Sighting record / 1960
The early hours of a Monday morning. February 1960. Inside the mess room of the steam locomotive depot at March, in the flat Cambridgeshire Fens, a railman looked out of the window and saw a bright orange light low in the sky toward Stonea. Soon there were well over a dozen men at the glass. At first they took it for a plane coming down on its way to Mildenhall. Then it began to move erratically, glowing with an intense light. It hovered a bit. Then it disappeared. Two police constables came out to the depot. By then there was nothing to be seen.
March is a railway town in the Cambridgeshire Fens. In 1960 its locomotive depot on Hundred Road was a steam shed, coded 31B by British Railways, standing beside Whitemoor Marshalling Yard. The country around it is flat and open. From the depot the land runs south-east toward Stonea, and beyond it, about 35 kilometres away, lies RAF Mildenhall.