BUFOG and Nottingham’s Roswell

I did it! What did I do? Well I took the drive to see the Birmingham UFO group, here in the UK. I had gone with a specific goal in mind, to see a friend who runs a blog HPANWO and alongside does podcasts, writes books and runs his own Youtube channel.

Ben was there to speak about an incident in Nottingham, a Roswell type of affair that happened in 1987 in Nottinghamshire. Now I wouldn’t say I necessarily believe in alien contacts here on Earth in the manner that many may, but I am confident enough that science supports extra-terrestrial life somewhere out there so I would perhaps be a hypocrite to outright deny these things. More to the point this blog would be awfully boring with a NO stamped all over it… besides I think I am on the side of The X-Files here – I WANT TO BELIEVE.

So who better than to give me an interesting, and very interesting case? Well that would be a combination of BUFOG (link) and Ben Emlyn-Jones.

We’ve all heard the rhetoric if we have spent ANY time at all discussing the paranormal, UFO’s or “‘fringe” subjects… Missing your tin foil hat mate? Sounds like a patients got out of the local loony bin etc etc… and yet in a room of perfectly rational men (and yes women!) we were able to openly talk about experiences and beliefs. So have I seen a UFO is probably your first question? Honestly I don’t know is my answer, I know I have seen things in the sky that I couldn’t work out as a plane or helicopter and I know that I haven’t been able to work out how chem-trails do their thing or why – I am no aviation expert and yet I can tell you that I haven’t been convinced, in the slightest, that all things unexplained are weather balloons…

The case presented (link here for the full talk) was about the Nottinghamshire area, encompassing Mansfield down towards Arnold, see the video for the map or simply check it out online if you need the area. Now followers of this blog will no doubt recognise one of the areas in there, Ravenshead where I looked into Newstead’s Sanatorium.

12th November, 1987 is when the event happened and locals in the area remember the noise which came with a giant boom and displaced tiles and chimneys. The reports suggested two points of interest for crash debris, Thieves Woods and a portion of the land where Annesley Hall is located. The part which made me sit up and think about this was when it was mentioned the major road (A60) had been closed off and it was military intervention.

Now I cannot tell the story the way Ben does, he has done some great research, but I can tell you that there was some very interesting points brought up. For instance – why would it be closed in such a vast area for a whole week? Also the top soil was removed from that section which wouldn’t be normal for an average crash surely? And I have to admit I came away with questions, questions about the local area and what effects had come from it.

Is it possible that there was a military test that went wrong and they just needed to remove all evidence of it? After all as a civilian I don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of knowing anything they do and probably rightly so, I mean if I knew then it would mean everyone knew and secrets are sometimes a good thing. What if it was a military test for a nuclear plane/aircraft? Lets be honest modern fossil fuels are going to eventually pose a problem and so what if they were looking at a plan for that and the test didn’t pay off? Well that would still make it a UFO…

Did aliens crash? If so I wonder what did they want and why Nottinghamshire might be of interest? The thing is it has not been the only sighting in Nottingham perhaps there is something here of interest, because arrays of lights and various anomaly’s have been spotted and a quick check online even shows some old articles from the BBC, not that I can always say mainstream media is something without bias but it shows you that there’s interest here at least. Nottingham is pretty central to get to other major routes around the country so perhaps just like us our ET friends just find themselves passing by quite often…

So as you may guess from this article, as well as many others, I write with an air of middle ground, neither committing to nor denying events which I find presented to me.  What I can say with absolute certainty is that the BUFOG and HPANWO gave me an amazingly welcome reception, were open and candid, have a great sense of humour and if anyone could convince you of the reality of these events I’d pin my money on them! Unfortunately for me I missed a wonderful opportunity to meet a abductee who could have told me more but I met people that were able to confirm their sightings and what they felt was at play in this big old world of ours.

I hope they think I have been fair and just in my first review of this kind. I hope that it helps someone skeptical to think about approaching groups like this and to dive into the subject without bias or abuse. Without people like us, and people that go forwards with things you wouldn’t get conspiracy theories to become a matter of conspirifact… 1605 and the Gunpowder plot, 1865 and the Lincoln assassination plot, 1961 Cuban Plot, etc etc.

Moonville

The name sounds like a fantasy town, unfortunately a town that is no longer there it having been in Ohio, USA. It was a mining community and little remains except for a few foundations, cemetery and an old rail-road tunnel that is the subject of numerous ghost stories.

It was never a big town with a peak population of around 100, the area was fairly isolated in the woods and walking the rail-road tracks was dangerous. One trestle was over Raccoon Creek, 50 metres from the tunnel and by 1920 five or six people had lost their lives.

The decline in use meant that the last family left in 1947, the town was then fully abandoned. By the 1960’s the buildings were gone. In 1981 a signal on the Moonville rail-track was erected, in 1985 the last train took that route in August and the tracks were removed. It is still possible to access that area but there only the abandoned area of the lines.

There is a ghost that appears in the tunnel and swings a lantern, attempting to stop trains that are no longer running. The other ghost walks the tracks near Moonville on the other side of the tunnel. 

B+O Engineers on the line would tell the each other about the ghostly lantern. Sometime in the 1920’s a group of men, some miners, were drinking and playing cards in a shack nearby. Full of moonshine and frivolity one inebriated chap wandered off with a lantern I hand off down the tracks. A train came from the other side and too drunk to think about backing up he waved the lantern, hoping to stop the train most likely. He was hit and killed and buried in the local cemetery, since then his aimlessly wandering ghost has been witnessed.

Another story is about a headless conductor but the details given seem less widely known than the lantern carrier. There are several accounts around a decapitated man who walks the tracks, often with a lantern, so I suspect this might just be an elaboration on the original tale.