Greetings Earthlings

Where: Rowley Regis, West Midlands, England
When: January 4, 1979
Witness: Jean Hingley

Introduction

I first came across this story ("one of the strangest, if not one of the most absurd 'close encounter' cases ever recorded" according to Alfred Budden) in Kevin Randle and Russ Estes' volume Faces of the Visitors: An Illustrated Reference to Alien Contact. The delightful mixture of domestic banality and high-weirdness captured my imagination straight away. Randle's pithy and understated opening paragraph sets the tone nicely:

Just after Jean Hingley watched her husband leave for work, she spotted an orange sphere close to the roof of the garage. Her dog reacted by becoming stiff and falling over. At that moment, three small beings…zipped into the house making a zee-zee-zee sound. Hingley ran into the living room when she heard the Christmas tree rattling, only to find two of the creatures shaking it. Later they jumped up and down on the couch like children left alone.¹

This cursory (but intriguing) description - together with Estes' accompanying illustration (see below) - made me wish for a further and fuller elaboration.

Happily, after flicking through a random volume of Fortean Times back issues, I found it - in the aforementioned Alfred Budden's article, "The Mince Pie Martians: The Rowley Regis Case".² The following summary relies heavily on that piece.

Appearance

The creatures were approximately 3 ½ feet tall and wore silvery tunics with six small buttons on the front. Their eyes were large and black and their faces were white (with no apparent nose and a simple line for a mouth). Mrs. Hingley noted that their expressions never changed ("like a dead person’s face").

They wore transparent helmets with small lights on top and they appeared to be surrounded by a halo. Their limbs were "silvery-green, ending in simple tapering points with no apparent hands or feet". Their large wings looked "as if they were made of thin, transparent paper covered with dozens of glittering multi-coloured dots" and as they flew around the room their arms were "clasped in front of their chests", while their legs "hung down stiffly". The wings appeared to be "ornamental" as they didn't flap, but merely "fluttered gently or occasionally folded inwards like a concertina".³

Event

Alfred Budden's account of the encounter's early moments tallies fairly closely with Randle's, while contributing a couple of additional details. We're told that Hingley "could feel heat on her face" as she looked at the "orange sphere", and that the shaking of the Christmas tree resulted in its fairy (which looked, according to one investigator, like a smaller version of the "aliens" themselves) becoming dislodged and falling to the floor.

Following the incident with the tree Jean tried to confront the beings, but found that she "had become paralyzed in an extremely ungainly pose, mouth wide open and eyes staring." As she tried, in vain, to speak to them they turned towards her and said, "Nice?"

She recalled being shocked by the fact that they spoke "in unison, in a gruff masculine voice". At that moment her voice returned to her and she replied, "Oh its nice to see you, to see you nicely". Devotees of British light entertainment will no doubt recognise the above as a slightly amended version of Bruce Forsyth's catchphrase.

After this opening exchange Hingley tried asking the creatures where they had come from, but she received no reply - with the aliens choosing instead to fly around the room before landing on the sofa and jumping up and down ("like naughty children"). At this point Jean seems to have become (somewhat understandably) annoyed and "told them sharply to stop, which they did".

However, such attempts to gain control of the situation resulted in the creatures emitting "a very thin laser-like beam" from the lights on top of their helmets. The "aliens" focused this light on Mrs. Hingley's forehead, causing an intense burning sensation as well as the occasional paralysis mentioned above by Randle. She then repeatedly asked her visitors why they insisted on hurting/incapacitating her in this way, to which they replied, "We haven't come to harm you". Unconvinced by this assurance, Mrs. Hingley countered: "Well, you keep putting that light on".

After finding herself flying across the room and landing on the sofa beside them, she again asked the creatures where they were from - receiving the vague answer, "From the sky".

The next section of Budden's article captures the hilarious, "kitchen sink" oddness of the encounter so perfectly that I quote it (almost) in its entirety:

They flew over to a picture of Jesus on the wall and began a long conversation with her about Jesus and his welfare, Tommy Steele, the place of the woman in the home, the Queen, children, babies, and back to Jesus again[…]

She talked to them in the same vein as before, until they began to float slowly around the room lifting up and putting down, or simply touching, small objects like cassette tapes, as if the pointed ends of their arms were magnetic[…]

Jean decided that they were looking at the bottles of drink left over from Christmas and asked if they would like some, to which they replied "Water, water, water", in unison as always. Jean complied, and found herself gliding down the hall into the kitchen. "So I got a tray, and put four glasses on a tray [one for herself, "to show it wasn't poisoned"] and I got a plate and six mice-pies. It's rude to have just enough, so I put two extra." She glided back into the living room[…]

"Each of them lifted a glass as I lifted mine…when they saw me watching them they put the power light on…I didn’t actually see them drink the water but the glasses were empty when they put them down."⁴

Jean began to understand that the beam disabled her "whenever the entities were unable to perform certain tasks, such as drinking or answering questions". She also started regarding her visitors as 'robots', or "animated dolls with a set number of responses".

A further detail worth noting is that the "aliens" constantly touched the "buttons" on their chests before speaking - leading Jean to conclude that this activated some kind of translation device:

"Every word they didn’t understand, they did 1-2-3 ever so fast on their chests…bleep-bleep, bleep-bleep…I said 'You'll learn a lot of things from me with that bleep-bleep'. And they said 'Yes-yes'…"⁵

The hour-long encounter came to an end when Jean decide to show the creatures how to smoke. As she lit a cigarette the three beings recoiled (leading her to conclude that they were frightened of fire), after which a loud noise was heard from the garden. Looking out the window she once again saw the orange "space ship", now parked on the back lawn:

"It looked about eight feet long by four feet high and it had glowing round port-holes in it…it was covered with a sort of shining plastic…There was something like a scorpion tail at the back with a kind of wheel on top of it, but without a rim…like an old-fashioned sweep's brush…They got off the settee, and…put their hands to their sides…they didn't open their wings to go out…They lifted themselves up, and they pressed a press-stud…and they glided themselves out…"⁶

The final act of Hingley's visitors, as they "sailed out of the room", was to grab a mince-pie each. Then, as they boarded the "ship" and flew off "towards Oldbury and West Bromwich", the craft "pulsed with light twice" - something Jean interpreted as their way of saying "Goodbye".

Aftermath

As soon as the "aliens" had departed Jean found herself dropping to the floor in agony:

"I was in such pain. My legs, I couldn't feel them, and then I was wobbly, and very very weak. I grabbed the table. I slid my feet along the carpet, and I got on the settee, and I didn't know how long I was there. Ooh! I was dead!"⁷

Budden informs us that Hingley "lay there all day until about five o'clock", at which point "she felt sufficiently recovered to make tea for husband".

Physical "evidence" of the encounter allegedly included: a) An 8-foot impression in the snow (in the middle of the lawn), b) "A circle about eight inches wide scratched into the glass in the back door, which Jean insisted was not there before", c) A stopped clock, and a non-functional television (and radio), and, d) "Distorted and ruined" cassette tapes (those that had been handled by her visitors).

In addition, Jean was apparently afflicted with sore eyes (for weeks after the event), a painful inner ear, an aching jaw, a red mark on her forehead (which persisted for months) and such a general feeling of unwellness that "her doctor gave her two weeks off work".

In a final (surreal/playful) twist, her Christmas tree disappeared two days after the encounter. It reappeared in her back garden a few days later, in pieces and stripped of its decorations (though these gradually returned over the next several days).

Thoughts

Because of the prankish nature of the "aliens", the domestic setting, the "gruff, masculine voices" (etc), Budden hints at a possible connection to poltergeist activity, but doesn't commit to a more concrete hypothesis.

It need hardly be added that prankish behaviour is traditionally characteristic of fairies - the folkloric entities whom Mrs. Hingley's visitors most closely resemble. In fact, without the trappings of laser beams, translation devices, a "spaceship" (etc), the story could slot quite comfortably into the annals of established fairy lore. Making connections between aliens and fairies is, of course, a fashionable ufological pursuit - though one often hampered by over-literalism. The notion that traditional accounts of fairy encounters can be interpreted as literal, eye-witness reports (expressed in terms specific to that culture/time) of Close Encounters of the 3rd/4th Kind is one that I've never been convinced by.

What ultimately makes the above tale so memorable is (as previously suggested) the evocative (and…well…hilarious) juxtaposition of the banal and the extraordinary: Bruce Forsyth and paralysing laser beams; Tommy Steele and a hypnotised dog; Mince pies and beings "from the sky". Add in the fact that these elf-like creatures came at Christmas and were concerned with Jesus' welfare, and the whole account (as improbable and amusing as it is) seems pregnant with meaning.

The most telling (and poignant) detail for me though is the discussion Mrs. Hingley and her visitors had about "the place of the woman in the home". This discussion seems to fit in well with the general air of quotidian domesticity - one in which Jean was eager (despite the bizarre circumstances) to be a good hostess, and where her 'recovery' seems occasioned by a desire to make her husband's tea. Given all that (and allowing our imaginations free rein) it’s hard not to see some manifestation of repressed domestic anxiety at play!

Related Images

1. Randle, Kevin, & Russ Estes Faces of the Visitors: An Illustrated Reference to Alien Contact (New York: Fireside, 1997), p. 74. [back]
2. Budden, Alfred, "The Mince Pie Martians: The Rowley Regis Case" in Fortean Times, Issues 47-51: Fishy Yarns, eds. Paul Sieveking & Bob Rickard (London: John Brown Publishing, 1995), 50: 40-44. [back]
3. Budden, 50: 40-41 [back]
4. Ibid., 50: 42 [back]
5. Ibid., 50: 43 [back]
6. Ibid. [back]
7. Ibid., 50: 44 [back]

Added: June 24th, 2007
Tags: All, Fairy, Black eyes, Paralysis, Wings, Helmet, Flying, robot, England, 1979, portholes
Views: 2149
Comments: 8

• Home
• About
• Archives
• Comments
• Contribute
• Links
• Tags

©2007 edited & written by Fústar, designed by Jess Beeley Byrne