Flying Saucers Beside the Seaside: The Morecambe UFO Wave of 1957
The mysterious visitors had travelled a long way for their holiday in Morecambe. Their glowing silver vehicles had voyaged much further than the usual grubby trains that chugged into town carrying trippers from Bradford, Glasgow and other industrial towns. Their flying visits to the seaside were very brief – over in the blink of an eye, in fact – but the visitors were clearly impressed by the so-called Naples of the North; throughout the 1950s, they came back again and again, and again…
This was the Morecambe UFO wave of 1956-1957, when scores of witnesses saw strange craft soaring across the seaside skies. They came in daylight and after dark; they appeared above the young and the old, the scared and the awed. But WHY did they come? Why were fleets of unidentified aircraft drawn repeatedly to a small Lancashire seaside resort, more famed for its potted shrimps than for intergalactic plots? Were the ‘aliens’ merely in need of a mini-break by the sea? Were they really aliens at all? Was there a natural explanation for Morecambe’s mid-century aerial mysteries, or were darker, atomic forces at work?
Let’s fasten our UFO seatbelts and set our engines to Warp Factor 10: we’re off to the 1950s.
Intergalactic Vegetables: October 12th 1956
Autumn might be harvest time and associated with vegetables, but the last thing a bewildered Morecambe man expected to see soaring across the night sky in October 1956 was a ‘giant flaming onion’. Mr. D. V. Garden was sufficiently troubled by his sighting to report it to the local press, writing the following story for the Morecambe Guardian:
While in Morecambe on Saturday night, I saw a curious phenomenon in the sky, moving in a S/S.E direction. At first sight it looked like a giant flaming onion, travelling earthwards at an angle of roughly 25/30 degrees. My brother was with me: I drew his attention to it, but we could hear no sound. It was far too big for an ordinary firework, and not fast enough for a meteor. My own conclusion is that it may have been either a big test rocket, or a key aircraft diving to earth – I have seen no reports of any such incident. We both noted the time of this occurrence: 7.20pm.
Just like an actual onion, this report has many layers to unpeel. Firstly, let’s examine the form of the craft itself. We can safely assume that what Mr. Garden saw was not an actual onion hurtling through the sky. (It’s possible, of course, that an angry allotment holder, dismayed at the poor showing of his vegetable harvest took to hurling his underdeveloped onions away in an angry rage. Possible, but highly unlikely). Taken more literally, an onion shape correlates closely to celestial occurrences such as a comet or meteor: glowing, bulbous at one end with a root-like tail at the other. However, Mr. Garden stated that his craft ‘was not fast enough for a meteor’, and he most likely was correct: no meteor showers were active over Morecambe in October 1956 (in-the-sky.org).
If we can discount angry allotmenteers and meteors, we’re left with two possible explanations for the sighting: firstly, Mr. Garden’s suggestion of a test jet aircraft, or secondly, a genuine UFO. It’s thought that many UFO sightings during the early Cold War were in fact glimpses of covert military aircraft – the silver glint of a U2 spy plane high above the US, for instance – so it is certainly feasible that Mr Garden and his brother could unwittingly have borne witness to a secret flight that unassuming Saturday. The local newspapers in 1956 did not mention any RAF or military aeronautical activities taking place over Morecambe, although they were hardly likely to have splattered their top-secret reports across the front pages for all the world to see!
Having peeled back the outer layer of the ‘giant flaming onion’, we arrive at the big juicy core which will really make your eyes water. It transpires that onion-shaped flying objects have been reported zooming across the heavens since time immemorial. Often associated with biblical stories and celestial beings, many stories tell of flaming bulbous craft which carried angels to their heavenly destinations. While not explicitly being labelled as onions, the shapes described are undeniably akin to the mystery object seen above Morecambe in 1956.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence to back a supernatural, or even extraterrestrial origin for the Morecambe UFO can be found in a beautiful medieval painting, The Crucifixion of Christ (Kosovo, 1350). As the crucifixion of Jesus Christ takes place on the earth below, the sky above is filled with observing angels. Their modes of transport? Flaming, onion-shaped orbs.
Flying Saucers and Fish and Chips: January 1957
Fish and chips are traditionally served wrapped in newspaper, but the last thing Mrs. W. Thompson of Westminster Road, Morecambe expected when she nipped to the chippy one Saturday night was to appear in the newspaper. Speaking to the Morecambe Visitor, Mrs. Thompson relayed that on the 5th January, she had ‘slipped out for a walk with the dog’ and decided to ‘call for fish and chips at Bloomfield’s’, a popular takeaway on Sefton Road. Upon leaving the shop with her mushy peas and scraps, she found her ‘eyes positively dazzled by several large discs’ moving across the sky ‘with terrific speed’. Each ‘ball of light had a terrific beam of light coming from it and pointing downwards’, Mrs. Thompson said, adding that the discs were ‘much lower in the sky than [she] would have liked’. Mrs. Thompson found that she was alone in seeing the spectacle: ‘there wasn’t a soul in sight, and after wondering whether to go back into the shop and tell them, I decided I might not be believed and so went home’.
Mrs. Thompson needn’t have fretted about being believed. Across town, at the exact same time, other people were witnessing the same phenomena…
- In nearby Carleton Street, Mr and Mrs. D, Cairns ‘were out for a Saturday evening stroll’ — translation: going to the pub — when they ‘saw what appeared to be a very bright and large star. At a second look, they noticed a long orange-yellow beam which moved across the sky in a south-east direction’. The Morecambe Visitor drew particular attention to Mr. Cairns’ career as a research chemist about to be called up for National Service, clearly insinuating that a man with a scientific brain and military aptitude made for a credible witness.
- Five minutes away in Balmoral Road, Margaret Prescott and her sisters were walking to a party when ‘they saw a bright star with rays coming from it’. As they watched, the object moved to the south and then quickly disappeared. Said Miss Prescott: ‘My sisters and I thought it could have been the Star of Bethlehem.’
- Over in Bold Street, Mr. E. Thistlethwaite was stargazing in his back yard when he ‘saw a brilliant light from the north moving in a southerly direction. It was moving straight and there was a powerful beam penetrating the clouds and a glowing light surrounding the object.’ Worried that he was ‘going crackers’, Mr. Thistlethwaite called his wife out to see the mysterious flying object. Confirming that her husband wasn’t going round the twist, Mrs. Thistlethwaite endorsed that ‘there was a very brilliant light from the object.’ The couple spent about four minutes in the back yard watching the UFO in flight, then dashed around to the front of the house to watch it carry on its south-easterly journey.
There are several striking consistencies across all these reports: the beam of light emanating from the back or underside of the object, its glowing brightness, speed and silence, and its south-east direction of travel.
The simplest solution to the mystery would be to identify the UFO as a meteor. Consistent to this theory, at the time of the sightings, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower was visible over the Morecambe area, with the peak of visible meteors around 3rd to the 5th of January 1957. Huzzah, mystery solved! Or maybe not. According to in-the-sky.org, the meteor shower culminated at around 9.00am GMT, with the best displays being produced ‘shortly before dawn’, rather than the 7pm window in which the sightings occurred. Moreover, earth’s rotation in January 1957 ‘turned Morecambe to face optimally towards the direction of the incoming meteors, maximising the number that rained downwards, producing short trails’. The meteor trails would therefore have appeared to emanate from the top of the flaming balls of light, rather than beneath as observed by witnesses. What’s more, the meteors rained downwards, rather than hurtling across the sky in a consistent south-east course.
Could it be that the UFO’s direction of travel is the key to unlocking its true origin and purpose? As described by witnesses across 1956 and 1957, the ‘weird light’ always came into view flying from the north west, before altering its trajectory and disappearing over the southeast horizon. If we suppose that the UFO was an alien craft, we have to question what landmarks along that route would have sufficiently interested little green men to prompt them to undertake an intergalactic roadtrip? The solution may be found in the cause of the Cold War itself: the atomic bomb.
Since the earliest days of nuclear technology, sightings of unidentified flying objects have abounded around atomic sites. As Roy Bainton states in his book The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena: ‘The sudden global emergence of the UFO, coinciding as it did with the advent of the atomic bomb in the mid-1940s, is generally regarded by ufologists as an indication of the interest shown in our planet by benevolent (or otherwise) races from across the universe. [It seems that] once we earthlings developed the worrying ability to blow ourselves to kingdom come, the “space brothers” decided to monitor us more closely.’
It seems natural, then, that north-west England would have been of particular interest to intergalactic nuclear tourists, being, as the 1980’s exposé Target North West confirmed, ‘Britain’s main centre of nuclear activity’. In 1956, the region was home to many sites which were ‘vital parts of the nuclear cycles in Britain, Europe and even the USA, both for providing reactor fuel and nuclear bomb material.’ To the north-west of Morecambe in Cumbria lurked the Windscale nuclear reactor plant, built to produce plutonium for atomic bomb cores. To the south, Springfields Nuclear Fuel Productions in Preston and Culcheth Laboratories nuclear research institute in Warrington carried out studies instrumental to the production of nuclear arsenals. Meanwhile, down the road in the village of Capenhurst, Cheshire, Uranium was busily being enriched for use in apocalyptic weapons. If we join up all of these locations on a map – a kind of nuclear dot-to-dot – we find that we are looking at an exact reproduction of the 1957 Morecambe UFO’s flight path.
Is it possible that Morecambe was an unwitting pitstop on an alien atomic monitoring highway, or were the town residents merely hallucinating, swept along on a wave of Cold War hysteria? We may never know for certain. What is for certain, however, is that as the Cold War progressed, the Morecambe area was to play an ever increasing role in nuclear affairs. As atomic power in the area boomed over the coming decades, so too did UFO sightings. Things were set to become even stranger beside the seaside…
Coming soon to Atomic Target Lancashire: A new nuclear power station arrives in Morecambe, a UFO is caught on camera and an alien visitor is seen strolling on the promenade. It’s the 1960s and 70s… Groovy!
Rebecca Shaw
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