What happened
Early on a foggy December morning, a retired police officer who later went by the name Philip Spencer set out across Ilkley Moor to visit his father-in-law, carrying a camera and a compass. Near the White Wells spring he heard a hum and saw a small, green, big-headed figure with long thin arms on the path ahead. It waved him off; he raised his camera and took one frame before it scuttled out of sight. Chasing it, he said he glimpsed a domed craft like two saucers joined rim to rim lift off into the cloud. When he reached Menston, the church clock showed about two hours later than he expected and his compass pointed south. He had the film developed in Keighley the same day and contacted UFO researchers Jenny Randles and Peter Hough. Months later, under regression hypnosis, his story grew into a full abduction with medical examination and apocalyptic films. The blurry photo became one of Britain's best-known UFO images.
The official explanation
Skeptics say the image is far too grainy to prove anything and that the small figure could be a person or a cardboard cut-out. They ask why Spencer photographed the being but not the craft, which would be harder to fake, and note that a compass is easy to damage deliberately. The abduction details emerged only under hypnosis, a technique known to generate false memories. Commentators also cite the area's proximity to RAF Menwith Hill and Leeds Bradford Airport as a source of other moorland reports.
The anomalous case
Spencer never sought money and insisted on anonymity, handing the photo's copyright to Peter Hough, who has said he started out extremely skeptical and came to believe him. Hough sent the picture to specialists: technicians at Kodak's Hemel Hempstead laboratory reportedly found no evidence of tampering, and a wildlife photographer said the figure matched no known animal. Jenny Randles examined the rest of the roll and found it consistent with his account, with no test shots of a model in different poses, as a faker might produce. Bruce Maccabee, a U.S. Navy optical physicist, judged the image too grainy for conclusive analysis, which cuts both ways. The independent details, a lost two hours and a reversed compass, were reported before any hypnosis took place. Nick Pope, formerly of the MoD's UFO desk, included the case in a 2011 list of the UK's top ten incidents.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Ilkley Moor UFO incident Wikipedia
- Ilkley Moor, 1987 Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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