Carl Nally and Dermot Butler
Our first case comes from County Wicklow, on Ireland’s east coast, just to the south of Dublin. The summer of 1988 will always remain fixed in the memory of Peter Simons. He and a friend, and their wives and children, travelled from Dublin to spend a long weekend in the picturesque Glenmalur Valley, a heavily afforested area of County Wicklow.
The entire group set out for a walk soon after arriving. It was late in the evening, though still bright, and their intentions were to take in some fresh air, stretch their legs, and to get to bed reasonably early. Simons and his friend had been at work that day and tiredness meant that any local exploring would have to wait until the next morning.
The children in the group chatted excitedly as they walked in front of their parents who, in turn, were catching up with the goings-on in each other’s lives. Suddenly, just ahead and to one side of the road, they all noticed a small figure, wearing what appeared to be overalls, apparently tinkering with the mechanism at the top of a telephone pole. It was an unusual spectacle, especially at that hour on the Friday of a long weekend, but everyone in the group naturally presumed that it was a maintenance worker from the telecommunications company, carrying out essential work on a locally reported fault. The figure was unusually slight in stature, but perhaps a young apprentice had been tasked with doing the work, or maybe the worker was female.
Seconds later, just yards past the telephone pole, everyone stopped. They all realised that they were miles from any depot that the ‘maintenance worker’ could have come from, and he or she had no van. There was no nearby gateway in which a vehicle could have been parked, nor any houses with driveways onto which a vehicle could have turned. There were no gaps in the hedges on either side of the road, so the worker’s maintenance van couldn’t have been parked in a field, out of sight. They turned to look at the figure again. It had vanished.
The group returned to its local accommodation, musing over what had happened. They decided to shrug it off, as they set about planning their activities for the next morning and then retiring for the night. All, that was, except Peter. The bizarre event nagged at him to such an extent that he decided to return to the area to try to resolve the puzzle. With everyone else preparing to go to bed, the dumbfounded Simons told his wife that he was going outside for a cigarette. Once outside, he quickly walked back down the road towards where he had seen the figure earlier. He looked over a hedge, at dots of light on the far side of the valley, each one representing a house or locally sited caravans and mobile homes. He then noticed another, closer light. Then several of them, in various colours, clustered in one small area.
He zipped up his jacket and turned up his collar against the chill, then climbed through the hedge and began walking towards these lights. Within moments, he realised that they were much nearer than he had first thought. They were not, as he had concluded, emanating from a farm building that he hadn’t noticed earlier. The shape that came into focus as his eyes adjusted to the almost pitch dark was not that of a van or car. He stopped in his tracks. A short distance in front of him was an object shaped like an upturned saucer. It had four legs supporting it on the ground. For a man who had rubbished UFOs all his life, this was the precise moment when his worldview changed forever. He couldn’t believe what he was looking at, and it terrified him.
The object had several lights around its middle, which were the lights he had focused on when he had looked over the hedge into the field. As he stared at the object in disbelief, his heart pounded and sweat drenched his shirt, despite the chill of a late summer’s night.
When we interviewed him, Simons told us that, looking back, it wasn’t the craft itself that scared him the most. It was his sudden thought that he was all alone in the middle of a large field, at night, some distance away from a road that had no traffic on it. If whoever (or whatever) was inside the object had decided to attack him, there was no one to help him. His fear was compounded by the subsequent thought that perhaps the beings who were operating the craft may have been outside it, watching him from the darkness.
Just then, lights began to flash all over the noiseless object. Simons’ legs had turned to jelly, but instinct now took over. He knew that he had to get away from there, and he turned and fled as fast as he could back to his accommodation.
Peter Simons had never been so terrified in his entire life. He got little or no sleep that night, and when he worked up the courage to tell his wife the next morning, she laughed at him at first. She consoled him later, but still insisted that he was not to tell anyone about his experience as he (and she) would be ridiculed and embarrassed about it. Her attitude was unfortunate from the research point of view, but it was perfectly understandable. It reflected that of society as a whole at the time, and that attitude still exists to a large extent well over two decades later. People can make various claims about experiencing religious phenomena, or poltergeist activity, ghosts
or the banshee, and their stories are much more readily accepted within Ireland’s
cultural parameters.
Is it possible that the elusive being which Simons and his group observed at the top of the telephone pole was there as a lookout, to warn the craft’s occupants of possible intrusions into where it was positioned? We may never know. What we do know is that this was not the only incident in which a strange, diminutive figure was sighted.
One night in late August 1996, a group of teenagers had a terrifying encounter in the Curlew Mountains, near the town of Boyle in County Roscommon, northwest Ireland. The seven friends, all locals, were embarking on a short camping trip. They had just lit a fire and had erected the first of two tents. While they were erecting the second tent, they noticed some movement elsewhere in the field. Something was scurrying about, but they couldn’t quite make out what it was. It was close to 2 a.m., and the light from the blazing fire enabled the youths to discern a lot of movement around them. The teenagers thought that animals, such as foxes or dogs, had been attracted by
the fire, the noise the friends were making, or the smell of food.
They had just finished putting up their second tent when stones began to be thrown at them. This lasted for what seemed like several minutes. Abject fear overcame the group, as small, dark, knee-high beings surrounded the camp. The boys fled in terror, leaving all of their equipment behind. There is a possibility that the phenomenon of missing time was involved here, as the witness who came forward commented on how odd it was that their campfire had mysteriously burned out while the incident was happening. Their frightening encounter went on for some minutes, but the boys’ fire should have burned for far longer than that.
It is interesting to note that this case took place in a location where many unusual airborne objects have been observed over many years. Even the famous writer WB Yeats commented on unusual bright objects being observed in the region. Also, in the same area of Ireland, well-known researcher Jacques Vallée has noted, at least one incident was reported in the late 19th century which involved a small being warning local men, who were on a hunting trip, to leave the mountainside they were on, and not to come back. Despite being armed with shotguns, the men felt menaced – and hurriedly left the area.
Back towards Dublin, in the ‘royal county’ of Meath, UFO reports date back into the mists of folklore and legend. The landscape features Newgrange, which pre-dates the pyramids by at least half a millennium. This megalithic site along with others in the area, now seem to attract many reports of the ‘Flying Triangle’. Pilots coming in to land at Dublin Airport have reported many cases to us involving close encounters with these UFOs.
One such case, detailed in Conspiracy of Silence, later involved the author of our foreword, Timothy Good. One particularly interesting case from this region involved a member of the Irish police, and it is extensively explored in a dedicated chapter in States of Denial.
On 3rd August 2008, a Sunday, a member of the Irish police had an experience that will live long in his memory. Around 10:30 p.m., he was driving south through the Meath town of Dunboyne when he noticed four groups of white objects in the sky in front of him. They were in formations of three, moving from his right to left, and as the fourth group came into view over a wooded area on the far side of a road junction, he had the opportunity to pull in to the side of the road.
Climbing out of his vehicle, he activated the camera on his mobile phone and managed to capture a fascinating sequence. With the ticking of his car’s indicators (turn signals) audible in the background, the resulting footage showed three bright white objects, in a triangular formation, gliding to the left and rotating in unison as they did so. The rotation strongly suggested that
the three lights were, in fact, parts of one larger, triangular object.
The object emitted a thin, sharply defined, bright red, laser-like beam of light which was directed towards the ground. There was no discernible engine noise from the object. In conducting research into this incident at that time, we discovered that similarly shaped UFOs were responsible for firing coloured beams of light, not only vertically but horizontally also. We later interviewed an eye witness in the area who, as a boy in the late 1970s and in the company of a friend, observed a disc-shaped aerial object firing beams of light in a horizontal direction. This account dispels the notion that a glitch in modern digital cameras is the culprit. Indeed, many incidents that are similar to the Dunboyne case – often featuring the beams being observed with the naked eye and not just filmed – have occurred in Manchester, Bristol, Germany, Turkey, etc.
(The Irish police officer’s footage has been uploaded and can be viewed on youtube).
For more:
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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