The Heytesbury Vicarage Cigar: A Vicar's Family Watches a Glowing Object Over the Village

From December 1964, the Wiltshire town of Warminster began reporting strange sounds and lights. By the summer of 1965 the flap had a name, the Warminster "Thing", and it had drawn press coverage, a UPI wire story and a public meeting. Heytesbury lies about 3½ miles south-east of the town, on the north bank of the River Wylye.

June 3, 1965. About 8:30pm. Patricia Phillips, the vicar's wife, saw a cigar-shaped object in the sky. One account places it to the south. Another puts it over the local churchyard. "The craft was horizontal, not vertical," she said.

It glowed fiery red and threw off a halo of red-orange light, with "a distinct dark circular patch or aperture at the base of the fiery object." It hung there, stationary. A brilliant spectacle, for a good twenty-five minutes or more. Her husband and their three children watched too, and by one account so did a visitor. The 12-year-old son raised a pair of binoculars and drew what he saw.

Then the object changed. "It then seemed to grow shorter, as if turning, and then it vanished." No sound was reported.

After the account was published, seventeen people at Shearwater Lake on the Longleat estate came forward. The same day, Harold and Dora Horlock reportedly saw "twin red-hot pokers hanging downwards, one on top of the other, with a black space in between." One account calls it obviously the same object seen by Mrs Phillips and her family, though the link to the Horlocks rests on a single summary.

Two weeks earlier, Hilda Hebdidge had reported a cigar shape above Heytesbury, with bright lights that winked and blinked in shades of gold and yellow.

The sighting survives through one book, Arthur Shuttlewood's The Warminster Mystery, published in 1967. No Warminster Journal clipping, police report or official file for it has been found online. That matters. The sightings in Shuttlewood's book were reportedly more sensationalistic than those first printed in the Warminster Journal, and at least one incorrectly dated sighting and one possible misattribution have been noted.

Later retellings disagree. One list calls the object metallic and the sighting half an hour long. Others describe a glow. Even the vicar's name is uncertain. A single 2015 article calls him the Reverend Graham Phillips.

Nobody has called this sighting a hoax, and no conventional explanation has been offered for it. For the wider flap, people pointed to mass hysteria, natural phenomena and military activity at the nearby army base, which the military denied. Elsewhere, a Gordon Faulkner photograph printed in the Daily Mirror in September 1965 was later described as faked. It has no link to the vicarage.

The Heytesbury vicarage cigar remains one of the remembered sightings of the 1965 Warminster flap. It appears in Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom and in a run of online retellings, some marking the flap's 50th anniversary in 2015. The son's drawing, if it survives, has not been found online. Neither has an explanation.