Haunted Skies by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway: Volume six

With the series advancing with an exciting progressive momentum, the Jubilee edition of Haunted Skies covers a lot of new ground on established cases. There will be some you haven’t heard of but in the multiple cases such as the ‘Welsh Triangle’ case, John and Dawn give us more material than was seen in the first rounds of the cases making it to the newspapers and reports. We see the growth of Ufology from the nuts and bolts approaches in the 1960’s and the realization that Close Encounter cases are so vividly different. The new diverse kinds of sightings were in greater variation on the shapes, appearances and sizes of Extra-Terrestrial encounters. Cases such as the Welsh school children sightings show more drawings and once again, this book series proves itself time and time again in the way the cases are relayed to the reader. 

John and Dawn often reverse the time clock and meet up with as many of the original witnesses as they can, as evident in their call to Randall Pugh-Jones in his later years, who investigated the original set of multiple sightings in Haverford West and other parts of Wales. 

We also see the beginning of new researchers appear for the first time such as Jenny Randles, Philip Mantle and Gary Heseltine’s first UFO sighting, an experience that lead to him later establishing the U.K. database for Police professionals.

With artwork and original pictures of cases, we have a book that also produces new reconstructive scenes from cases, adding a further edge to the original witness hand drawings of sightings, but retaining all of the realism of the event they portrayed.

Graffiti on the barn at Warminster and other places nearby such as Windwhistle Hill and the high strangeness cases which built up from the widely reported Arthur Shuttlewood and his publicity and tours to Cradle Hill to see anomalies beyond the original ‘Thing’ in the sky.

New researchers were to later become torchbearers to research the cases further such as Kevin Goodman, who later produced his own overviews and accounts of the famous area.

There are now close encounters with descriptions of entities sometimes looking remarkably humanoid, demonic or lizard like but also grey or impish in stature or facial structure. 

Craft and occupants that glow in seemingly incredible hues are reported in addition to cases of seemingly impossible trajectories and speeds, including MOD jets seen in full UFO pursuit are featured in this edition. Volume six shows us beings that emit ghostly lights and plasma like experiences and many of these predate the release of films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are many reports from personnel form the armed service too, notably many police sightings and a suspected animal mutilation case.

All kinds of sightings from lights, objects all the way up to high strangeness cases are in this huge book and for the current price less than £20, Volume Six of Haunted Skies is a key turning-point edition in the growing development of the investigation approaches of the subject, the way the media report cases. The meeting of witness’s decades after the time of their original sightings demonstrates John’s skills as a police detective in reviewing cases. This transferred professionalism to the UFO reports has become a welcome and prevailing feature of the whole series of these books. Each incident is reviewed and thoughtfully edited for its context, relevance and any possible new information that can further added, which often turns up brand new material never discussed or seen the first time round they appeared in UFO or media publications.

Matt Lyons

Chairman

The British UFO Research Association

March 2013