The Effect
It is the very early hours of Christmas morning 1964 and in a quaint market town in the south-west of England, a series of bizarre and unexplained happenings is about to commence. The town is Warminster, an ancient settlement with a chequered history, located on the western fringes of Salisbury Plain.
At 1.25am, a Warminster resident named Mildred Head, wakes with a start. Mildred has the distinct feeling that something is seriously amiss, a sense of unease creeping over her. And there is it again - the noise that must have jolted her from sleep - she hears it more clearly now. Through the darkness of her bedroom, she peers up at the ceiling. The entire expanse of plaster above her bed (she later reports) has: ‘come alive, with strange sounds lashing at the roof’. She relaxes a little. A storm must have blown up in the hours since she got into bed. And indeed, the noises above her sound exactly like the wind, lashing bare branches of trees against the roof tiles. But, suddenly, those noises change, warping into more of a thudding, which then abruptly stops. Mildred tentatively steps from her bed, venturing over to the window to part the curtains and see if she can determine just what is going on outside. But the street is quiet, the skies clear and calm. She pauses for a moment. Perhaps the street is not as quiet as she thought, as if she listens very carefully, she can make it out, a different noise again, an other-worldly humming that grows in volume, becoming so loud Mildred is forced to clamp her hands to her ears to block it out. When she lowers them again, several minutes later, the humming has faded to: ‘a faint whisper, a low whistling or wheezing.’ A few seconds more and it has dissipated altogether, and silence once again falls over the town.
But that silence doesn’t last long. Later the same Christmas morning, another resident, Marjorie Bye, has an extraordinary experience as she makes her way to church. It is still dark as Marjorie sets off to take holy communion at Christ Church, when she notices an unusual crackling sound, which seems to be coming from the area known as Bell Hill. Marjorie, completely ignorant of Mildred’s peculiar experiences just a few hours earlier, decides it must be a lorry spreading grit along the roads. She continues on her way, but the commotion gets closer, its volume increasing. It is like, as Mildred herself puts it: ‘branches being pulled over gravel.’ This noise soon changes, morphing into a hum, as though someone is talking to her from on high. Then, just as she nears the church, the humming overhead suddenly worsens, becoming far more intense. Marjorie feels as though she is being paralysed by the noise, assaulted by a series of severe and relentless vibrations which prevent her from moving. Shockwaves pound her head, neck and shoulders, and she is pressed to the ground by ‘invisible fingers of sound.’ After a few moments, Marjorie wills herself to keep moving, to reach the sanctuary of the church. Finally, and with enormous effort, she manages to break free of the inexplicable unseen forces and hurries away. When Marjorie shares her account of what has just happened to her with the rest of the congregation, news starts to spread, eventually reaching the offices of the local paper, the Warminster Journal.
Arthur Shuttlewood, the features editor of the Journal, cannot believe what he is hearing. Sensational accounts of unexplained happenings in his very town, given by some of its most respected residents. In the days following Arthur’s publication of the story, around thirty other witnesses come forward to share their own experiences of the odd occurrences the paper begins entitling: ‘The Thing’. Amongst these witnesses is Roger Rump, who lives in a house very close to Christ Church. Roger claims he had been in bed that same Christmas morning when he heard a terrific clattering coming from his roof, as though each of his five thousand roof tiles was being lifted individually and then slammed back down with some ‘tremendous force’. Following this, Roger says, he heard the same humming tone experienced by both Mildred Head and Marjorie Bye, which lasted about a minute and then stopped.
In the opening weeks of 1965 still more eye-witnesses share their stories. Many of them report ear-splitting unseen forces coming from the sky. One man, a resident of Five Ash Lane, claims he had awoken one morning to find a whole flock of pigeons lying dead in his garden. When he investigates what might have killed so many birds, he finds no obvious cause of death. It is like they just… fell out of the sky.
A further rash of sonic attacks follows, but this time there is a difference. This time, witnesses claim, the extraordinary soundwaves and humming are accompanied by mysterious sightings in the night sky. As a haulier is driving his lorry one night, he detects a strange sound emanating from somewhere high above. He slows his vehicle and listens, gazing up through the windscreen into the dark. All of a sudden, a fierce ball of light appears in the sky, before hurtling towards his truck. He is certain it will engulf his vehicle, but at the last possible moment it veers off in another direction and vanishes into the darkness. Later that same evening Rachel Atwell, a young housewife, is fast asleep when she is awoken by a ‘dreadful droning’. She jumps out of bed and runs to her window. Outside, she says, there is a brilliant burst of pulsating light, hovering six feet above the ground. The longer she looks at the light, the more Rachel’s brain begins to be subjected to an extreme and blinding pressure, as though someone was tightening a steel band fast around her forehead. The pain lasts a few seconds and then stops. When Rachel looks back outside, the bright glow of light has vanished, leaving no signs behind it and no trace of where it might have gone.
Accounts of the ‘Warminster Thing’, as it is now commonly known, continue into the spring and summer of 1965, showing no signs of slowing, but rather becoming both more vivid and more frequent. Seventeen people at Shearwater Lake, to the south-west of the town, are fishing and swimming when they see a large cigar-shaped object rapidly descend from the sky. ‘Twin red-hot pokers hanging downwards,’ is how a witness describes it, ‘one on top of the other, with a black space in between.’ There are trembling roof rafters, a sound like an enormous tin can containing nuts and bolts rattling overhead, as though shaken by the hand of a giant. There are electric cracklings, explosions so powerful they smash windows. There are orange lights, blue lights, green lights, lights so bright and so white they: ‘turn night to day.’ And the accounts of unidentifiable shapes in the sky increase as well. People say they see yet more long, flying objects shaped like huge cigars, some resembling lit train carriages with rounded ends, gliding sideways among the stars.
But, despite the multitude of people claiming the events unfolding at Warminster cannot possibly be explained by science or rational thinking, there are as many who disagree. Salisbury Plain, only a little to the east of the town, is not just a place rich in ancient myth and folklore, but science and technology, too. In 1896, some of Britain’s first experiments in wireless telegraphy were carried out on the Plain, and from 1898, the army began to conduct manoeuvres at what, by the 1960s, had become the well-established Salisbury Plain Training Area. Surely the army’s presence here leaves no doubt as to the cause of the strange happenings in Warminster after all - they must simply be down to forces’ manoeuvres, to weapons testing causing strange lights and sudden, shocking sounds?
Or maybe not. Intriguingly, some of the most compelling testimonies of all relating to the curious events at Warminster came from the army itself. Namely, from members of the forces stationed near the town. A sergeant at Knock Camp, five miles to the east of Warminster, claimed that several of his men had approached him in confidence after reading the Journal’s newspaper reports. They described noises so intense it was as though a vast chimney was being obliterated above them, with rubble raining down on the parade ground and around their mess. When the soldiers got up from their bunks to investigate, just like Mildred Head, they could find no traces of anything out-of-the-ordinary.
In addition, an army major from the same camp contacted the Warminster Journal with an account of his own, with strict instructions that if the paper printed his story he was to remain anonymous. He claimed he was travelling back to camp from a formal engagement, in his personal vehicle, when the engine and electrics of his car suddenly cut out. As the major sat in his car trying to start the engine again, the chassis began to inexplicably hum and vibrate, a tremor that deepened in intensity, until the whole car was shaking violently. As the hum rose to a near deafening crescendo, the major felt a blinding pressure in his forehead, like a heavy force from above. Then everything ceased as suddenly as it had started and, moments later, the car engine sparked back into life. The major swung the vehicle’s headlights across the road in front of him, but nothing untoward was revealed in their beams whatsoever.
So, if even the supposed cause of the bizarre goings-on - the armed forces themselves - were reporting similar incidents, then surely something else altogether was at play in the town of Warminster? But just who… or what, might it be?
The Method
By late summer 1965, the unusual events that had been unfolding at Warminster for almost nine months began to receive national attention. Over the August Bank Holiday that year, it was estimated that 8000 people flocked to the town, desperate for their own glimpses of ‘The Thing’. When, in the following month, Warminster resident Gordon Faulkner claimed to have photographed one of the UFOs spotted hovering over the town, the picture was published in the Daily Mirror, garnering Warminster even more publicity. Gordon’s photo, which apparently captures a classic ‘flying saucer’ - the grainy form of a disc-shaped object topped by a dome - has since become iconic. By the time the Daily Mirror took up the story, news of the Warminster Thing had even made its way stateside, with papers as far flung as California reporting on the town’s eerie events.
The more coverage the bizarre happenings received, the more varied and outlandish the theories became as to what was actually going on in this ordinary corner of England. And over the many months of eye-witness reports, the Warminster Journal speculated that the incidents could be explained by everything from static electricity caused by wet power lines to Father Christmas himself. But perhaps an explanation could lie in the fact that this corner of England is not really that ordinary. Wiltshire and its neighbouring counties have long been recognised as a hotbed of strange occurrences, from UFO sightings to accounts of ghostly regiments on parade. Maybe this is because of its long and concentrated human history, dating back to neolithic settlers and spanning Roman villas and the English Civil War. Some people have even stated that the land around Salisbury Plain is a special place both geographically and transcendentally, that its density of leylines, terminating at Stonehenge, have not only drawn man to the land across millennia, but also acted as beacons for visitors from outer space.
The man most responsible for promoting the activity in Warminster as being caused by alien visitations was that features editor of the Warminster Journal, Arthur Shuttlewood. Indeed, in the years after the happenings, he was repeatedly accused of cashing in on his own newspaper coverage to try and turn himself into a celebrity and the area a tourist industry. He organised mass UFO watching events, gave lectures, and authored no less than five books on the subject. Many people believed that Arthur Shuttlewood became so obsessed by the ‘Warminster Thing’ that he lost all sense of objectivity where the story was concerned, descending into sensationalism and exaggeration. And, in fact, long before the Warminster Thing was reported, Arthur was known to embellish his news reports for dramatic effect and, in turn, greater newspaper sales and personal notoriety. But Arthur remained adamant: he was a total sceptic. “I am not easily fooled,” he said. “I dare not be. I have built my reputation as a journalist on the bedrock of integrity”. Nevertheless, by the time his book The Warminster Mystery was published in 1967, Arthur was of the opinion that the objects spotted in the skies above the town were indeed alien spacecrafts.
Since Arthur’s job at the Warminster Journal gave him access to most, if not all, of the eye-witness accounts, he became known as the primary source of information about the case and, for many of the early reports, the sole source. Some commentators later put forward the theory that Arthur Shuttlewood himself actually made the entire ‘Thing’ up. But while others swear that he couldn’t possibly have been guilty of inventing the whole story himself, the consensus does seem to be that he probably did spice up certain sections of his books in the interests of personal income. After all, in a number of the eye-witness accounts, he was the eye-witness.
On April Fool’s Day in 1966, the BBC South and West broadcast a 30 minute documentary covering the events at Warminster. It concluded that the strange reports in the area were most likely related to secret military technology being tested near Salisbury Plain. Quite whether the documentary was intended as an April Fool’s joke is unclear, but nonetheless the Warminster happenings being caused by the Ministry of Defence’s activities on Salisbury Plain remains perhaps the most compelling explanation of the episode to date.
By the mid-sixties, the Cold War was at its height, and the Ministry of Defence (or MOD) had been established at Salisbury Plain for over six decades. They carried out artillery tests, tank and vehicle manoeuvres, and there were even certain sections of the base dedicated to top secret experimentation into chemical weapons. One serviceman, Ronald Maddison, even died there in 1953, after being subjected to nerve agent toxicity tests on human subjects. As a result, accusations of disturbing and unethical activities at the site persisted. Sonic weapons, now commonplace on the modern battlefield, were also tested at the MOD’s base on Salisbury Plain. And what better way to explain those strange and numerous accounts of hummings, pressure to the head and buildings quaking? Surely the flocks of birds dropping from the sky were killed by the aftershocks of these sonic booms, or else by the shockwaves of massive artillery explosions? Surely those peculiar nighttime lights hovering across the horizon were caused by after-dark weapons testing? Might the ‘Warminster Thing’ then, have originated from several early eye-witness accounts of MOD activities, which later grew and became more elaborate as they spread across the population? Could the residents of the sleepy historic market town have even been subconsciously responding to a mass unease about the clandestine activities at the MOD base?
The Ministry of Defence, however, has continued to deny that any of their activities could have caused the events in Warminster between 1964 and 1965. They even went as far as to claim that the reports given by their own men were never formally recorded, implying that they were merely a fabrication of the Warminster Journal itself, another ploy on the part of Arthur Shuttlewood to sell more newspapers.
By the early 1970s, both the supposed sightings of the Warminster Thing and the number of visitors to the town had begun to decline. Nevertheless, the events that occurred in this corner of south-west England have secured the town’s place in the annals of the UK’s most paranormal locations. In 2015, a mural appeared on the old police station wall at Warminster to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the happenings. It was painted by a ‘secret artist’ and remains there to this day, persisting just like the stories that inspired it. Indeed, the events that occurred between 1964-5 have cemented Warminster as one of the ‘UFO capitals’ of the UK, with sightings of extraterrestrial visitings reported as recently as 2017. And, despite more than half a century having passed since the strange occurrences began, still no definitive theory has been put forward to explain ‘The Thing’ and why, for a few years in the swinging sixties, it terrorised the residents of Warminster.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
