The Carl Farlow A338 UFO case

close encounters of the second kind,multiple witnesses,took place in Avon and sopley Hampshire,UK,DATE 6th November 1967

Sometime between 1:00AM and 2:00AM Carl farlow was driving a truck loaded with domestic cookers on the A338 trunk road between the villages of sopley and Avon in Hampshire England

he was approaching a junction near a bridge over the river Avon when his wagon's lights died,its diesel engine that needed no spark to keep it running kept running.

assuming some sort of short circuit or blown fuse he pulled up to try to find the course of the failure.

before he could climb down from his cab he was astonished to see a bizarre "egg shaped object" it was moving from left to right across the road in front of him at a height of about 25 feet from the ground.

the object was magenta coloured with a white base and was perhaps 80 feet long big enough to overhang both sides of the road.as it went from left to right it expelled a strong smell like burnt wood and made a sound like a refrigerator.

as it crossed the road it excellerated gradually and after a few seconds it disappeared altogether from sight.

Farlow then realised that a jaguar car which had been coming in the opposite direction was stranded on the other side of the UFOs path.its driver who was a veterinarian approached Farlow explained his vehicle was out of action and his lady passenger was hysterical,they suggested they call the police.

a call from a nearby booth that was working though its lights too were dead brought the police to the scene shortly afterwards.There preliminary inspection of the site showed that the road seemed to have melted-almost inconceivable in an English winter.

the vets passenger was taken to a nearby hospital and treated for shock,whilst the two men were individually questioned first by the police and secondly by the ministry of defence.

the next day Farlow returned to collect his wagon. a bulldozer was leveling the road,the phone booth was being re-painted and other people seemed to be investigating the area with instruments.
a week or so later Farlow saw the same stretch of road had been re surfaced some 70 yards or so.

Now i like this case because of the fact there were multiple witnesses and the site where this took place was physically damaged so some thing definitely did happen.

i have often thought of the possibilities, could this of been some military test vehicle perhaps nuclear gone wrong or a true off world alien craft?www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk...

An interestingly unique description of a flying machine built with sixties technology.

Seriously though, with all the sound and smell it seems likely to have been a chance encounter with an experimental craft.

yeah i never saw any mention of the people involved
being harmed other than mentally so what was the heat
source that melted the paint off the phone booth as
well as melting the tar road?

because there were no ill effects reported surly it cant
of been a nuclear device?but what caused the heat?
propulsion device?

Originally posted by stealthyaroura
yeah i never saw any mention of the people involved
being harmed other than mentally so what was the heat
source that melted the paint off the phone booth as
well as melting the tar road?

because there were no ill effects reported surly it cant
of been a nuclear device?but what caused the heat?
propulsion device?

Could have been just hot exhaust from some sort of combustion engine. They make paint remover tools that are basically heat guns [hopped up hair dryer] with a blade on the end, and blacktop can get hot enough to melt in regular sunlight on a hot day, so I don't think the temperatures involved are so extreme as to require exotic technology.

so we have an egg shaped craft, 80 feet in length magenta in colour
that's like a purple pinkish colour with a white base and its wide enough
to span the road and some.it was dark so it must of been illuminated.

it stops the jaguar car's engine stops the headlights on Farlows wagon
working as well as the phone booth,so it is giving off some kind
of electromagnetic energy or other form of power drainage.

we have massive heat,70 yards of road dug up and re surfaced.

so give me a description of known tech of 1967 that fits with
what the witnesses state?

don't tell me it was a blimp! no i think there is a lot more
to this case than any man made conventional craft.

add to that a possible cover up this is a strange occurrence indeed.

Originally posted by stealthyaroura
so we have an egg shaped craft, 80 feet in length magenta in colour
that's like a purple pinkish colour with a white base and its wide enough
to span the road and some.it was dark so it must of been illuminated.

it stops the jaguar car's engine stops the headlights on Farlows wagon
working as well as the phone booth,so it is giving off some kind
of electromagnetic energy or other form of power drainage.

we have massive heat,70 yards of road dug up and re surfaced.

so give me a description of known tech of 1967 that fits with
what the witnesses state?

don't tell me it was a blimp! no i think there is a lot more
to this case than any man made conventional craft.

add to that a possible cover up this is a strange occurrence indeed.

There's no reason to assume that it wasn't a man made craft, albeit unconventional. And the cover up would follow logically if it were some sort of secret test.

The story is reminiscent of the Cash Landrum case

[edit on 21-6-2010 by draknoir2]

reply to post by draknoir2


OK i cant convince you this was an alien craft,but that's alright
i see your logic but i lean more towards this being a true UFO.

oh just to add the vet who was in the other car took out his
torch and that failed to work to and it worked earlier.

i just don't think this was ours. a glowing pinkish massive egg
floating around then shooting off after all the damage.Hmmm.

reply to post by draknoir2

Could have been just hot exhaust from some sort of combustion engine.

Good thought. What I find fishy is why any secret military project involving experimental rocketry would be flown directly over a road? The point of secrets is to keep them secret. Why would they fly it over a road where civilians can witness it and could have (potentially) have been hurt- shock is already a potentially dangerous situation which is apparently what happened to the lady in the jaguar. It just doesn't add up..
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Good OP Stealthy. I found it interesting how the diseal engine did not die but the gasoline one did. Of course we could point out the fundamental differences between gas and diseal engines, but I'm not sure that brings us closer to the truth. For instance, why do some folks report their car shutting off during a CE and yet once the encounter is over their car starts up again? In this case, the Jaguar was (apparently) not able to continue even after the UFO left the scene.

Perhaps that wasn't the intended flight path.

In the Cash Landrum case the same sort of thing happened, down to the alleged resurfacing of the road, only in that case people actually got irradiated to the point of chronic sickness and eventual death.

A rogue experimental flight makes sense to me.

What experimental craft. it's simple name one that had anything like those flight characteristics?

There are time it strikes me the *experimental craft* crowd are exactly the same as the rampant believers. If it's not explainable it has to be an experimental craft. This despite the fact, you can't actually name a single project that had anything like the characteristics that this craft exhibited.


Plus, there is the inconvenient problem that, this sighting was slap bang in the middle of flap that covered this whole area. The whole period was documented by Arthur Shuttleworth and was sufficiently *weird* for umpteen news reports and couple of documentaries to made about the various happenings.

If anyone could have turned car engines on and off at will, in the middle of the cold war, it would have 100% certain, been deployed as some sort of weapon. It wasn't, ergo one can surmise that, the idea is was something experimental is utter moonshine.

reply to post by Scramjet76


yes this is a little known but great case that i have been meaning to
post a thread on,most of the content came from a UFO book cos it
covers more than i could find on the web

i doubt the experimental craft hypothesis this is far more.
thanks for the comps Scramjet76

reply to post by FireMoon


i could not agree more.ahh the voices of reason have arrived.

hey any info on a similar craft in the time frame
as you say this was in the middle of a flap?

Originally posted by FireMoon
What experimental craft. it's simple name one that had anything like those flight characteristics?

There are time it strikes me the *experimental craft* crowd are exactly the same as the rampant believers. If it's not explainable it has to be an experimental craft. This despite the fact, you can't actually name a single project that had anything like the characteristics that this craft exhibited.

I don't recall saying that it has to be anything. What I said was that there was nothing to support a non-terrestrial origin. Nothing. No physical evidence, no eyewitness testimony of little gray dudes waving out the window... just an unidentified flying object passing over a stretch of road.

Experimental craft crowd. I guess if you need to label someone you know nothing about in order to make your position seem valid, then go for it. I'll do you the courtesy of not labeling you a "rampant believer" based on your last post.

reply to post by draknoir2


Actually i have found the niche i like to be in. The rampant believers think I'm a skeptic. The skeptics think I'm a rampant believer. So i assume, i am least doing summat right.

There's a good background to the events in that part of England in the 60s here.
www.ufo-warminster.co.uk...

reply to post by FireMoon


Never really been interested in fitting into any particular niche, myself.

Thanks for the link.

reply to post by FireMoon


oh of course the Arther shutlwood paper, a great link
to the flap around the area although the A388 case may
have slipped past this man?

great link though thanks.lot of activity and none conventional.

reply to post by draknoir2

In the Cash Landrum case the same sort of thing happened, down to the alleged resurfacing of the road, only in that case people actually got irradiated to the point of chronic sickness and eventual death.

Yes, the texas case in the early 1980s. Good call. You jogged my memory so I looked it up and reread the Landrum account.

The problem with these reports is they are not accurate enough. For instance in the case of Cash-Landrum, it was said that following the lady getting burned by the exhaust, "the UFO then ascended and departed." The rate of acceleration and more precise descriptions are needed for us ufologists to make more headway!

The problem I have with these stories is that nothing concrete ever comes of it. Electrogravitics is nonsense. How can an electric field (either static or moving) move any sort of substantial mass?

Now it is possible that the "gov't"

reply to post by Scramjet76


the cash landrum case to me i did think a shielded helicopter
was carrying a run away nuclear reactor and that is what caused
the problems.

that being said if it was a man made nuclear experiment
gone bad ALL the helicopters would of been irradiated and
there crew.

maybe i will have a look back over the case now my interest
has been renewed

now i have refreshed my memory on the cash landrum case
it does sound like a military test vehicle as we no they were
experimenting with nuclear engines but shielding has always
been the problem. and the date of 1980's sounds about rite
for the military to have advanced to the stage of making a
kind of nuclear power plant.

BUT WHY would you purposely put the lives of these people
at risk by giving them a close encounter unless the tech (if
it was ours) had malfunctioned and it was just unlucky.

then there is the shape a diamond?sounds like some sort of
lifting body type of craft.

i really hope one day we get to the bottom of these unusual
events.we have been lied to far to long.
on a side note on nuclear engines.
i remember reading on a nuclear powered missile that stayed
in the air for a really long time so it could be deployed so soon
if needed.the thing got canceled because apparently by the time
it had been up in the air and flying over any zone the damage
from radiation due to the population was so great it was more of
a killer to people under or near it than its warhead!

any one read about this i found it in wiki but can never find it now.
showed a picture, US made and very ugly looking.

reply to post by stealthyaroura


Stealthyaroura.....

Thanks for posting your very interesting report!

Assuming the witness reports were reliable.....

If that was an experimantal craft of human origin, then it was extremely unusual.

At the same time, the idea it was an alien spacecraft is about the most unusual idea of all!

I guess you "had to be there".

Kind regards
Maybe...maybe not