the small print! Thus they refused to cough up.
As local insurance sales man Mike West, who dealt with many of the insurance claims, revealed: "it just doesn't make any sense.
Every claim that I've dealt with in the last twenty-six years has been logical and reasonable but this defies reason. It
(the object) zigzagged across the sky. I spoke to one old lady who was petrified. She saw it flying straight towards her
house. It looped and double-looped and was doing other manoeuvres in the sky. Another man saw it from a distance and described
the sky as "suddenly becoming bright red."
Mr West added that, prior to this incident, he had dealt with numerous insurance claims that had come about as a result of
damage caused by lightning and/or thunderbolts. He had never witnessed a case such as this one. On some streets, he said,
windows imploded and exploded in alternate houses, a fact seized upon by one local journalist at the time who wrote: "That
was some thunderbolt!"
Some thunderbolt indeed.
Mr West concluded: "It's as if the whole area was blanketed with electromagnetic radiation.”
To add to this, a local TV and video repair man (whom I will call Bob) told me that all of the sudden the "lights started
to dim and light bulbs fused and started to pop" in his house. The following day he was flooded with calls from people whose
video and TV equipment had been damaged by the "thunderbolt." When I spoke to Bob, a former military man, he certainly came
across as a down-to-earth, level-headed person – "I’m the type of person who needs to see and measure something
before I believe it," were his precise words. Bob told me that on the night in question, just minutes before the impact,
his front door bell started to ring all by itself. Immediately following this, he said, six light bulbs fused simultaneously
and the electrical trip-switch blew. Suspecting a poltergeist – or something of that nature – he began to wonder
what on earth would happen next.
"Suddenly I heard this incredible explosion," he said, still trying to come to terms with the events that followed. "My immediate
reaction was to race upstairs and make sure my family were okay. I've never heard anything like it. I honestly expected
to open my front door and find corpses in the street."
Bob went on to say that although, during his military days, he had seen "one or two things he could not explain," the possible
existence of extraterrestrial intelligence had never really crossed his mind until he began seriously to investigate this
particular case some years later. Even so, he is still not convinced of ET's existence, and thus is still not certain whether
or not the crashed object was "an alien one." But he is convinced that something crashed just south of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire,
on the night of the 12th/13th of October 1987, that the facts surrounding the crash have been deliberately obscured by government
agencies, and that what happened that night has thus far escaped any rational and/or satisfactory explanation. Indeed, Bob
is of the opinion that the "freak thunderbolt" theory is even more ludicrous than the Roswell "weather balloon" story of 1947.
And I have to say I concur.
File 31: Appendix 01
Case Report: Cosmic Top-X39 Eyes Only
In an effort to gain more information about this incident I contacted local UFO researchers Andrew Emerson and Dominic Beglin.
A decade after the event both Andrew and Dominic remain convinced that the incident provoked one of Britain's biggest ever
military UFO cover-ups. Their story follows.
On the night of 12th/13th October 1987, residents reported seeing an object travelling very slowly in a zigzag manner over
Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. It was said to be making a "strange whiny noise, as though it was in some sort of trouble."
Some short while later two more objects were observed coming from the direction of Blidworth, near Sherwood Forest. This
was confirmed by some of the insurance claims, which reported objects coming from three different directions and "colliding
in midair" just south of Mansfield.
According to several witn