Encounter record / 1978
Friday 17 March 1978. About 11:30 pm. Service engineer Ken Edwards was driving his van home to Warrington, past the atomic energy site at Risley in Cheshire. Something was coming down the embankment. At first he took it for a man climbing. It was not. The figure stood at least 7 ft tall, silver from head to foot, with a dark featureless face and two thin arms jutting straight out of its chest. It walked on stiff legs that seemed to have no knees. Then two pencil-thin beams of white light shot from its eyes. Edwards could only move his eyes. Decades later, a researcher offered an earthly answer. The night has kept its strangeness all the same.
Risley sits near Warrington, in Cheshire. In 1956 the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority took over part of the former Royal Ordnance Factory at Risley Moss, and by 1970 the UKAEA site employed 4,500 people. On 17 March 1978 Ken Edwards, a 39-year-old service engineer, was making the 15-mile journey home to Warrington after a union meeting in Greater Manchester. His van carried a radio transceiver. The road ran beside the nuclear facility.