The Lytchett Minster Splitting Cigar: Lance Druce, Brian George and Two Police Officers (1967)

Lytchett Minster sits about 4 miles north-west of Poole town centre, on the Dorchester Road. In October 1967 Britain was in the middle of a well-publicised wave of sightings. That same month brought the Devon "flying cross" at Okehampton and the Moigne Down sighting reported by Angus Brooks. No source links those cases to this one. But the sky was in the news.

Lance Druce of Bournemouth was teaching his brother-in-law, Brian George, to drive. They were heading home from a fishing trip at Portland. Eight friends had come along, but the group had got separated.

Dusk. Around 17:30. George noticed something odd in the sky. Then the car's engine sputtered and stalled, leaving both men "staring helplessly out of their window".

Over St Peter's Finger Garage hung "a cigar-shaped form, coffee brown in colour with a row of regular yellow lights along it." The lights looked like windows. The witnesses put it at about 70 ft long and some 200 ft up. Several other motorists left their cars to watch. For about five minutes the two men stared. Then fear sent them back to the car. And the object split. In one telling, the top section broke away from the main body, went beneath it and rejoined. In another, the two halves positioned themselves vertically above each other in the air.

The engine came back to life, and the object rose slightly and began to follow them. "It crossed from one side of the road to the other in order to keep pace with them." It stopped over the police houses opposite the Oasis Cafe, where the car had pulled up. Druce ran for an officer, and one came out. By then the object was gone, and at first he saw nothing unusual.

Then it flickered back. It returned as a blazing mass of coloured light, in bands of red, green, yellow and blue. A second officer came out. "Now two policemen were watching the thing, and it began an uncanny dance." Finally it gained speed and shot out of view, "like a bullet from a gun".

Druce said his legs went weak and the hairs on his arms stood up. George was sick on the drive home. The police took statements. The witnesses never heard anything more. No copy of those statements has surfaced.

Leslie Harris wrote the case up in Flying Saucer Review in late 1969. Hanson and Holloway later added details from Harris. In 2003 the Western Daily Press retold it in a feature on Gary Heseltine's PRUFOS police database. That version speaks only of two off-duty policemen and leaves the motorists out, while the older account puts Druce and George at the centre. The officers seem to have been at home in their police houses, which may explain the label.

The accounts disagree on size, from 70 ft to between 20 and 45 metres, and on exactly how the object split. No hoax has ever been alleged. No conventional explanation has been published, and nobody seems to have checked the sighting against aircraft, balloons or astronomical objects.

For Druce the evening was a turning point. He became an enthusiastic believer in extraterrestrial visitation. Brian George went on to report more sightings around Poole, including an orange sphere near Old Harry Rocks and a Polaroid photograph taken in July 1971. The original Harris report, the exact day and the officers' names are still waiting to be found.