The Charlton Crater: Did a UFO land in Wiltshire in 1963?
In July 1963, an orange light was seen over Wiltshire and a mysterious crater appeared in a farmer’s field. Here’s the story of the Charlton Crater.
Image: Britain's X-Files
Have aliens been secretly visiting the UK? You’d certainly suspect so, given the high number of UFO sightings in this part of the world. Often, though, when a Brit does claim to have had an extraterrestrial encounter, one important thing is conspicuous by its absence: physical evidence.
Sure, many people claim to have seen strange lights in the sky or even ran into creatures thought too freakish to be of this earth. Still, it can often be difficult to simply take these accounts at face value. We need something else, something tangible enough to make the story feel real.
That’s why the tale of the Charlton Crater stands out so much in British UFO lore. In July 1963, farmer Roy Blanchard was shocked to find a mysterious crater in his potato field in Wiltshire. Even the police and military struggled to explain it. As the Sky HISTORY series Britain’s X-Files investigates the mystery, we ask: Has anyone come up with a truly convincing theory?
A jaw-dropping find on a remote farm
In July 1963, a policeman saw a peculiar streak of orange light in the sky above Charlton, Wiltshire. He wasn’t the only local that month to suspect something very strange was afoot. Leonard ‘Len’ Joliffe, a dairyman employed at Charlton’s Manor Farm, was minding his own business when he thought he heard an explosion.
Len’s brother Gordon Joliffe relayed the story when interviewed for Channel 5 documentary The British UFO Files in 2004. ‘He was on his way to work at 6 o’clock in the morning because he was a milker, he worked for Mr Blanchard,’ Gordon explained. Len was reportedly on his bike when he heard ‘this great big bang in the morning, after the huge light in the sky came down’.
Within hours, another of the farmworkers, Reginald Alexander, had stumbled upon a huge, unfamiliar crater where potatoes and barley were usually grown. He called his boss Roy Blanchard to the site. Soon, journalists, scientific investigators and even bomb disposal experts would also be at the scene. What they saw was so extraordinary that it would become known to history as the Charlton Crater.
How large was the Charlton Crater?
Reports have slightly differed over the years, but ufologist Waveney Girvan provided his own dimensions in an article for Flying Saucer Review in autumn 1963. ‘The marks comprised a saucer-shaped depression or crater eight feet in diameter and about four inches in depth. In the centre of this depression there was found a three feet deep hole variously described as from five inches to one foot in diameter.’
Especially strangely, four other, slot-like marks – each ‘four feet long and one foot wide’, according to Girvan – ran out from this central hole. It was like a giant bicycle wheel, complete with spokes, had been pressed into the soil from above. Yes, the soil was bare. There was no sign of crushed potato or flattened barley in the crater itself. It was as if the crops at the impact site had been miraculously vaporised.
What caused the Charlton Crater?
Given how heavily Britain was bombed during World War II, could it be that the crater resulted from an unexploded wartime bomb finally going off? Could there still have been some other dormant explosives lying beneath the soil? The British Army feared so, and sent its bomb disposal unit to investigate. In the event, the team did not find any bombs, or even scorch marks suggesting that an explosion had taken place.
Could the Charlton Crater have been caused by a meteorite? The astronomer Patrick Moore was a forthright proponent of this theory. What looked like a fused piece of metal was found in the crater, seemingly backing up this argument. However, the British Museum analysed the metallic debris and discerned it to be just ordinary ironstone, commonplace in the Wiltshire area.
So, what exactly was it that landed on Roy Blanchard’s farm that fateful morning? The farmer himself was stumped for easy answers, but did suggest a rather eye-opening one. He reflected: ‘The thing was heavy enough to crush rocks and stone to powder. Yet it came down gently. We heard no crash and whatever power it uses produces no heat or noise. I believe that we have received a visit from a spaceship from another world.’
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