Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753547243
Publisher: Virgin Books

7 ‘Oh no, not again!’

We have already encountered Harold Wilkins, as the author of one of the best of the early books on flying saucers. But in Mysteries Solved and Unsolved (1959) he recounts a tale that he certainly felt had no connection with flying saucers.

One day in the summer of 1906, three children went into a field known as Forty Acres, a mile outside Gloucester, and disappeared. They were a boy, age ten, and two girls, age five and three, the children of ‘a rather uncouth railway guard, or brakeman, named Vaughan’. Harold Wilkins joined in the search. ‘We paid particular attention to the north-east corner of the field, where the pasture was bordered by tall, old elms, a thick hedge of thorn and bramble, and a deep ditch, separating it from a corn-field. Every inch was probed with sticks, and not a stone left unturned in the ditch. Had a dead dog been dumped there, he would certainly have been found.’

The case was reported in the national press, and the Vaughan family received many postal orders from sympathetic readers. But, when the vicar called to express commiseration, he was turned away with the comment that Vaughan ‘didn’t want no bloody parsons rapping at his door’.

Four days later, at six in the morning, a ploughman going to work in the cornfield looked over the hedge, and saw the three children asleep in the ditch. The children simply had no idea of where they had been for three days and nights.

The ploughman was denied any share of the reward on the grounds that he had probably kidnapped the children to claim it – which was absurd, since the reward was not offered until after they had vanished. Besides, he lived in a small cottage in a tiny hamlet, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, so it was impossible.

The missing boy was still alive after World War Two, and verified that he did not have the slightest idea of what happened from the time they went into the field to when they woke up four days later. This, Wilkins comments, is ‘characteristic of the amnesia which marks these phenomena’.

Vallee would undoubtedly point out that the case bears an obvious resemblance to cases of abduction by fairies, as well as to the engineering student described in the Introduction to The Invisible College, who was taken on board a UFO and spent some hours connected to a ‘teaching machine’ – then returned to find he had been absent for eighteen days.

We also note its resemblance to the herd of cows that vanished and reappeared near Warminster in 1967. And John Mack would certainly point out its similarity to modern abduction cases. For example, one evening in 1943, as a normal American family was having dinner, the father – a violin teacher – stood up and said, ‘I’m going to get a pack of cigarettes.’ His family stared in astonishment – he was a nonsmoker. But he had been odd for some time, suffering strange lapses of memory.

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