A DIFFERENT KIND OF UFO

Despite the fact that my interest in nuts and bolts UFOs began and ended about twelve years ago when I wrote a couple of UFO books in order to pay for an acrimonious and expensive dicorce, I still get UFO reports even now. The ones that interest me most, like this one which came in this evening from Emily (15), Daniel (13) and Jessica (11) Taylor who live near the village of Monkleigh just outside Bideford, are the ones which are most certainly NOT of a piece of extraterrestrial (or even secret government) hardware..

In the late 1940s, John Philip Bessor noted some of the strange behaviour of supposed UFOs.
"The 'skipping' motion is comparable to the poltergeist-propelled objects of a haunted house," he said. "Such things often waver or skip in transit. Then, too, ghosts are always 10 feet ahead' of a pursuer...Their sudden disappearance 'in mid-air' is comparable to a ghost's dematerialization."
From this observation, Bessor developed the concept of the "ideoplasm," a primitive, ectoplasmic creature "originating in the stratosphere-ionosphere, capable of materialization and dematerialization."

Writing in M.K. Jessup's "The UFO Annual," Bessor remarked "I noted that the 1870s, '80s and '90s saw record and near record-breaking weather and also a tremendous number of flying saucer reports. This leads me to suppose that there is a cyclic recurrence of periods of freak weather and aerial phenomena. I think we can be justified in assuming that the solar or cosmic disturbances in space which affect freak weather also cause the "flying saucers" to "migrate" to more dense atmosphere, coming within our range of observation. Since 1946, there have appeared in our papers numerous accounts of migrations of fishes into waters previously foreign to them, and of the intrusion of wolves, bears and other wild animals into areas in which they had never before been observed."

He thought the creatures have an intelligence akin to that of fish. In various eyewitness accounts, sky beasts can change their density, becoming smaller, harder masses that are usually metallic in colour, or they can become larger and cloudlike, to the point of invisibility. It is said that when atmospheric beasts die, they fall to earth as a gelatinous mass that may resemble a green, purple, grey or iridescent jelly that evaporates into nothing within minutes, hours, or, at the longest, a few days. This is supposed to explain a type of anomalous event, pwdre ser that puzzled scientists for some time. Pwdre ser is Welsh for "rot from the stars." This phenomena, also known as gelatinous meteorites or star jelly, and reports of it come from around the world. Many can be explained however by the sudden growth of slime moulds.

It was Trevor James Constable who really ran with the idea. He published three books on biological UFOs, "They Live in the Sky," "The Cosmic Pulse of Life" and "Sky Creatures." He claimed that the creatures were giant single celled entities, sort of atmospheric amoebas of huge size. They were not always visible to the human eye, but could be caught on camera if infrared film were used. Objects which emit heat will stand out on infrared film as lighter shades, while colder objects will appear darker. Very cold areas will appear black. His books contained claimed photos of sky beasts taken in this way.