A strange couple of days!
Sunday
After a long and tiring day at work, my brother and I got our camping gear together, headed out into Tunstall Forest, and settled down in an isolated glade to cook our dinner. The meal was composed of roasted chestnuts and cans of baked beans/sausages/mushrooms/various other things cooked on the fire. After the fire had burned down, we decided to go on a night-hike in the Birches (our local part of the forest). The moon was almost full and provided enough light to see by, but I also took along a candle lantern--which promptly went out in the gusting wind. We used our Maglites to light the way in some of the darker thickets.
Eventually we came to a feature we know as "Forest Barrow", a Neolithic (10,000 year old) burial mound in the middle of a pine plantation. We stopped there and watched the sky for a while. Almost immediately, we both noticed a piercingly bright, star-like object to the west, which was moving southwards at a speed faster than most planes of similar altitude. It was pure white and did not pulse. After it was in view for maybe thirty seconds, the object--for want of a better word--emitted a pulse of purple light so intense that it lit up the entire sky, annihilated our night vision in a split second, and made both of us hit the dirt. Once our eyes had recovered, we noticed that the moving star was gone.
We considered distant lightning as a cause for the pulse (backed up by subseqent, weaker flashes, plus a rumbling that may have been thunder--or a jet), but we both agree that the first flash was far, far too bright for lightning ... and moreover, it definitely emanated from the star-like light.
I'm at a loss about this. Do I risk your incredulity, or do I speak my own mind and admit that I think it was, in fact something completely unknown? I won't even mention that it seemed to be in the direction of Rendlesham Forest and the Woodbridge Base, which is now re-occupied by British troops. In fact, it seems to draw many parallels with certain aspects of "fiction" that I integrated into Project Cold Witness. Spooky. Throughout writing that book, more and more things which I took to be fictional have turned out to be true. And now this ...
Today
I've finally been paid for my first three weeks of working at Wyevale, only to find that I'm paying about fifty pounds worth of tax. I was assured that, as I'm only eighteen and earning a miniumum wage, I would pay no tax whatsoever. My net pay is just over £216 (I was expecting something more like £300). Moreover, they have spelt my name wrong. Instead of "MR. A. RODDIE", they printed it on the cheque as "MR. A. RODDLE". Can you believe that? Can't these people read, or something?
Onto the second weird thing for the day (sorry about the long post). As I sit here in the electrically-heated darkness of my summerhouse, at the bottom of the garden (back yard?), I can hear the roaring of a pig from the direction of the forest ... a large pig. The edge of the Birches is about a hundred yards west, beyond a field. I think I'm probably hearing the angry growls of one of our resident wild boar as he fends away rival males. We always knew there were boar in Tunstall Forest, but to hear one making a noise that loud (especially bearing in mind we were walking over there this time yesterday night) is enough to make one wish firearms weren't quite so hard to obtain in Britain.
Sunday
After a long and tiring day at work, my brother and I got our camping gear together, headed out into Tunstall Forest, and settled down in an isolated glade to cook our dinner. The meal was composed of roasted chestnuts and cans of baked beans/sausages/mushrooms/various other things cooked on the fire. After the fire had burned down, we decided to go on a night-hike in the Birches (our local part of the forest). The moon was almost full and provided enough light to see by, but I also took along a candle lantern--which promptly went out in the gusting wind. We used our Maglites to light the way in some of the darker thickets.
Eventually we came to a feature we know as "Forest Barrow", a Neolithic (10,000 year old) burial mound in the middle of a pine plantation. We stopped there and watched the sky for a while. Almost immediately, we both noticed a piercingly bright, star-like object to the west, which was moving southwards at a speed faster than most planes of similar altitude. It was pure white and did not pulse. After it was in view for maybe thirty seconds, the object--for want of a better word--emitted a pulse of purple light so intense that it lit up the entire sky, annihilated our night vision in a split second, and made both of us hit the dirt. Once our eyes had recovered, we noticed that the moving star was gone.
We considered distant lightning as a cause for the pulse (backed up by subseqent, weaker flashes, plus a rumbling that may have been thunder--or a jet), but we both agree that the first flash was far, far too bright for lightning ... and moreover, it definitely emanated from the star-like light.
I'm at a loss about this. Do I risk your incredulity, or do I speak my own mind and admit that I think it was, in fact something completely unknown? I won't even mention that it seemed to be in the direction of Rendlesham Forest and the Woodbridge Base, which is now re-occupied by British troops. In fact, it seems to draw many parallels with certain aspects of "fiction" that I integrated into Project Cold Witness. Spooky. Throughout writing that book, more and more things which I took to be fictional have turned out to be true. And now this ...
Today
I've finally been paid for my first three weeks of working at Wyevale, only to find that I'm paying about fifty pounds worth of tax. I was assured that, as I'm only eighteen and earning a miniumum wage, I would pay no tax whatsoever. My net pay is just over £216 (I was expecting something more like £300). Moreover, they have spelt my name wrong. Instead of "MR. A. RODDIE", they printed it on the cheque as "MR. A. RODDLE". Can you believe that? Can't these people read, or something?
Onto the second weird thing for the day (sorry about the long post). As I sit here in the electrically-heated darkness of my summerhouse, at the bottom of the garden (back yard?), I can hear the roaring of a pig from the direction of the forest ... a large pig. The edge of the Birches is about a hundred yards west, beyond a field. I think I'm probably hearing the angry growls of one of our resident wild boar as he fends away rival males. We always knew there were boar in Tunstall Forest, but to hear one making a noise that loud (especially bearing in mind we were walking over there this time yesterday night) is enough to make one wish firearms weren't quite so hard to obtain in Britain.
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