UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

BY HANNAH MALTWOOD

David Gillham is a man who has been searching for the truth about UFOs for more than 20 years after spotting something he couldn’t explain in the skies above his Truro home.

He was so intrigued by the unusual sight that he started to look into other sightings around the local area, made contact with Army and RAF bases and even started a weekly meet-up for like-minded people to share their experiences.

p:nth-of-type(2)","sizes":[[8,8]],"hideOnSensitiveArticle":true,"relativePos":"after","additionalClass":"in-article","name":"div-gpt-ad-vip-slot","type":"VIP"}" data-response-start="998.0500000000001" data-type="gpt" data-requested="1080.835" data-google-query-id="CLj_i7L7w9YCFQ2KdwodPmIFFg" data-timer-slot-rendered="2115.2200000000003" data-rendered-width="1" data-rendered-height="1" data-response-end="3380.355" data-viewable="true" style="text-align: justify;">

At its peak, the group had 100 attendees all interested in mysterious activity over Cornwall.

While the group stopped many years ago, Mr Gillham has been inviting “open-minded people” from across the county and farther afield to attend the annual convention hosted by the Cornwall UFO Research Group (Cuforg).

The convention aims to help people learn more about the different theories that could explain unidentified flying objects, share their own stories and find out more about the many sightings reported to Cuforg every year.

David Gillham, founder of the Cornwall UFO Research Group, which hosts the annual UFO convention

Mr Gillham explained that he had first formed the research group after his own sighting in 1995.

He said: “I was looking out of the window at home, towards Nansavallon Woods and I saw two red lights hovering just above the trees. I live on top of a hill so the lights were at eye level.

“I called the wife to come and look and she saw them too. Then the lights went off towards Truro.

“I went down the little lane behind the old Richard Lander School so that I was looking down on to the woods. The lights had gone by the time I got there and it was pitch black by that time. Then two or three helicopters came over. They started criss-crossing over the woods and then a plane flew over quite low.

“After about half an hour I decided to go home and when I got there my wife was standing in the kitchen with the lights off. She was at the window and she said, 'those lights weren’t helicopters, I’ve just seen helicopters fly over and it wasn’t the same'.”

Mr Gillham was so determined to get to the bottom of what he had seen that night that he started carrying out his own research.

“I went down into the valley the next day and started knocking on doors," he said. "I really wanted to find out what the lights were, but no-one knew.

“Then I called Culdrose but they couldn’t tell me anything. It’s very interesting, but I have never been able to get to the bottom of it.”

UFO spotted over the sea near St Austell, the witness took one photograph from Black Head and Trenarren, which was unveiled at the Cornwall UFO Conference hosted by the Cornwall UFO Research Group (Image: © APEX NEWS & PICTURES)

More than 20 years later, the lights Mr Gillham spotted over Truro that night remain a mystery.

But the incident sparked an interest in other UFO sightings across the county and Mr Gillham said he has had hundreds reported over the years, including a mass sighting in 2000 and a councillor who claimed she had close encounter with a flying saucer.

Mr Gillham said: “There was a mass sighting in Cornwall in 2000. It was an evening in December at around 6pm when someone spotted four lights in the sky. The back light was going on as the front was coming off and it looked like a circle with something in the middle that was covering the lights as it flew.

“It flew over Marazion, Helston, Falmouth , over Truro and then up the A30 towards St Austell. Then a helicopter flew over straight after.

“I then came across a man from Ponsanooth who had managed to video the UFO, it definitely looked circular. It was seen by more than 20 different people that night.”

Kelvin Barbery from St Agnes, took this photograph of a UFO spotted in the skies between Swanpool and Maenporth (Image: Kelvin Barbery)

While sightings of mysterious lights in the skies are an interesting topic for many people in Cornwall, which Mr Gillham described as “a hotspot” for UFO activity, it was a close encounter that proved the enthusiasts' most interesting tale.

“One of the most interesting stories I have ever heard was from Councillor Joan Vincent from St Austell in the Sixties,” Mr Gillham said. “I went to her house to interview her about what she had seen.

“At the time there was a lot of sightings in the area. It had got to the point that students were climbing up to the top of hills at night to try to see something.

“This councillor said that she had gone down towards the clay pits with her husband. She said there had been a bright light that was so bright it almost blinded them.

“She looked over the top of a Cornish wall where the light was coming from and said that in the field on the ground was a UFO. She said it frightened the life out of them both and they shot off in their car.

“Although she told me about it, she wasn’t ready to speak out in public. A while later she told Bella Magazine and the West Briton about it and said she felt it was time she spoke out. Afterwards she had a lot of people contact her and say that they had seen this object take off from the field.”

This image drawn by Councillor Joan Vincent showing what had she had witnessed, appeared in the Cornish Guardian (Image: Cornish Guardian)

Cornwall Live’s print editions, including the Cornish Guardian carried the story in 1995 as well as a follow-up story when more people contacted the paper, breaking their silence over the UFO that they had seen over the clay country more than 30 years before.

Over the years Mr Gillham has compiled all of the sightings reported to him. Many, he says, can be answered simply by objects such as weather balloons, the space station overhead or Chinese lanterns, but many others remain a mystery.

Mr Gillham said: “I’ve seen objects myself. I’ve seen a silver round object way up the sky. I’ve seen an object coming in and out of the clouds and then a helicopter shoot up to the same area.

“I’ve also had lots of very good sightings reported in Cornwall over the years and lots more don’t report it.

“There are a lot of different theories of what the UFOs could be including things crossing out of different dimensions. I can’t tell you what they are because I don’t know. I have been looking for an answer for all these years and I still haven’t found one. It’s very interesting. I keep an open mind.”

Joan and Roy Vincent photographed at the scene of their close encounter

The UFO conference will give other like-minded people the chance to come together to share their own sightings and hear theories from experts in the field.

“We have four talks throughout the day, one from an expert who is coming over from Sweden to talk to us,” said Mr Gillham. “One of the main reasons for the conference is for like-minded people to come together and talk about what they have seen, hear the different theories, without being ridiculed.”

The 20th annual UFO conference will take place in the Fal Building at Truro and Penwith College on Saturday, October 7.

Mr Gillham added: "We have some really interesting talks this year. We always try to find different speakers from across the UK and further to make it interesting for everyone.

"We had David Icke come to speak to us one year."

David Icke looked at the records of Cornish Sightings with David Gillham, when he attend the Cornwall UFO Conference as a speaker

The doors will open at 9.50am, with the closing speech by Mr Gillham at 5.15pm. There will be four talks throughout the day:

Ghost rockets, Swedish military cases, by Clas Svahn
The spiritual consequences of UFO disclosure and contact with extra-terrestrials, by Alan Foster
Are UFOs extra-terrestrial craft? By Nigel Watson
The Earth its ghosts and our past in its creation, by Tim Water

Tickets cost £25 and can be purchased on the door.

For further information visit the Cornwall UFO Research Facebook page.

{ http://www.cornwalllive.com/ }

The universe is a weird place. We’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of what makes physical reality tick here on Earth, while the goings-on of various objects and energies in space sometimes defy even our wildest scientific theories. Among the many unexplained phenomena we can observe with our scientific instruments are so-called cosmic rays, blasts of high-energy radiation that zoom through the universe close to the speed of light.

It has been speculated that these rays might originate from distant supernovae.

These ‘rays’ are actually band of particles made up of protons and the nuclei of common elements like hydrogen and iron and their energy levels are the strongest observed in nature, over 1,000,000 times stronger than what man-made particle accelerators can create. These particles are mostly deflected by the Earth’s atmosphere, but sometimes make it through where they can irradiate flight crews and even scramble electronic circuits.

When these rays hit our atmosphere, they break apart into secondary particles and rain radiation down upon us.

When these rays hit our atmosphere, they break apart into secondary particles and rain ionized particles and electromagnetic radiation down upon us.

For years, the source of these cosmic rays has eluded astronomers’ best attempts at explaining them. However, a groundbreaking study conducted at the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina might have finally found their source. After observing cosmic ray particles bombarding Earth for twelve years, a team of over 400 scientists believe they have pinpointed the source of these mysterious rays. According to their headache-inducingly technical publication in Science, the researchers believe the source of the 30,000 particles they observed is a distant region of space with an abnormally high concentration of galaxies.

Could some type of unknown galactic phenomenon be causing these rays?

The University of Adelaide’s Bruce Dawson says that this suggests that Earth is bombarded by stardust from the farthest reaches of space:

This clearly indicates an origin of particles outside of the Milky Way and is a very exciting outcome; the result of years of careful work with a highly tuned giant detector. This is the first conclusive evidence that real atomic material, not just star-light, arrives at Earth from distant galaxies.

This study has interesting implications for the formation of all the matter in the universe, possibly even confirming a ‘center’ out of which all matter is expanding. As Carl Sagan put it, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” But where did that stuff come from? Studies like this one make me wonder if there actually was a ‘beginning’ to it all or if everything has just always been. Perhaps the fact that our lives have a clear beginning and end make us try to force that type of narrative onto the universe around us. It’s kind of terrifying and reassuring at the same time to imagine that all that is has always been and always will be. Except for us, of course. We’re all gonna die and rot in the ground.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }