The Chasetown "We Want You, Come With Us" Encounter

The night of Thursday 4 May 1995. Two young males were walking home up Rugeley Road in Burntwood, near Fulfen School. The press would later call them "two terrified youths", "two teenage boys" and "two men". Their names were redacted from the official file.

The first sign was heat. The pair "experienced an intense heat when they were walking up Rugeley Road." Their skin turned a glowing red. A later tabloid retelling says a flash of light came first, and that it turned one friend's face "the colour of beetroot".

Then they saw it. In the words of the police inspector's report, it was "a darkish silver inverted saucer-shaped object in a field, which was glowing red beneath. The object was about four houses high in the sky and about 40 feet away from them."

Beneath the machine, a lemon-like head appeared. A voice came from it. "We want you, come with us." No account describes a body, eyes or clothing, only the head and the words. The same tabloid version adds that the object emitted an intense heat before zigzagging off east to west.

The youths ran to Chasetown Police Station. They arrived out of breath, distressed and agitated. Neither was drunk or under the influence of illegal substances. The next day both provided the police with detailed written reports.

At the station, a sergeant had seen something too. A red light was visible in the sky with white lights surrounding it. In his report he judged that it "could quite easily have been a civil airline."

Staffordshire Police returned to the area the next day. They found no other witnesses. A local farmer had been crop-spraying the field. He had seen nothing unusual, and according to ABC News he denied having spoken with anyone. That effectively closed the inquiry without resolution. The inspector's report and the two statements went to the Ministry of Defence UFO desk, Sec(AS)2.

The MoD published no finding of its own. Coverage of the case repeated the department's standard line, that there was "no evidence whatsoever to suggest that intelligent life from outer space or alien spacecraft have landed on our planet." No hoax finding or confession has ever been published. The airliner suggestion covers the lights seen from the station, not the close encounter in the field.

The accounts also disagree on details. The time is given as 11pm and as 11:55pm. The witnesses are youths, boys or men. The head is one, or several.

In August 2009, The National Archives released a fourth instalment of MoD UFO files: 14 files, just over 4,000 pages, covering 1981 to 1996. The Guardian's Alan Travis led his piece "The truth is out there" with the Chasetown case. ABC News and Lichfield Live ran it the same week, and David Clarke guided listeners through the release's highlights in The National Archives podcast. The inquiry closed without an answer. The words remain on file. "We want you, come with us."