Making Friends

Arthur Shuttlewood. Warnings from Flying Friends. Portway Press, Warminster, 1968.
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“UFOs not Bourgeois Journalist Fabrications”, “Young Drug-Takers Groped and Grovelled”, “Earth Time is Desperately Short – Warning”, “Anatomy of a Holocaust — and Dying Fishes” These are some of the exciting chapter headings in the second UFO book to come from the inimitable pen of Mr Arthur Shuttlewood.

The book contains photographs of UFOs and poems by Pauline Roberts and Veronica Cadby. The author writes in his foreword: “We hope you will like the poetry and not consider it totally irrelevant.”

I suppose that this work falls into the category which the more esoteric ufologists call “New-Age” literature. Much of the book is devoted to recording the views of various people who have communicated with Mr Shuttlewood since he became well known for his investigations of the Warminster “Thing,” It seems that most of these people are sincerely convinced that the world as we know it is likely to come to an end in the near future and this event will be followed by the dawning of a new “Golden Age” of spiritual enlightenment and enhanced awareness of man’s relationship with the universe.

This is the general sort of idea behind most of the messages quoted but they are, inevitably, heavily embroidered with pseudo-scientific speculations, apocalyptic visions and vague verbiage.

Although most of the visionaries appear to be basically sincere, it is obvious that some of them, apparently lacking a sense of humour, fall easy victims to the leg-pullers. One of these elaborate jokes is quoted in detail and Mr Shuttlewood gently indicates, to the perceptive reader, that he appreciates the jest — I think. I must point out here that we will probably get letters from his more obtuse readers earnestly requesting further details. It seems that Mr Shuttlewood was approached by “a charming Norfolk man with honest blue eyes, humble approach, disarming candour and integrity, sparking his personality.”

This gentleman reported that a philological expert to whom he sent a tape of the Venusian language and a sample of Venusian script went into raptures over them.



The philological expert came to some hilarious conclusions such as: “Sound production is diphasic: this means that the two lungs are acutely out of phase with one another, thus enabling the creature to speak for a long time without taking breath … The script: this is quite uncharacteristic of anything found on earth except possibly the Sacred Boggah Script of the Abluti Indians of Paraguay,..” and “From an application of Reinmann Phoneme analysis techniques — first stage, naturally — it can be concluded with fair certainty that the creatures in question possess a large hand, possibly with all thumbs…” I feel sure that many of us know beings who have these characteristics and whose terrestrial origin is not in doubt.

I was agog to read Mr Shuttlewood’ s version of the memorable events of May 27th and 28th, 1967 at Warminster, in view of the fact that Alan Sharp and I were there at the time and had published our version of that weekend ('Report on a Visit to Warminster', by John Harney and Alan W. Sharp, Flying Saucer Review Vol.3, No.5}. Disappointingly, he only mentions in passing the controversial skywatch of the night of May 27th-28th, when we saw lightning and he saw the ‘Thing’. He goes into considerable detail, though, about the visit of the ‘Aenstrian’ to his home on the afternoon of May 28th. He was in a bad mood just before: the Aenstrian’s visit and this was due to lack of sleep and the fact that: “With Bob and Sybil, I shared weariness of libellous comment over the integrity of our team and Warminster witnesses that had gained unmerited headlines in ill-informed magazines published by a certain group of ‘armchair’ ufologists begrudging our experience.”

The magazine referred to is possibly MUFORG Bulletin, of which I was editor, in which we had published a rather critical review of Mr Shuttlewood’s lecture on the Warminster phenomena delivered at the 1966 BUFORA Northern Conference in Bradford. We learned indirectly, that Mr Shuttlewood was very annoyed about the article in question, even though the Bulletin had only a very small circulation.

From the depths of my armchair I recommend this book to all connoisseurs of the Warminster phenomena. -- John Harney.


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