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Several hundred years ago, an aged resident of Clapham reported that she had seen a “bright round shape like the full Moon” float down into the woods and disappear into the bushes. The woods were “filled with fumes that stinketh of burning matter” and the people of the town were afraid to go there afterwards. Since that time, there have been many more UFO sightings in this Ww small area. In October 1972, a telephone engineer saw a large saucer shaped object in the sky above the woods. It hovered for some time before making a circle of the area, then veered off. At the same time, a couple were walking near the main road and thought they saw Jupiter or Venus low in the western sky - until it started to move very quickly due north, keeping in line with a ridge as it came toward them. Suddenly, when the object was over Clapham Wood, a beam of light descended vertically from it, and then rapidly withdrew, and the object shot away north-eastward at great speed. Paul Glover of the British Phenomenon Research Group was walking along the downs toward Clapham Wood one clear starlit night in the summer of 1967. At about 10 p.m., both men suddenly became aware of a huge black mass low in the sky blotting out the stars as it moved very quickly toward them. The object was boomerang shaped and made no sound. As it passed overhead the displacement of air was so great they ducked into the bushes for safety. They vehemently denied it could have been a cloud, for it retained its shape, was on a definite course, and there was no wind to drive it. Minutes later, they saw two bright objects high in the sky, which they watched for several minutes. One of the UFOs released a smaller object that traveled a) ee ee ae) a aa alla across to the second object, seemed to enter it, and then re-emerged and veered off, disappearing from sight. An hour later, on their return in the opposite direction of their walk, [apparently] two yellow lights descended in the region of the woods, followed just a few seconds later by two more, and then a final pair, making a total or three groups of two. Then at the point where they seemed to have dipped down into the woods, two white beams of light shot out horizontally - quite unimpeded by the contours of the downlands - followed by the next two beams and then the final two, all traveling very fast, before disappearing into the night sky. No craft of any kind could be seen behind the lights. During that same year, in the village of Rustington a few miles westwards along the coast, two schoolboys, Toyne Newton and John Amold, who had never even heard of Clapham Wood, had a strange story spelled out to them ON A OUIJA BOARD: that Clapham Wood was a base for spacecraft, and that one had landed recently to fetch supplies of sulphur and other chemicals. No one believed the boys, of course, but nearly 10 years later an investigation was carried out when soil samples were taken from the woods. From the report given in BBC-TV’s Nationwide program at the time, it seems there was more than a grain of truth to the sulphur story. The investigation had been triggered by reports of dogs disappearing in the woods in 1975. 83 High Strangeness — Part One