by Colin Wilson
Ted was interested in Jung’s notion that UFOs could be ‘projections’ of the unconscious mind, and later was fascinated by the work of John Keel and Jacques Vallee. If UFOs were ‘paranormal’, what about lake monsters that were described by respectable witnesses, yet were obviously too large for the small lakes they were supposed to inhabit? Lake monsters and flying saucers, dragons and discs—could they be connected? The English researcher John Michell (of whom I shall speak in the next chapter) was reaching the same conclusion independently. And it now struck Ted that Anglo-Saxon barrows (burial mounds) were disc-shaped, while others were cigar-shaped—like UFOs and their ‘mother ships’. And in his book The Dragon and the Disc (1973) he speculated whether Bronze Age culture in Britain might, in fact, be a ‘disc culture’. Could it be that the problem of lake monsters and the problem of UFOs were connected in the sense that neither was ultimately soluble?
In June 1973, UFOs and monsters came together in Ted’s life. He was sufficiently convinced that the Loch Ness monster might be a member of ‘the phantom menagerie’ that he agreed to accompany an eccentric clergyman called the Rev. Donald Omand in an exorcism ceremony on the loch. Both felt oddly drained and exhausted afterwards. Ted wondered if they were stirring up dangerous forces.
Ted had heard of a UFO sighting near the loch. A Swedish journalist called Jan-Ove Sundberg had been wandering in the woods behind Loch Ness when he saw a strange craft in a clearing, and three odd-looking grey men, wearing what he took to be divers’ helmets. Then, with a shock, he realised they were not human. They stepped in through a hatch, and the craft took off at great speed, but not before Sundberg collected his wits enough to snap one photograph. After his return to Sweden, Sundberg had been plagued by ‘men in black’, who left strange footprints in his garden; he finally had a nervous breakdown. Ted heard about the episode from John Keel.
Soon after the exorcism, Ted went to stay the night with a wing commander named Basil Cary, who lived above Loch Ness. Both the Carys had seen golden, globelike objects over the loch.
Ted was telling Cary and his wife, Winifred, about Sundberg, and saying that he intended to go and visit the landing site the next day. Mrs. Cary warned him against it—she had heard about people being abducted. As she spoke, there was a rushing sound like a tornado from outside and a series of violent thuds; through the French window Ted saw a pyramid of blackish smoke swirling. Then a beam of white light came through the window and focused on Ted’s forehead. Mrs. Cary screamed. The odd thing was that Wing Commander Cary, who was pouring a drink with his back to the window, saw and heard nothing. Ted himself failed to see the beam of light. They went to investigate the garden, but everything was normal. Winifred Cary obligingly wrote and signed an account of the incident.
The next morning, as Ted went out, he saw a man clad in black leather and goggles, who seemed to be waiting for him. Deciding he might as well confirm whether this was a real man or not, Ted walked up to him. In doing so, he removed his eyes from the man for a few seconds, and heard a whistling sound; when he looked back, the man had vanished. He looked up and down the road; there was nowhere the man could have gone to.
One year later, Ted was standing near the same spot when he had a heart attack. As he was being carried away on a stretcher, he recognised that they were passing over the spot where he had seen the man in black. He comments in The Goblin Universe: ‘Synchronicity and the forces that control it never give up’.
Five years later, in February 1979, Ted died of a heart attack.
I had seen the typescript of The Goblin Universe soon after Ted completed it, in mid-1975, and found it his most satisfying and stimulating book so far. So I was greatly puzzled when he told me that he had decided not to publish it. After his death, I persuaded an American publisher to bring it out, and to give the royalties to Ted’s mother.
And it was when Florence Holiday sent me the typescript of his last untitled book that I finally discovered why he had changed his mind about The Goblin Universe. In June 1975, just after he had completed The Goblin Universe, the American investigator Robert Rines took some photographs in Loch Ness with an underwater camera. One showed a large creature with a neck as long as a giraffe’s, while two others showed what looked like an immense triangular flipper. And suddenly, Ted became convinced that the Loch Ness monster was a creature of flesh and blood after all, and that, moreover, the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau might soon come up with even more solid evidence—perhaps even a carcass. If so, then all his work since The Great Orm of Loch Ness was a waste of time, an excursion down a blind alley. It must have been a considerable blow. But he picked himself up, and instead wrote a more straightforward book about lake monsters—something that was closer in tone to The Great Orm of Loch Ness.
Then, as if to renew his belief in the goblin-universe theory, there was a sudden outbreak of UFO sightings and encounters not far from Ted’s home in Haverfordwest. The first occurred on 14 February 1977, when a shining metal disc with a dome on top landed in the field beside the Broad Haven Primary School. Fourteen boys and one girl all saw it. Unfortunately, the headmaster could not be bothered to go and look when several boys came to tell him what they had seen. Meanwhile, the disc moved behind some bushes and was lost to sight. But a local UFO spotter named Randall Jones Pugh heard about it later in the day, and went to look at the landing site. He found nothing, but a local reporter wrote an article about the sighting, and the affair was publicised in the national press and on television. Thirteen days later, a UFO landed again in the same boggy field and was seen by a schoolteacher and two canteen ladies.
Ted Holiday and Randall Pugh began to investigate, and soon found many other people who had seen UFOs in what was then Dyfed. A party of four in a car saw a bright, lighted object with a dome on top; a crowd on the sea front saw a large orange light in the sky out at sea, which diminished in size and finally disappeared; and a woman looking out of her kitchen window saw a silver object in a field, which vanished into thin air.
Then humanoid sightings began. A woman who ran a hotel heard a humming noise in the middle of the night and saw a disc in a field, pulsating with blue light, then saw two very tall men in ‘boiler suits’, who seemed to be faceless; when she tried to call her husband, she found she had no voice. A youth named Steve Taylor saw a glowing orange disc in the sky, and a black dog ran past him frantically. He stopped at the gateway into a field and saw a large, domed object. Then a very tall man with high cheekbones and a one-piece suit walked up to him, and Steve felt an inexplicable fear and tried to hit him. His fist hit nothing, and he turned and ran as fast as he could. Back at home, the family dog barked and growled at him ‘as if I was someone else’.
Another dog, belonging to a family in Milford Haven, also in Dyfed, refused to sleep downstairs after several members of the family saw lights in the sky, and the seventeen-year-old daughter saw a three-foot-high humanoid standing on the windowsill and looking into her bedroom. Another family were startled when a red light filled the sky and their television went off. An hour later, the grandson arrived in a state of terror; he had also seen the red light in the sky, and a tall man in a silver suit had jumped out of the bushes and chased him.
Then came the strangest case of all: the events on Ripperston Farm.
The herdsman on Ripperston Farm was Billy Coombs, who lived with his wife, Pauline, and five children in a cottage overlooking St. Bride’s Bay near Haverfordwest. On 12 April 1977, Pauline Coombs was driving back to the farm after dark, with three of her children in the rear seat, when her ten-year-old son Keiron pointed at a luminous yellow object about the size of a football that was coming towards them, with a torchlike beam shining from its lower side. It passed overhead, then did a U-turn and followed them. Pauline Coombs accelerated to eighty miles an hour and flew between the high hedges, but her speed made no difference. As the football caught up with them, the headlights faded, and the engine cut out. She opened the door, grabbed her children, and ran the rest
of the way home. When she shouted that something was following them, her husband and teenage son ran out, to see the shining football vanishing over the sea. When Billy climbed into the car, it started immediately.
A few days later, making a cup of tea at 10:30 in the evening, Pauline Coombes saw another UFO from the kitchen window. This one was about twenty feet across, silvery in colour, and was standing on three legs. Then it took off towards the sea; when they looked at the spot, there was a circular burn mark.
On 22 April, television interference was very bad as the Coombeses watched a late-night film. Pauline Coombs noted a glow outside the kitchen window but paid little attention—there was another cottage next door. But, about an hour later, Billy Coombs looked at the window, and was electrified to see a face looking in. It belonged to a very tall man wearing a silver suit, with a kind of visor concealing most of his face.
Billy phoned the farm manager, then Randall Jones Pugh, then the police. But by the time they arrived there was no sign of the man in silver. But the eight-year-old twin girls saw the same figure three weeks later, as they were playing in the grass of a field, and the figure walked past, then apparently disappeared through a barbed-wire fence.
Now the aliens began playing tricks. The dairy herd—of a hundred cattle—began escaping from the yard at night and wandering. But it should have been impossible for the cows to escape: there was a massive gate, and Billy Coombs not only locked it, but wrapped wire round the catch. Yet the herd kept escaping—six times in all—going past the house so silently that no one was awakened, and turning up at Broadmoor Farm, run by the farm manager. On one occasion, the herd disappeared so soon after they had been locked in, and reappeared so soon at Broadmoor Farm, that Billy Coombs swore there was no time for them to escape and make their way there . . . But, whether or not they were ‘teleported’, the cattle were certainly traumatised, and their milk yield dropped.
This relocation of animals is by no means unknown. In 1967, in Chitterne, near Warminster (another UFO ‘hot spot’), a herd of cows vanished, and a night-long search failed to locate it; the next day they were back in their field.
And, in his account of Ripperston Farm in The Unexplained, Hilary Evans mentions an 1897 book called Haunted Houses by John Ingrams, which speaks of a farm at Birchen Bower, near Oldham in Lancashire, where a bizarre custom was observed. A former owner, terrified of being buried alive, left instructions in her will that her body should be embalmed and brought to the house every twenty-one years. Whenever this was done, the horses and cows would be found wandering. One cow was found up in the hay loft, although the entrance was too small for it, and blocks had to be borrowed to get it down. The Daily Mail of 18 May 1906 reported that a horse was found in the hay loft and a wall had to be knocked down to get it out.
Evans also reports a poltergeist case from Italy in April 1936, where fires kept breaking out in a farm in Prignano, near Salerno, and a pair of oxen were carried from one stall to another.
All this certainly suggests that the disturbances on Ripperston Farm were of the poltergeist type. And the earlier history of Pauline Coombs lends support to this. The Coombses had earlier lived in a caravan, and Pauline Coombs repeatedly saw the image of the Virgin, wearing a white dress, in the glass of the window. (Pauline had been brought up a Catholic.) It was life-size, appeared at 10:30 at night, and remained for half an hour. Sometimes it was transformed into an image of Jesus standing with outstretched arms. The local Roman Catholic priest came to see it, accompanied by the whole Sunday school, and declared that it was beautiful. A group of teddy boys came to jeer, and were reduced to amazed silence.
Billy Coombs told Ted Holiday and Randall Pugh that when the vision appeared, the latch of the wardrobe door would lift and the door would swing open.
When Pauline was in hospital having a baby, the farmer moved the family to a new caravan, and burnt the old one. As a nonconformist he may have felt that a caravan in which the Virgin had appeared had no place on his farm. Or perhaps he was simply afraid that the place might become a kind of Lourdes.
So it seemed Pauline Coombs was the focus of poltergeist effects and religious visions before UFO phenomena erupted around her.
In The Dyfed Enigma (1979—co-authored with Randall Jones Pugh), Ted Holiday concluded that ‘a force existed at Ripperston which was distinct from humans, but could use the potential of humans for ends which seemed purposeless and obscure’. And at the end of the book, he returns to the question of the ‘goblin universe’, and writes:
. . . the phenomena, whatever they are, exist externally in space. We assume, but we cannot by any means be sure, that they also exist in time as we know it. Nor do we know whether they objectively occupy space in any meaningful sense of the term. When the humanoid beings are perceived as occupying space, they appear to react in conformity to the laws governing perspective and optics. They give the appearance of being three-dimensional objects, although they are manifestly neither physically solid nor organic in any known sense of the word . . .
In other words, he has returned to the conclusions of The Goblin Universe, which means that the misgivings that made him suppress The Goblin Universe were not, after all, as important as he thought when he saw the underwater photographs of the Loch Ness monster and suspected that it might prove to be as unmysterious as a hippopotamus.
Now all this, admittedly, sounds slightly insane. We seem to have left the baffling but straightforward world of UFOs for a world that seems to make no sense at all. What have lake monsters, black dogs and the great god Pan to do with flying saucers?
What Ted Holiday is suggesting is that the UFO problem cannot be solved in isolation. Those early attempts to explain it in terms of invaders from Mars or visitors from Sirius all collapsed as it became clear that the phenomenon is too rich and complex to be explained in such practical terms. As Vallee pointed out, it seems to enjoy defying every category we devise for it.
The investigator who has come closest to creating a plausible general theory is the New Yorker John Keel, the man who told Ted Holiday about the UFO sighting of Jan-Ove Sundberg above Loch Ness. The phenomenon has led Keel the same kind of dance it led Vallee. But he did not approach it from the same angle as Vallee. Keel was not a scientist, but a writer with an irresistible attraction to the unknown.
John Keel’s father was a bandleader and crooner who lived in Hornell, New York; when his band went out of business in the Great Depression, John—born in 1930—went to live with his grandparents. His childhood hero was Houdini, and from the beginning he was fascinated by magic. He delighted his schoolfellows with simple conjuring tricks. When he was ten, he went to rejoin his mother, now divorced and remarried, on a remote farm, where entertainment was minimal. There he lay in the hayloft, reading books on magic, hypnotism, ventriloquism, and the Black Arts, and daydreamed of travel to Egypt and the Himalayas.
When he was eleven or twelve, he experienced his own personal poltergeist. He used to sleep in a room at the top of the house, and, when he heard knocking sounds on the wooden wall close to his head, he at first assumed they were due to squirrels. But he found that, if he rapped back, the knockings imitated his rapping. Then he discovered that he could ask simple questions—by speaking them aloud—and receive the correct answer in knocks. Intrigued, he went to the local library and explored the section on ghosts and the paranormal. But his invisible companion seemed to resent this research—or perhaps the phenomena had run their course anyway—for the knocks stopped about six months after they had started.
He was fourteen when he first saw his name in print over a humourous column in the local newspaper, for which he was paid two dollars a week. At fifteen, he sold his first article for five dollars. With an enormous appetite for knowledge, he spent all his days in the local library, and taught himself electronics, radio, chemistry, physics, aviation and a dozen other subjects, almost as if he was unconsciously training himself to work on the UFO problem.
At seventeen, he
hitchhiked the four hundred miles to New York, and found lodgings in Greenwich Village. There he made a scanty living writing articles with titles like ‘Are You a Repressed Sex Fiend?’ He was—and is—a natural writer, apparently incapable of writing a dull sentence.
Then the Korean War broke out, and he was drafted—fortunately, not to Korea, but to Frankfurt, where he worked for American Forces radio. And there suddenly he achieved his first major success, with a Hallowe’en broadcast from Castle Frankenstein, where a monster was actually killed by Baron Frankenstein in the thirteenth century. The programme had much the same effect as Orson Welles’s famous Martian Invasion broadcast of October 1938. Three announcers were told that the monster returned every hundred years on Hallowe’en in search of his slayer, and were sent off in the dark to intercept it; some of their genuine terror (particularly when a fake monster came striding out of the night) conveyed itself to the listeners, and people all down the Rhine double-bolted their doors, while a convoy of military police with drawn guns converged on Castle Frankenstein.
The result was that Keel was offered a civilian job after his national service was finished, and was allowed to do what he had always dreamt of doing: roam around freely, making programmes—Paris, Berlin, Rome, and eventually Egypt, where he made a Hallowe’en broadcast from the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.
Again, it was successful, and Keel’s taste of the Middle East awoke his old hunger to travel the world in search of mystery. In 1954, when he was twenty-four years old, he resigned from his radio job, drew his savings out of the bank, and went back to Cairo. He had decided to support himself by writing articles about the magic of the East.
The story of the next four years is told in Jadoo (a Hindu word meaning magic), one of the funniest and most fascinating travel books ever written. As a conjuror, Keel wanted to know the secret of some of the most famous magic tricks of the East, such as driving hatpins through the tongue and cheeks, or chopping off a pigeon’s head and then restoring it. He was later to discover that he could drive hatpins through his own cheeks without much inconvenience—the needle hurts momentarily as it goes in, but otherwise there is no pain. The pigeon trick was done by sleight of hand—the pigeon’s head is tucked under its wing, making it look decapitated, while the magician flourishes the head of another pigeon. Walking on water, Keel discovered, is accomplished by stretching a rope just under the muddy surface. As to the Indian rope trick, he was informed that it has to be performed at dusk, when poor light prevents the audience from seeing the fine wire, on to which the rope is hooked, stretched overhead.