At about 9pm on Wednesday, 5 September 1956, Richard Lappin reluctantly left his comfy armchair to investigate why his dog was disturbing the peace.
Lappin, who had served in the Anti-Aircraft Command during World War II, lived opposite the main entrance to Parliament Buildings, better known as Stormont, the current home of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
When he got outside, he saw an “irregularly shaped object moving in the misty sky overhead.”
He watched it for a while. At times the object moved with great speed – and at other times it just seemed to hang in the sky. Lappin was unable to gauge its size or height.
He alerted his wife and his neighbours, the Browns, and they took turns to watch the object. During their vigil, the object changed colour, “from a shadowy black to a reddish colour.”
But after two hours of close observation, the Lappins and the Browns still didn’t know what it was they were looking at. So, they contacted RAF Aldergrove to see if they could help identify the object.
According to an officer at the base, a weather balloon had been released from RAF Aldergrove about an hour before Richard’s initial sighting; but the wind would have taken the balloon westwards – and nowhere near Stormont.
Lappin et al watched the object until 11:30pm.
In the days that followed, several theories were suggested. One was that there hadn’t been an object in the sky that night – that what Lappins and the Browns had seen was the lights of the city reflected on low-lying clouds. Another was that effect had been created by the red warning lights on the radar masts in nearby Dundonald.
Lappin himself suggested that the object was perhaps “a toy balloon of considerable diametre, tethered somewhere near at hand.” And lets not rule out the possibility of it being a craft from another world.
But no one was able to say – definitively – what the object was.
If only someone had been able to get a closer look.
2
At 12:30pm on Friday, 7 September 1956, Thomas and Maud Hutchinson were sitting at home when they saw an object fall out of the sky and land in a boggy field, about 200 yards from their house, in the townland of Ballyneil Beg, near Moneymore, in County Derry.
They ran outside and made their way towards the object. It remained motionless as they slowly approached.
The object was egg-shaped and pointed at both ends. It was 3 feet high and had a diametre of 1.5 feet at its centre. It was light red in colour with dark red marks at each end and three dark red stripes. It appeared to be made of a canvas material. And it stood on a saucer-shaped base.
Thomas had never seen anything like it before. And despite its size, he believed someone might be inside. So, he stood and looked at the object for some time before getting too close. It continued to remain motionless.
Assured that no one was going to emerge from the object, Thomas kicked it over. It immediately sprang back to its original position.
Intrigued, Thomas picked the object up by its base for a closer look. It began to spin, faster and faster, and then it began to rise.
Thomas held it tighter – and began carrying it home, with the intention of bringing it to the police. “The police station was the only place for such a wicked looking thing as this and I started to carry it there,” he said.
“The police station was the only place for such a wicked looking thing as this and I started to carry it there.”
The object was incredibly light, and Thomas had no problems carrying it across the field. His main difficulty was his wife, Maud. Fearing that the object could explode at any moment, Maud walked alongside him, continually screaming at him to put it down.
Unfortunately, Thomas did put the object down as he attempted to get through a hedge. Seizing its chance, the object “rose up like a helicopter, and with a whirring noise.”
“Then all of a sudden the monster rose and it nearly pulled my husband off his feet when he tried to hold it,” Maud recalled with horror. “I started to panic and then I ran home and prayed.” The object disappeared in a matter of seconds.
Maud was glad to see it go.
3
When the news broke about the Hutchinsons’ strange encounter, Richard Lappin came forward to say that the object that had landed in Ballyneil Beg was the same as the one he’d seen over Stormont.
“It is strange that Mr Hutchinson, without having any connection with us, has a very good description of what we saw,” said Lappin at the time.
So, what did the Hutchinsons see that day? Was it a craft from another world? Another time? Another dimension, even?
A “high ranking officer” at RAF Aldergrove was “nearly certain” it was just a weather balloon. “These balloons are almost identical with the shape of the object that Hutchinson saw,” he said. “It could have dropped to the earth when it encountered some change in the air currents. And it could have gone up again.”
The weatherman at RAF Aldergrove also chipped in: “A balloon may get wet and be pressed down to the ground by the weight of water. It may lose sufficient water there to enable it to take off again, and moving it would help.”
But there was some uncertainty about this conclusion. Other RAF bases and meteorological stations had been contacted. No one could definitively identify the object – and no one was claiming ownership of it.
“Thomas Hutchinson is a level-headed, God-fearing chap. He’s not the sort of man who would imagine he seized a flying saucer if, in fact, he didn’t have one.”
And weather balloons were not an unknown quantity. They were frequently found by farmers on their land. And they usually came with a card attached, notifying the finder of a reward for returning the balloon to the station responsible for launching it.
Despite this, the official position of both the RAF and the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabularly – Northern Ireland’s police force at the time) was that the Hutchinsons had encountered a weather balloon.
The only dissenting voice appeared to be that of the desk sergeant at their local RUC station. “Thomas Hutchinson is a level-headed, God-fearing chap,” he exclaimed. “He’s not the sort of man who would imagine he seized a flying saucer if, in fact, he didn’t have one.”
But the desk sergeant wasn’t their only ally.
4
“I spent some time with him and I gained information missed by the reporters who, I believe, rather confused him.”
Desmond Leslie had been a Spitfire pilot during World War II. And in the years that followed the war, he made a name for himself as a film maker and as an electronic music pioneer.
He was also a writer. And in 1953, Leslie had co-authored the book Flying Saucers Have Landed with George Adamski. We met Adamski in The Portglenone Incident: he was the man who claimed to be in regular contact with the flying saucer pilots, and had been on a day trip to Venus with one of them. The book caused quite a stir.
Anyway, Leslie had been in Ireland at the time of the incident in Ballyneil Beg, and he followed the news with interest – and some despair. He felt that the journalists had done a poor job of getting the details of the encounter from the Hutchinsons. And that important information had possibly been missed.
So, he travelled to Ballyneil Beg to interview the Hutchinsons himself.
And for the most part, it was a very fruitful journey. For starters, Leslie was able to elicit a more detailed description of the device from Thomas. In an article for the journal Flying Saucer Review he writes: “It was roughly an elongated, pointed sphere, about three feet six on its major diametre, two feet on its minor diametre, red in colour and rubbery in appearance.
“There was a small red knob or point on top, and the bottom was gathered rather like the neck of a bag, but more regular. Round the middle were four thinnish, white stripes which he said weren’t ‘regular’. I finally learned what he meant was that the colours blended gradually as if put on with a spray brush, so that the transition from red to white occupied about an inch of the surface. Apart from that, the stripes were regular and uniform all the way round.”
Given that Thomas had picked the object up, Leslie was interested in Hutchinson’s impressions of the object as he had held it in his hands. Hutchinson said he had held the object by its “gathered” base. “The feeling he told me was like canvas outside and slippery rubber inside.”
Leslie also uncovered an interesting detail about the objects movements when Thomas had picked it up. “He was not quite sure, but he thinks it spun a few times anti-clockwise, then reversed and began spinning the other way.”
And something else very interesting had happened as the object escaped. According to Thomas: “It went straight up and very fast and as it rose those white stripes, the ones on the side I told you of, seemed to go like bright silver. As though the sun was shining on it. I thought for a moment it was sun reflecting on them.”
Already, the weather balloon theory was beginning to seem less plausible. But Leslie gathered some more details – details that hadn’t been reported elsewhere – that seemed to rule it out completely.
According to the scenario suggested by the authorities, the Hutchinsons had encountered a weather balloon that had become so waterlogged that it had been “pressed to the ground by the weight of the water” and had taken off again when it had lost some of that water.
But according to Thomas, it rained non-stop that day – before, during and after the encounter. “It never stopped one moment that day,” said Thomas. “It was one of the worst rains I’ve known, and it never stopped at all.”
Another suggestion by the authorities was that a piece of meteorological equipment had become dislodged from the balloon after it landed. Freed of this load, the balloon was able to take off again.
However, Hutchinson told Leslie that the police had considered this scenario and had carried out an extensive search of the area around the landing site. Nothing had been found.
Leslie’s efforts had all but ruled out the possibility of the object being a weather balloon. But did it bring us any closer to knowing what the object actually was?
No.
“Hutchinson struck me as an amiable honest fellow,” wrote Leslie. “He found it hard to describe, but he did his best. He was definitely not inventing anything. He merely told me, as best he could, all he could recall about the strange whirling object he’s held in his hands between twelve and a quarter-past midday on Friday, September 7, 1956.”
“But if only he hadn’t let go of it to get through that hedge!”
5
But the story wasn’t quite finished.
The Hutchinsons’ strange encounter had been reported widely in the press, both at home – and abroad. And a few weeks after their strange encounter, Thomas received a letter from a man called Paul F Doering, from Massachusetts, in the United States.
“Last month I vacationed on the east coast of Maine, a State on the Eastern seaboard of the U.S.A. The weather on 10th August was extremely nice, so, early in the evening I decided to stroll along the shore, taking my camera with me …”
“I had not gone far when my attention was attracted by a red glow beyond a formation of stone. I approached it carefully, not knowing what I would find. I was quite suspicious, because I heard no voices. As I got closer I was amazed to see an egg-shaped object resting on a small stretch of sand. I watched it for some time before I remembered that I had my camera with me. Because the sun was setting, I was forced to use a flashbulb to illuminate the scene. The flash, so bright in the dark of the evening, temporarily blinded me. When in a few seconds I could see clearly again, the object had disappeared. I still do not know whether it vanished or simply flew away.”
“I advanced to the spot and found a saucer-like depression where the object had been. I took another picture, but the depression was not great enough to be caught by the camera.” Doering enclosed a drawing of the object he had seen. According to Thomas Hutchinson – apart from the indentations depicted in Doering’s drawing – it was the same object he had encountered.
6
What exactly landed in Ballyneil Beg that day is still a mystery. And it’s a mystery that will probably never be satisfactorily solved.
Yes – it was probably just a weather balloon that was behaving strangely due to particularly adverse weather conditions. And if Thomas Hutchinson had managed to get it to the police station, someone would have quickly identified it as such.
But what if it wasn’t a weather balloon? What if it truly was a strange device from another time or another world? And what if its arrival here wasn’t an accident? What was its purpose? Did it return home – or is it still here?
How different might our world be today if Thomas Hutchinson hadn’t let it go?
IOW
Recommended Reading
If you enjoyed this post and would like to know more, you might enjoy the following book:
The Roswell Incident – by Charles Berlitz and William Moore
On 8 July 1947, Lieutenant Walter Haut – the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field – announced that a flying saucer had been found on a ranch near Roswell and was now in the possession of the US Army Air Force. Coming so soon after Kenneth Arnold’s encounter with the saucers, this news caused great excitement around the world. But just a few hours after Haut’s announcement – the US Army Air Force issued a statement to say that it wasn’t a flying saucer – it was just a high altitude weather balloon. The Roswell flying saucer was immediately forgotten about. Then, in 1980, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore was published – and gave birth to the Roswell story. There have been many, many books written about Roswell in the last 45 years – many of them better than this one – but you really should start here.