Some Flying Saucer Enthusiasts around 1960 … unexpected relics have recently come to light.
My friend, Dr. Blaise Vyner, surprised me in June 2025
with some interesting images, drawn by my father … and thereby hangs a short
tale.
My father, COLIN FORWARD of Malmesbury, and and Blaise
Vyner’s father, JOHN VYNER of Little Somerford, became friends during the late
1950s … possibly when both had joined the local group of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament in North Wiltshire … or perhaps whilst travelling to and
from their workplaces on country bus routes.
For a long time, there had been a public fascination
with the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life-forms visiting our planet,
particularly in the imaginary craft called flying saucers.
Fictional alien invasions were nothing new but, in twentieth
century popular culture, the possibilities began to seem more and more like
probabilities as time passed and as films and fictions proliferated.
Whatever.
John Vyner was fascinated by flying saucers to the
point of obsession, archiving newspapers articles about rumoured sightings and
encounters … and my father soon absorbed much of John’s enthusiasm.
Aged ten or eleven, I visited John Vyner’s farm
cottage with my father and saw a large composite map on his wall with markings
that charted possible sightings of “unidentified flying objects” across the
counties of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.
John persuaded Colin to join him in a search for fresh
evidence.
They took a holiday in which they walked night-after-night,
going north-east across a stretch of promising territory in the two counties,
presumably in the hope of encountering visitors from other worlds.
I didn’t share their enthusiasm and I quickly forgot
about the whole episode … until my school friend Blaise Vyner contacted me about
sixty-five years later with news of this surprising discovery.
John and Colin were long dead by then, but Blaise’s
mother had lived on into her nineties.
And with Mrs. Vyner having passed on, Blaise’s younger
brother, Merlin Vyner took on the task of going through the relics and
souvenirs of her life.
Blaise then sent
me photographs of several old and stained drawings discovered by Merlin, each
drawing glued to a rough piece of card.
Although
they were never signed, it was immediately clear that they were by Colin’s hand.
Colin
Forward, a Welsh man, had trained at Cardiff as an art teacher in the late
1940s. He was a highly proficient technical
illustrator and was a well-practised portraitist. These drawings reflected some of that
professional competence.
The drawings
discovered by Merlin fell into two groups.
The first group,
were drawn upon the theme of the early Victorian “bogey-man” character, Springheel
Jack, once the subject of several “urban myths” . Not instantly recognized by me but soon
identified with the help of some internet searches describing these images and
their “narrative” content.
Searching for
“a tall man in Victorian costume breathing fire” quickly led me to the
subject matter of this first drawing.
It
illustrates Mary Stevens account in 1837 of being assaulted at night on a
street in South London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-heeled_Jack
https://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/9059/
The second,
third and fourth drawings in this group puzzled me … but not for long … my
guess is that they fictionalized a chance encounter with the supposedly immortal
Springheel Jack, perhaps in some country pub along the way to Northampton.
John Vyner may
have believed that Springheel Jack was a lost spaceman who could not find his
way home and now walks the Earth disguised in human clothing … a bit like “The
Man Who Fell To Earth”.
Can you see
his alien ears in the drawings ? Is his
expression one of alarm at being recognized
?
Having
studied these Spring Heel Jack drawings, it seemed to me that John Vyner must
have written something fictional, or had at least imagined it, and then Colin Forward
had made these drawings, probably intending them for publication.
But where ? And
when ?
Perhaps
John’s work had been published without Colin’s drawings. How could I find out ?
More
internet searches followed.
The
Wikipedia article on Spring-heeled Jack had provided a helpful bibliography,
but didn’t point to an obvious source for an article by John Vyner, and Blaise said
that he was never aware that his father had ever published something.
Not a thing. Never, ever, ever.
I carried on
searching for a while and then The Internet Archive, a kind of global digital library,
miraculously turned up something unexpected whilst I searched for J Vyner
and for Spring-heel Jack.
Lynn E.
Catoe’s UFOs BIBLIOGRAPHY was and is a treasure trove.
So, now we
knew that John Vyner’s article about Springheel Jack had first been published
in THE FLYING SAUCER REVIEW in the UK in May of 1961, and had then been re-printed
in the US in another pulp magazine named FATE in October 1961.
I wasn’t
able to track down the copy of the Flying Saucer Review at that time, but
eventually discovered that a surviving issue of FATE magazine was for sale …
from Bloomsbury Books … a dealership based in Las Vegas, Nevada.
I flourished
my credit card, virtually, on the 10th July, and was promptly supplied
with the goods, at a very decent price, especially when considering Lloyd the
vendor’s own efforts and expenses.
The
carefully packaged little book arrived in Tenby on Friday 18th July.
NB. I have
belatedly discovered there is, after all, a PDF of the Flying Saucer Review
online
Not the
greatest thing you ever might read, but worth every cent to me …
There were
two more drawings amongst Merlin Vyner’s discoveries, although neither was directly
connected to that published article.
Each drawing
showed a close encounter between a small training aircraft of the Royal Air
Force, and an even smaller-looking flying saucer.
Each close encounter
was shown from the same standing-point in Malmesbury, looking up and across from
the lower corner of the old cattle market towards St. Denis Lane and towards the
High Street beyond.
( Yes ! There are topographical inconsistencies ... and No ! I haven’t the faintest idea why and how !
)
In those
days the skies around Malmesbury were busy with multitudes of different
aircraft from the Royal Air Force stations at Kemble, at Hullavington, and at
Lyneham … and also from the USAF bomber base at Fairford. Trainers flew over daily.
It is
possible that John Vyner wrote another article, and equally possible that Colin
Forward dreamed up this scene … although the fact that the drawings had
remained in Mrs. Vyner’s possession suggests they had been commissioned by her
late husband.
After a busy
summer, Blaise and I were able to meet in a Yorkshire pub on a sunny Sunday
evening, 7th September 2025, and we exchanged the little magazine and
the drawings. Hurrah !
Hurrah !
My gratitude
to Blaise Vyner, and to Merlin Vyner, and to the late Mrs. Vyner, is enormous
and will last forever and a day.
