The Newbiggin-by-the-Sea / Cresswell Abduction

In 1942 the Northumberland coast was watched by radar. South of Cresswell village stood the Cresswell radar station, a Chain Home Low site run by RAF No. 60 Group, about three miles north of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea. Albert Lancashire, 27, was a soldier guarding it. One account says he carried a rifle with a fixed bayonet.

Late summer 1942. Most versions say September, and most put him on sentry duty at night. He felt a sudden urge to go outside, and a "strange impulse to look at the sky." He saw "a glowing light surrounded by dark mist."

In one telling a first light slipped behind a cloud. Then a second, yellow light appeared, apparently a beam from the edge of a circular object. Another version has a silent, luminous sphere moving above him in a sunny sky.

Lancashire thought it was a German weapon. He went to raise the alarm. The beam, about a foot wide, swung around. Then it shone directly in his face. "He threw his hands up in the air then felt as though he was floating and promptly passed out."

He woke a few yards away, lying on the ground. After a few minutes he went back to guard duty. He did not report it. For a while afterwards he believed he had psychic powers.

October 1967. According to the account Peter Rogerson later summarised in Magonia, the rest came back. Lancashire recalled being "seized by a pygmy-sized man and carried aboard a craft." The crew were "normal sized," and there was "a 'captain' with dark hair, wearing goggles." Another goggled man leaned over a table and smiled as if in welcome, and Lancashire lay on a couch, "looking up at a blue-domed ceiling," and felt that some sort of medical examination had taken place, though he could remember no details.

Lancashire wrote to Lionel Beer of BUFORA. He had found the address in the Daily Mirror, which had printed excerpts of The Interrupted Journey, the book about Betty and Barney Hill. Around 1969 or 1970 the newsletter COS-MOS ran "What Happened to Mr Lancashire?" Jenny Randles later covered the case in her 1988 book Abduction, and he appears to have told her more. A naked oriental woman on a bed, and goggles placed over his own eyes.

No RAF or Air Ministry inquiry is recorded. There are no photographs, no physical traces and no radar record, even though it all happened at a radar station.

In Magonia in 1994, Rogerson noted that the Daily Mirror excerpts about the Hill case ran in October and November 1966, a year before the memory returned. The beam, the examination and the couch all echo the Hill story. Randles observed that Lancashire "appears to have incorporated his encounters into a semi-religious framework," and he quoted the Bible freely. He also reported other strange experiences, including hypnagogic visions and lights. Nobody has openly called it a hoax. No conventional cause has been offered for the light itself.

The story lives on in Mysterious Britain, UFO Insight and a 2012 Evening Chronicle history of North East sightings, which said he "claimed to have walked up a beam of light." Neil R. Storey's UFOs Over Britain lists it as the Newbiggin abduction. Even the name drifts. Wikipedia calls him Lancaster. One soldier, one yellow beam, and a memory that waited 25 years.