Clones Strand, Wexford
Carl Nally and Dermot Butler
In previous articles for UFO Truth magazine, we focused upon UFO encounters involving pilots, both commercial and military. For Side Stream News, we have decided to bring matters back down to earth, as it were, by detailing some interesting cases from our files that involve the startling otherworldly experiences of perplexed witnesses on the ground.
Just inside the northern county boundary of Wexford lies the small rural community
of Castletown, which is nestled less than a mile inland from the popular beach at Clones Strand. Living and working in the area all his life, Tommy Flanagan was accustomed to observing aircraft, meteor showers and satellites traversing the region’s dark skies, which remain relatively free of the light pollution that blankets the nearby towns of Gorey and Arklow.
Back in 1980, something strange happened to Flanagan, something which still troubles him more than three decades later. After a late night stroll to Castletown, the Clones Strand resident was returning to his home near the beach when he noticed something odd, flying low in the sky over the Irish Sea.
He observed two large, bright orange objects flying towards the northwest and over the county border of Wicklow. The colour and glare of both objects reminded him of the setting sun. They made no noise on what was a clear, wind-free night, and they cast reflections that rippled across the calm waters off Clones Strand. No trails were visible behind them. Flanagan kept both objects in view for perhaps a minute or more, while they glided slowly inland.
He wasn’t frightened by what he had seen. Instead, he was amazed, and very curious. He was, though, reluctant to speak to anyone about his experience until some months later, because he didn’t wish to be ridiculed – a common factor with many such witnesses. Although the experience itself was in no way unpleasant, he was to have another UFO sighting which did frighten him. In this instance, he was accompanied by two other eyewitnesses.
One night during the following summer, he gave a lift to two young friends of his from Clones Strand to Castletown’s only tavern. The two young men had joked some months earlier, at Flanagan’s expense, about him seeing ‘little green men’. He hadn’t, of course, seen anything of the sort, but the facts in cases like this are seldom allowed to stand in the way of some leg-pulling by close friends and relatives. It’s a natural reaction - some might suggest a defence mechanism - to being told something so fantastic it just can’t be true.
In this way, details of his actual sighting became more and more exaggerated locally, mushrooming into a wild distortion of what had really transpired the previous year.
While driving west along the pitch-dark road to Castletown, he was startled to observe orange and white balls of light appearing behind his car. In a scene reminiscent of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie, he eased off the accelerator to manoeuvre in to the side of the road, so that the ‘car’ behind him could overtake. As the other vehicle was closing in on them quickly, with blinding headlights on full beam, he wished to avoid the possibility of what might have been a drunken driver dangerously tailgating his car.
As he manoeuvred his vehicle onto the grass verge, the ‘car’ behind them duly overtook their vehicle – by noiselessly lifting off the road and flying over them. The now airborne craft veered to the right, again towards the Wicklow county line, and disappeared over a hedge and into the night sky.
Unlike in some other UFO encounters at close quarters, the craft did not cause the car’s electrical system to stall. Perhaps it was just as well, as the panic-stricken driver and his passengers wanted nothing more than to flee the scene. Flanagan slammed his car into gear, and pressed heavily on the accelerator. Though only a very moderate drinker, he nervously joined his terrified passengers for a stiff whiskey when they reached the tavern. They never again made fun of his earlier sighting, and all three have shunned any media publicity for over thirty years.
For more 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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