havant
UFO group climbed up to the top of Adam's grave for a better vantage
point. We stayed there for over an hour until the visibility
deteriorated and mist closed in.
We did not see the object again and we returned to our vehicles to get some sleep.
When we woke up later that morning we bumped into a friend who told us that she had seen what appeared to have been the same object on the horizon when she was returning from Stonehenge and she reckoned the object to be a UFO and certainly not an aircraft.
