Warminster

I took seven books to the counter of the bookshop. Outside the day was damp and overcast, the clouds all iron, indigo and grey. The hills across the bay were dimmed, full of shadow. The proprietor looked at the paperback on top of the pile. “The Warminster Mystery,” he read, and jerked his bearded head in dismissal, “no mystery there. Warminster’s right by some big army camps, that’s all it was.”

I felt as if I were being reproached for buying the book, but put this down to the often unusual sales techniques of second-hand booksellers. I murmured something about it looking interesting. “I thought Warminster was quite an unusual little town,” I added, rather insipidly. “Maybe,” he grudgingly conceded, “perhaps I was too young to appreciate it.” This sounded like a cue for me to ask about his childhood, but it wasn’t one I intended to pick up. I let the remark drop into the silence, handed over the money and went out.

I had visited the Wiltshire town on one of my journeys some years ago in quest of mystical places: the same quest that took me to Glastonbury, Avebury, Maiden Castle, the Rollright Stones, the Malverns and other, obscurer, places. I knew that Warminster had been in the early sixties the focal point for a flying saucer “flap”, as they are called: a sudden surge of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects. But that wasn’t its only link to the strange and uncanny. It was also said to be a fulcrum for a network of ley lines, and at the heart of an unpublished landscape zodiac, known only to a few zealous researchers. What more inducement could be needed to find out more? 

So I am delighted to see that the excellent Castles in Space record label have announced pre-orders for Warminster UFO Club, an LP by hauntological musician Drew Mulholland offering filmic compositions inspired by the Wiltshire town’s noted UFO flap. 

That bookseller’s dismissal of the mystery sounded as if it were common sense. When there is a cluster of sightings of strange lights, an explanation in some military dimension seems plausible. Even the very name of the town seems to offer a clue. But when I began to read the book, I soon found there were two reasons why this explanation was not quite so convincing as it seemed. For one thing, some of the sightings had been reported by military personnel, and they were of all sorts of ranks and posts. If the lights had indeed been caused by manouevres, or experiments, or some secret activity at the nearby bases, they might have been expected to know about these: and they might also have been expected to be told to keep quiet.

Secondly, the range and variation of the experiences and encounters reported in Warminster went much further than the strange lights, dramatic though they were. In fact, a common report was of strange noises on the town roofs, like giant hailstones or falling masonry, or the flapping of the wings of a vast flock of crows. There were also other peculiar noises, of whistling, buzzing, grinding, droning. Other phenomena included animals and birds behaving strangely, odd telephone calls, and that indefinable sense of a presence which we should not too easily dismiss simply because it is less specific. The locals, indeed, simply called all these phenomena ‘the Thing’, showing that to them it was more than simply flying saucer sightings.

The book was by Arthur Shuttlewood, a local journalist: it was probably the most popular of quite a number by him on the same theme. The Warminster Mystery was published in Tandem paperback in 1973; it was followed by The Flying Saucerers (Sphere, 1976), UFO Magic in Motion (Sphere, 1979) and the unimaginatively-titled More UFOs Over Warminster (A Barker, 1979). He had also published Warnings From Flying Friends from Portway Press in 1968, a library publisher and UFOs: Key to the New Age in 1971 from the Regency Press, usually a subsidy publisher.

His style is often vivid and exclamatory, and may not inspire confidence. We must also acknowledge that as a newsman the author could not help but have an interest in heightening and sustaining the idea of a strange and special crisis going on in and around the town. But in fact once the hyperbole is cleared away, he is quite precise about giving dates, locations and the names of witnesses. One thing is clear from his book: in the early 1960s, a significant number of “ordinary” Warminster people said they had seen or heard something well outside the common run of natural experience.

Interest in UFOs, ley lines and similar Aquarian Age motifs has waned in the sixty years since their peak, and they are now regarded mostly as cultural phenomena with a certain retro charm, symbols of a particular time, evoked with a bemused affection. There is a well-informed discussion of the matter on the BBC News website (“The mystery of Warminster’s ‘UFO’”, 20 May 2010) by Kevin Goodman, described as a ‘UFO expert’: he also runs the UFO Warminster website (www.ufo-warminster.co.uk). 

He describes how at one point the town had its own UFO newsletter, The Fountain, published from Star House, a privately-funded research centre, and a separate volunteer network, called Info. Goodman reports that “Arthur Shuttlewood died in Warminster in 1996. With his death, the last lingering memories slowly faded away,” but he adds, “all I can say is this: something strange did happen there. I know. For a time, I was part of it.”

By the time I visited, in the 1980s, the town was quiet again. There was no obvious sign of its dramatic past. It seemed a slow, steady, subdued sort of place. I was looking then, not for the afterglow of the UFOs or the doings of the Thing, but for clues to the secret zodiac that, so far as I knew then, had never been documented or described. 

The Wiltshire Zodiac, with Warminster at its centre, was one of a number of such landscape mysteries that had begun to be identified, or imagined (depending on your point of view), under the influence of the Glastonbury Zodiac, originally described by the sculptor and mystic Katharine Maltwood in 1935: I am working on an informal bibliography of them. So if you should happen to notice any astrological symbols while poring over maps of Wiltshire or exploring its mystic terrain, do let me know.

(Mark Valentine)