Arthur Shuttlewood, in one of his books – Warnings From Flying Friends – Flying Saucer Revelations, published by Portway Press in 1968, noted:
It was on Boxing Day of 1967, when farm worker Michael Coleman set off to feed a herd of cows on the hill overlooking Heytesbury, three miles from Warminster, that another example of the bizarre and unworldly sounds erupted without warning, scaring the beasts of the field as well as causing the phlegmatic employee concern.
He had distributed the food to the cattle and, turning his tractor round to face the wind and rain so that his seat would not get too wet, he dismounted from the machine and started to count the animals. Immediately his feet touched the earth, however, he heard a tremendous clatter of noise that shook the sides of the hill and almost made his topple off balance.
It was so unexpected and savage that he clung to the side of his tractor until it subsided. The weird buffeting of soundwaves he termed ‘much like giant hands shaking loads of galvanized sheeting all around. The cattle fled from their piles of food with feet flying and tails in the air. They were terrified.’
Michael pointed out that it was a rarity for cows to run from food, especially in bad weather. After the thunderclaps of noise abated, they were still reluctant to return, taking ten minutes or more to settle back to former equanimity and content.
‘It was funny, though,’ he told me sombrely. ‘Some cattle in the next field, no more than a couple of hundred yards from us, never even flinched.’ This surprised him considerably. They chewed the cud quite happily, unconcerned at blasting sounds nearby. Why?
Perhaps this was an earth tremor, I suggested, but Mr. Coleman was insistent that – although its effects made the ground tremble at its height – the loud sounds originated in the atmosphere. ‘It made my head and ears sing, it was so fierce,’ he told me. The geography of the hill fields supplied the answer.
The sounds were localized in one section; the adjoining field was around a curving slope of the hill. Mr. Coleman then recalled another unaccountable incident back in December of 1961, when he worked for farmer Harry Wales [Henry Wales]. [Quebec Farm]. The employees erected a new fence, digging in sleepers three feet into the ground to act as strainers.
Going to the field the next morning, they found that all the cattle had strayed from their pasture during night hours. The fence had been violently uprooted, the sleepers torn out and littering the area in jumbled confusion. Yet not one of the beasts was hurt and there were no tracks of any vehicle visible around the soil disturbance mounds.
In February of 1962, working for his present boss, Stanley B. Pottow [East Farm, Knook], by the same field only over the boundary, Michael found that a similar phenomenon had again struck one night. The employer thought the fence had been smashed by the impact of a vehicle driving through it.
No tracks of any transport were discovered, however; and no cattle were anywhere near the scene of devastation, so their footprints could not have obscured wheel marks. The tractor driver from Knook thought no more of these incidents, apart from their constituting unsolved minor mysteries, until he read a newspaper report that Geoffrey Gale, of Parsonage Farm (near Cradle Hill at Warminster) had suffered fencing damage in January and February of 1966.
An account of the latter appeared in The Warminster Mystery, precludes to sightings of UFOs with clockwork regularity over Cradle Hill itself, a few hundred yards from the farmhouse lying in the dip before the steep approach.
These happenings all took place in the same area, Michael revealed, practically on a direct line between Chitterne and Warminster. He saw nothing overhead at the material time. Nevertheless, he did experience a nasty electric shock on one occasion, while travelling on a tractor early one morning.
He attributed it to a shorting fault on the machine. Strange climax to this true story is: When the tractor and its engine was thoroughly examined by a specialist, its electrical wiring system was faultless.
