UK UFO Files Reveal Schoolchildren’s Sketches of 1977 ‘Alien Encounter’
Article by Alex McIntyre March 13, 2021 (cheshire-live.co.uk)
• UFO files released in 2009 by the UK Ministry of Defence’s UFO Desk have revealed children’s sketches of what appears to be an alien spaceship at the Upton Priory School in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England in October 1977.
• On this day, ten children at the school, aged between 7 and 11 years old, had gone out for their lunchtime break. When they came back, they told a teacher, Mrs. Hindmarsh, that they had seen something hovering around the trees before it vanished into the sky. The teacher told the children to draw what they had seen independently of each other using crayons and colored pencils. The images were so striking that she passed the drawings along to police in Cheshire.
• After checking with air traffic control in Manchester to see if they had anything on the radar, a Chesire police officer passed the pictures along with his written report to the UK Ministry of Defence, saying that there was ‘a remarkable similarity in these sketches with regard to the UFO and its location between two trees’. The file was then passed along from the Ministry of Defence in London to the MoD’s UFO desk.
• “It really is quite something,” said Dr. David Clarke, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University who was involved in transferring the ministry’s files into the public domain between 2009 and 2013. Said Dr. Clarke, “When I opened this particular (file), it struck me as more interesting than the usual, because it was full of all these crayon drawings by these schoolkids from Macclesfield.” “[T]he teacher must have thought this was something to be taken seriously and sat them down to get them to draw what they had seen independently. Then, because the drawings were so similar she actually gathered them together and took them to the police station in Macclesfield.”
• The Macclesfield case images were “just so amazing” that Dr. Clarke featured them in his book UFO Drawings from The National Archives, published in September 2017. Dr. Clarke speculated that the children could have been inspired to draw a spaceship in the trees due to the fact that the sci fi movie ‘Star Wars’ had been released earlier that summer.
UFO files released by the Ministry of Defence have revealed children’s sketches of what
appears to be an alien spaceship at a Cheshire school in 1977.
The pictures drawn by school pupils at Upton Priory School in Macclesfield were made public by the MoD’s UFO Desk shortly before it closed down in 2009.
The documents reveal that the sighting occurred in October 1977 when 10 children at the school, aged between seven and 11 years old, had gone out for their lunchtime break.
They came back and told a teacher, Mrs Hindmarsh, that they had seen something hovering around the trees before it vanished into the sky.
The teacher told the children to draw what they had seen independently of each other using crayons and coloured pencils.
The images were so striking that she passed the dossier to police in Cheshire before it ended up at the UFO desk at the Ministry of Defence.
In a covering letter, the police officer said there was ‘a remarkable similarity in these sketches with regard to the UFO and its location between two trees’.
Dr David Clarke, a former journalist and currently a professor at Sheffield Hallam University, was involved in transferring the ministry’s files into the public domain between 2009 and 2013.
Speaking to CheshireLive, he said: “When I opened this particular one, it struck me as more interesting than the usual, because it was full of all these crayon drawings by these schoolkids from Macclesfield.
“I suppose kids say all kinds of things about things they’ve seen in playgrounds but the teacher must have thought this was something to be taken seriously and sat them down to get them to draw what they had seen independently.
“Then because the drawings were so similar she actually gathered them together and took them to the police station in Macclesfield.
“Then this copper had written a report about this and sent it to air traffic control in Manchester to see if they had anything on the radar.
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