‘What I saw that night was real’: is it time to take aliens more seriously?

I spent a bit of time identifying Alan's route, and the rough location (within around 30 meters) on google street view where he stopped his car on Burnley Road (from old newspaper photos) to gawp at the object... It's useful to be able to follow his route on street view.


Alan was driving his police car North West along Burnley Road, Todmorden, and intended to turn right into Ferney Lee Road. Approaching his right turn off Burnley Road into Ferny Lee Road, (as shown in the google street view link below)...

https://goo.gl/maps/mN9ENGTWHiBYmvxp7

...he spotted up ahead on Burnley Road, something that he thought looked a bit like a bus slewed sideways across the road. As he closed in on the object, it became clear it was nothing like a bus. So instead of turning into Ferney Lee Road, he continued North West along Burnley Road towards this large object that was completely blocking the road ahead.

As he approached the object, he slowed right down to a crawl in utter disbelief of what he was seeing, and then brought his car to a halt around 20 yards away from it. The object at this point filled his entire windscreen area, and was completely incomprehensible to him.

From the newspaper photos of the time, Alan stopped his car somewhere around the Google Street View location below. We can just see the green copper dome of Mons Mill office on the right hand side of the road ahead through the trees (which is similar to the newspaper photos). Mons Mill itself has since been demolished.

https://goo.gl/maps/mf4JLZVoJrChVrMu5

(Note: Bizarrely, there is a ~100 meter gap on google street view at this point of Burnley Road - so we can't quite inspect the general location of the object in front of him)

The object was hanging in the air around 5 feet off the road surface. A diamond shaped object he estimates as 14 feet high, and 20 feet wide. With a dark paneling across the upper third, that he thought could be darkened windows. His car headlights were shining off, and illuminating the side of the object which was slowing turning in an anticlockwise direction. It seemed that a florescent glow was coming from its dome-like top. Its colour he described as unpolished gunmetal.

184-inch Synchrocyclotron completed in November 1946  (340 MeV protons). It was only later that year, that they began to install concrete shielding around the machine.

Showing site, and construction phases of the building which was to house The Giant Cyclotron









Showing the building of the 184-inch synchrocyclotron during 1946





Lawrence and his staff posing with the magnet for the 184-inch synchrocyclotron.




Artist's Impression of pilot Kenneth Arnold's Flying Silver Discs seen on 24th June 1947

Within the - now declassified - radiation report from Berkeley for 1947, is an indication that tests of rotating condenser plates in the main magnetic field were scraped in July 1947, to avoid problems they had encountered with eddy currents generated in the rotating discs. In July a different system of operation was devised which permitted the use of a single rotating condenser outside the magnetic field.






Here are some drawings of eddy currents withing rotating discs in a magnetic field...






There are some interesting similarities between these eddy currents, and Kenneth Arnolds drawings of the discs he saw. It makes one wonder if the reason for scrapping the multiple condenser plates in the magnetic field during July 1947, was connected with the flying disc sightings?

Just in case I didn't make clear enough the connection between the eddy currents generated in a spinning disc within a magnetic field, and Kenneth Arnold's silver discs.

Arnold mentioned that the discs were traveling in a line, one behind the other, separated by miles. The front discs were almost circular, but clipped slightly towards the rear as per his earlier drawing. As you moved further down the line, the discs became more distorted, with the discs at the very rear of the line almost resembling the crescent shape shown in the later photograph of Arnold with an artist mock up (above).

Below, I've taken the eddy currents drawing (above), and changed it's perspective to more closely resemble Arnold's artist mock-up, and highlighted the area of interest in blue. The resemblance in shape is really quite startling, and offers yet more circumstantial evidence of the connection between the flying discs of June and July 1947, and the powerful cyclotrons of the same period.