The Frodsham "Devil's Garden" Encounter

Frodsham is a small Cheshire town where the River Weaver bends toward the Mersey. In the riverside meadows near the town lies a stretch known as the Devil's Garden. In January 1978 Britain was in the middle of a wave of close encounter reports. Close Encounters of the Third Kind would open in British cinemas that March.

27 January 1978. About 17:45. Four young men, aged 17 to 19, lay hidden in the vegetation near the Weaver weir. They were poaching pheasants.

Then they saw a silver "balloon" float over the surface of the water. It gave off a strong purplish glow, hard to look at. At first they took it for a malfunctioning satellite.

The object left the river and moved horizontally about 6 metres above the ground, seemingly under control. It came down in the undergrowth near them and sat motionless. A faint hum. Then a noise like rushing wind. Its glow turned bright blue.

A figure came out. It was of normal height, dressed in a silver one-piece suit, with a lamp on its head that glowed violet, like a miner's. It looked around the area and at the grazing cows. Then it went back inside. It returned with a second figure, and together they carried a large metal frame.

The cows did not move. They stood completely motionless and silent, as though they had been immobilised. The two figures set the cage around one cow and moved parts of the frame, as if taking measurements.

The young men already feared radiation, and now they feared they would be next. They ran for the bridge as all four felt a tingling in the groin. One said it was like being tugged from behind. His testicles stayed sore for several days, and red marks like sunburn appeared on his upper legs, painful to touch. According to the original report, he was a young man with a strong scientific education.

Jenny Randles, a leading British investigator associated with BUFORA, looked into the case with Paul Whetnall. Their article, "Four Young Men and a UFO," appeared in Flying Saucer Review in September 1980, about two and a half years after the event. The witnesses were never named. They had been poaching on private farmland, and they insisted on anonymity. In 2000 the magazine's editor, Gordon Creighton, looked back on the case as a notable one, and John Schuessler cited its physical effects in his work on UFO-related physiology.

Around October 2007, an investigator named David Sankey raised doubts about the case's validity. Those doubts were never spelled out in public. The 2007 edition of Randles's UFO Study, updated by Robert Moore, called it "a significant UFO sighting claim, although some have since questioned its validity." There are no photographs, ground traces or official records, and accounts disagree on the date and the hour. Patrick Gross lists it as beings, hoax or confusion, with no certainty, while UFO Insight called it inconclusive.

The story lives on in local memory. A 1998 timeline in the Warrington Guardian recalled teenagers who "came across a large dome-shaped object sitting in a field near the Devil's Garden in Frodsham." No one has offered a mundane explanation that accounts for the figures, the frame and the frozen cows. The four poachers remain anonymous, and the Devil's Garden keeps its secret.