UFO In Formation Close To Ferryhill, Aug 2008 Jane

BBR Witness Jane: "Hi Deb, Last year you aired my story about my strange encounter in the Cairngorms, where I had a possible brush with the Grey Man of Ben McDhui. That incident had affected me for nigh on twelve years with no hope of ever coming to terms with it until I met you. Perhaps that experience affected me more because of an earlier incident, an incident which I would like to share with you now.  Three years before Dalraddy, my world had been completely rocked by another experience which still haunts me every day....

Back in the 2000’s like so many others, I realised a childhood dream by being part of a paranormal investigation team, getting to stay at purportedly haunted locations all over the UK.  It was an interesting time and a real privilege to gain access to historic sites overnight.  I met great people in the process, lifelong friends and it was a blast, there I was in my 30’s and doing what I had dreamed of since I was a kid.

In 2008, my friend had got us a location in County Durham, a haunted Inn that had featured on a well known paranormal program.  After that show had left, things had gone terribly wrong for the family there and poltergeist activity had escalated.  The Landlady vowed she would never permit paranormal investigations of any kind there again, but, my friend somehow managed to get permission off her for a few of us to go along and stay overnight.  At the time, this was a huge win for us and our little group.  You can imagine us counting the days until we could get in there, we were so excited.

The day finally came and we were all in high spirits.  EMF meters and recording equipment packed, we travelled south along the A1 towards our destination.  Some of the group went on ahead in their car and I travelled with my friend in her car a little while later.  We chatted away about the night to come, which was all we could think of.  However, as we were passing Newcastle, I looked over to my left and noticed something very odd in the sky off in the distance.  I said to my friend, “Well they’re certainly not helicopters!”  She glanced over and said, “Oh yeah, that’s odd”. 

From that moment, this formation of lights was clearly in my view and even though they were miles away, it was obvious that there was something very strange about them.  The objects themselves were unnaturally still and although they were bright, they weren’t giving off light, as say lights on a TV mast would for example.  They weren’t flickering at all, looking at them didn’t seem real, it was like someone had stuck six bright round orange stickers onto the night sky. 

So, it’s approaching 8.30pm on a Saturday night of the August bank holiday weekend 2008.  We’re on the A1 motorway and there are plenty of cars around.  This main artery road is well lit; the weather is warm and dry.

As my friend and I are progressing along the A1, we are getting ever closer to these lights.  The closer we get, the stranger this all is.  After I had been watching them for around 20 minutes, fascination soon turned to abject fear for me as we became within about half a mile from them.  At this point the motorway was about to bend around to the left and from the position of the lights, it looked like we were going to drive very near to them.  As the road straightened and the lights were in full view once again, to my horror, I saw that they were hanging low just above a motorway bridge and yes, we were about to drive right underneath them and there was no way we could avoid it.  My friend said, shall I pull over so we can get our cameras out of the boot and take a closer look?  I was terrified and said, “NO, for God sake just keep driving”.  As we were about to drive under these spheres and the motorway bridge, I said, “keep looking at the time, it’s 8.45pm, it’s 8.45pm”.

We drove underneath them and as we did I leaned forward and got as close to the windscreen as I could.  I crooked my neck to stare up at them as we passed underneath.  They were completely spherical, no marks, just bright orange spheres fixed in their positions, which had not wavered in the 20 minutes or so that I had been watching them.  I am hopeless at heights and sizing, but they were the just above the height of a house I would say and each of the orbs would have been large enough to contain a large car or transit van.  I checked the time and it was still 8.45pm as we passed underneath them and the bridge; then I spun around in my seat and watched out of the rear window and kept them in site for as long as the road permitted.  We turned off at the Ferryhill turning not long afterwards.

By the time we met up with our friends at the haunted pub we were in shock I think, well at least I was.  I couldn’t believe what we had just witnessed, we had just been close to six UFO’s hanging low over the A1.  They were so close to road surface I am sure I could have batted a tennis ball at them and would have hit them with no problem at all.  My friends must have thought I was a lunatic, I was in such a hyped state, telling them Bloody Hell, UFO's are real! 

That night I experienced a gamut of emotions: this was incredible, wow I had seen the impossible!  What I had been interested in and had an open mind about since I was a kid had just been proven to me, without a shadow of a doubt.  They were real!  I was amazed and in awe, but everything was about to come crashing down.

In the days that followed, I went from an ecstatic high to a very low point.  Amazement turned to pure fear and then, which was even worse, I dropped down to complete apathy.  My whole world was turned upside down, I clearly hadn’t been the true believer I considered myself, otherwise I wouldn’t have been reacting in this way.  I just couldn’t comprehend what it all meant.  I questioned my religious faith and came to the conclusion that nothing mattered anymore.  There was no point to anything.  This awful feeling of being lost stayed with me for a long time.  Nothing I ‘knew’ or thought I knew made sense anymore, how could it after seeing what I had seen?  The parameters of my world had been blown apart. I was scared and helpless; life would never be the same again.

So then three years later, I have that terrifying experience whilst camping near Aviemore and this one is even worse, as it felt life threatening and in the moment, I thought it was the end for me.  This second experience tipped me over the edge, UFO’s and now a monster?  It was too much for one person to handle and from that point until I found you Deb, I was deeply disturbed by these traumatic events.  One would have been more than enough, but two off the scale experiences, well, I am only human and I couldn’t cope with it.  Both experiences haunted my everyday life; I forever feared that something else would happen to me.

It was around 2018 that I started to listen to YouTube every morning before work.  It took that ten years for me to be able to get a grip and start better educating myself on the subject of UFO’s and Cryptids.  I learned a lot and from this daily habit it eventually led me to BBR thank goodness.  After listening to hundreds of hours of lectures and documentaries, I realised as far as the UFO subject was concerned, there were similar reports out there, so I was not unique and that brought me so much comfort.  Finding you Deb and BBR really helped me to finally realise that I was not the only one who had experienced the impossible and I can’t tell you how much of a weight that has lifted from me. 

It is such a worry when you feel that you are the only one to experience something, that feeling of isolation made me feel like a target, I lived in constant fear of what was going to happen next.  A feeling of being in danger was always in the background.

So what did I see over the A1 that night?  Whatever it was, it defied our accepted laws of physics.  Were they friend or foe?  Was it secret military tech or something from outside of our world? What I will never be able to reconcile is why there wasn’t a huge car pile-up on the motorway that night.  Or why cars had not pulled over to watch this spectacle.  It doesn’t make sense, surely others saw them, or did they?  So many questions.

More importantly, I want to make sense of the link between these orange orbs and creature sightings.  I have heard these two incredible subjects mentioned together many times, so they are not mutually exclusive.   Although these experiences of mine are three years apart, is there a link here for me too? 

I hope this is a subject you will explore sometime Deb, if you are comfortable to do so that is.  It seems many of us experience both kinds of phenomena and it makes me wonder why?

I have attached a very simple reconstruction of what we saw that night.  This is the actual bridge, I think it's the last motorway bridge heading south of the A1 before the Ferryhill turn.

All of my life I have been a sky watcher.  In the late 1970's I stayed at my cousin's remote farm on Anglesey for a holiday, I think it was 1978.  It was in the October and that summer had seen a spate of UFO sightings and a landing of a craft on Anglesey!  This was only a few years after the Berwyn mountains incident and Wales was still buzzing with UFO talk. 

I was 7 at the time of this holiday and I remember my cousin telling my parents about how a UFO had landed in the local school and the kiddie who had been sent out to collect the milk and gone up to the craft which was sat in the playground, he touched it and his clothes disintegrated.  I wasn't meant to hear any of this story, the adults thought us kids were out of ear shot, but I took in every word and have never forgotten it.  One of the days during that holiday, I remember playing in one of the fields near the farm, it was only a hundred yards or so away.  We were playing, my second cousins and I, with a teepee.  We set it up in a field and were having a great time.  It was a typical Welsh overcast day, with dark grey skies.  

I remember being suddenly consumed with fear, realising we had wandered too far away from home.  My seven year old brain worried that if something suddenly appeared in the sky, the grown ups would not hear us calling them for help.  So in a bit of a panic, I said to my playmates, come on we need to go back home, which we did.  Thankfully, the two didn't question me and we went back to the farm and played around the house.  That holiday has stayed with me and I have been a sky watcher ever since.  Every night me and my husband are out with the dog, I am always happy to get home as I still expect to see something.  

I'm from Cardiff originally and only moved out here to rural Monmouthshire in 2011 for my new job working as a custodian at Raglan Castle.  These incidents I've been talking about to you happened hundreds of miles away, so that gave me comfort until I watched a program which told of a similar UFO sighting just 10 minutes drive from me on the A449 at Monmouth.  Here's the account if you would like to watch it: https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=196&part=3&gen=13 

Around 2019, something changed here around my village, which worries me.  I've seen some very odd things in the sky, but my husband who is ex-army just tells me to get over it as this is a training area for the military, the silly soldiers as he calls them (SAS).  There is something definitely amiss in this part of Monmouthshire Deb.  I just don't want anything else to happen to prove me right!