Image: UFO captured over County Kerry
Dermot Butler and Carl Nally
The famous – or perhaps infamous – Roswell crash story made international headlines.
Ireland was no exception, as the story also made the headlines on the Irish Times and Irish Independent front pages. July 1947, though, also saw the country’s newspapers reporting on a mysterious flying object being observed by a Michael O’Sullivan, in the skies above the town of Cahersiveen, County Kerry.
This event occurred in the very same week that the reputedly otherworldly strangeness was
visited upon the New Mexico desert. Interestingly, O’Sullivan’s sighting was preceded, as far back as 1915, when an unknown flying object was reported flying over Ballinasloe, County Galway. This large and luminous body was observed by eye witnesses for a period of no less than five hours.
Ridicule greeted anyone who reported UFOs in those days and one can only imagine how totally lost for words a very young Finn Curran must have felt when his whole world changed irrevocably. A full eight years before the Roswell furore, Curran witnessed a spectacle that was way beyond his ability to rationalise.
In his decade or so of life, he had never seen an aircraft of any kind, and ‘motor cars’ were still a rarity in his isolated rural home environment. The ridicule that ensued meant that he could not explain clearly to his siblings that he had seen an object hovering above his head, as he was out collecting kindling to light the fire in his family’s cottage.
On that fine day in 1939, while going about his task, Curran was startled to notice a large object looming above him. The circular craft had sub-divisions or slats on its underside, radiating from a central point, reminding the frightened boy of a mushroom.
Speaking in 2001, Curran couldn’t clearly recall how the UFO departed, which leads one to wonder if there was any missing time. If so, this may indicate that an abduction event had transpired.
The testimony given by Curran, and by Michael O’Sullivan decades earlier, not only made Ireland aware that the UFO enigma is all too real, but that it had visited the country over thirty years before the Roswell incident occurred. Their recollections of these life-changing experiences prompted us to delve further into other reported UFO- related events in the region.
In July 1995, a five-member family group from Hampshire experienced a terrifying ordeal while on holiday in County Kerry. The party was driving towards Killarney in the early hours when strange lights appeared in the sky. The lights, when initially observed, were stationary. They then suddenly swooped down over the family’s Toyota. The driver of the vehicle later said that the anomaly was an oval formation of white lights, rotating in a clockwise direction.
The lights took up position to one side of the car, and then moved over to the opposite side of the vehicle. This high speed manoeuvre was repeated on two more occasions before the object(s) sped away. The driver’s wife reported that she saw strange beams of light, pulsating in half-
circles, coming from the anomaly as it sped away. The group’s experience lasted between ten and fifteen minutes, after which the lights retreated to a considerable distance. At this point, they continued to perform a ‘weird dance’ in the sky, which the witnesses estimated to be several miles away.
While all of this was going on as they drove, they also noticed a ‘strange white shape’ behind some forest undergrowth. Everyone in the car was well acquainted with various aircraft flying during the day and night, as they were residents of the Middle Wallop area, just a few miles away from an RAF base. There was no doubt in their minds that what they encountered was not of this world.
In 1991, Mary Hartnett of Abbeyfeale, County Limerick, was driving with her husband to Tralee in County Kerry. On a dark road they were startled to see a huge, circular object appear to one side of the highway ahead of them. She stated that it appeared to have a row of windows about it, and it seemed to be no more than perhaps twenty feet above the ground.
The object ‘jumped’ from one side of the road to the other as they continued along the pitch black road. It paced their vehicle for some distance, and only flew away from them when they came up to traffic lights in a more built-up area, leaving them in no doubt that the craft was intelligently operated and controlled. Mary informed us that this belief was based on the fact that the craft was ‘playing’ with them as they made their way to Tralee.
During April 2001, a huge lighted object was observed by a local resident near Scartaglin. The object was approximately forty feet above the ground, the witness reported, and when it moved away it gave off blue, yellow and green flashes. A locally based taxi driver and his two passengers also observed what appeared to be the same object.
Also in April of that year, another UFO – or possibly the same one – was observed in the Spa area. In this incident, the man who witnessed the spectacle commented that he had watched the object, hovering in the sky, while in the company of his wife and granddaughter. He was looking over the sea towards the Camp and Castlegregory areas, on the northern shores of Kerry’s Dingle Peninsula, when he suddenly saw a bright object in the sky.
It was below the clouds and it blinked out and reappeared minutes later in the exact same spot. The trio watched as it gave off blue, red and yellow flashes. After approximately forty-five minutes, it finally vanished.
On a bright late August evening in 2003, a local man was out walking near Lispole, along the R559 route from Anascaul to Dingle, when he saw an aircraft swooping low out of the sun, trailing flames and smoke. Another local witness reported seeing an aircraft in difficulties. They both reported aircraft, not flares, with one of the witnesses telling an Irish Coast Guard official that it was at an altitude of approximately 2,000 feet.
Another witness, quarry worker Damien Duffy, phoned the police after he and a colleague, Dan Myers, watched in shock as what they described as ‘an airplane’, on fire, went into the Stradbally Mountains area. They then saw smoke coming from the far side of the hills. A Sikorski rescue helicopter from Shannon Airport searched the Connor Pass area, but to no avail. No wreckage or casualties were located by the helicopter, nor in searches by the police, Coast Guard or mountain rescue personnel on the ground.
Would a flare really fool all of these people? If it was simply a flare, could Myers and Duffy really have thought that it was an aircraft, when the sky was still bright? The walker was quite adamant that he, too, had seen an aircraft. Also, since the loftiest peak in the immediate area is just over 800 feet high, would a flare really be drifting at a height of 2,000 feet? What did these witnesses truly observe…?
It is interesting to note, however, that the area in which this incident occurred is immediately south of where the witness in Spa was looking when he saw the UFO hovering for three quarters of an hour. (It is also just a few miles east of where another witness, Dan Moriarty, saw a diamond-shaped UFO in the mid-1990s).
Our files also reveal that in mid-November 2000, we corresponded with a man who witnessed a UFO flying over County Cork. The witness, Michael Daly, had kept the details of his experience very much to himself for over thirty years, a regrettable fact which once again demonstrates how so many witnesses to strange phenomena – UFOs especially – have had a well-founded fear of being ridiculed. His decision to tell of his encounter took courage, and his story is told here in his own words. He doesn’t try to rationalise what he witnessed, or attempt to understand something that may never be understood. Rather, he tells it exactly as he experienced it, and he was as bemused by the incident in 2000 as he was when it happened all those years before.
"A UFO was spotted on the Begley’s Forge to Crossbarry road by the occupants of two cars in 1969 (including my passenger and myself). A car was stopped on the road about 300 yards ahead of my car, observing the UFO, when I came upon the scene. I looked to my left and I saw a craft twenty-five feet off the ground, motionless. We got out of the car and stood on the ditch to improve our view.
"The craft was an estimated twenty-five feet in diameter. It was circular and grey in colour. There were three portholes with light on the UFO. It remained motionless for a minute and began moving in our direction and across the aforementioned road, middle way between the cars, and it headed towards what is known locally as the Black Cross. No noise was heard from the UFO as it moved across the road.
"By this time we had left the ditch and were observing it from the road. It moved out of sight, but thirty seconds later it appeared again and once more moved back to the left hand side of the road.
It continued to move along the left hand side of the road to Crossbarry. We hopped into our car and followed it as fast as we could, but it was moving too fast, skimming treetops as it went along, and disappearing into a wooded area which could not be seen from the roadway."
Side Stream News will continue to visit the research files of Dermot Butler and Carl Nally, outlining more cases of UFO encounters from within Ireland’s shores.
For more information, read: Conspiracy of Silence: UFOs in Ireland
States of Denial: The Tuskar Rock Incident and Other Mysteries
Circle of Deceit: A Terrifying Alien Agenda in Ireland and Beyond
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