from North Berks Herald,
November 17th 1966.
Reprint in Flying Saucer Review Vol.13-6:
The flying object which two people - one of them the Clerk of Wallingford R.D.C. - claim to have seen last week remains unexplained. They claim to have spotted it between 11 a.m. and 11.30 a.m. last Thursday near Wittenham Clumps.
Mr.L.Bullen, Clerk of the Council, and Alfred Carpenter, a Didcot photographer,
were near the Clumps taking photographs to illustrate the cover of the council's
official guide.
"Mr.Carpenter first drew my attention to the thing in the sky,"
said Mr.Bullen. "I thought initially it was an Argosy aeroplane from
Benson. It was high up, and partly obscured by clouds. It moved to the right,
but then appeared to move back again. It kept disappearing behind the clouds.
Mr.Bullen said it was difficult to describe, but it looked as though "It had legs dangling from the outside edge - like an octopus. It was rather long."
Mr.Bullen said the object had a long plume trailing behind it "rather like the jet stream from an aircraft taking off at London Airport." he said it was not possible to estimate how far away the object was "and I don't know whether we saw the whole of it."
Although there were high clouds, Mr.Bullen said the visibility was very clear at the time.
Mr.Carpenter said the object looked like "A flock of birds wheeling round" when he first spotted it.
"It came out of the clouds and then appeared to be solid. I had seen Argosy aircraft flying around from Benson but this object was on a different course, it looked like a Portugeuse Man O'War with tentacles and the strange thing about it was that it went backwards as well as forwards."
Portuguese man-of-war
Physalia physalis
When they returned from Didcot, he studied an Ordnance Survey map, and estimated that the object was probably flying near Nuneham Courtenay or Sandford when they saw it.
"It was visible to us for about a minute, before it disappeared completely behind the clouds," Mr.Carpenter added.
