The Girl Guide Leaders' Silent Airborne Machine, Himbleton 1971

Summer, 1971. Three women from the guiding movement in the West Midlands were out together after dark. Mrs Olwyn Grainger, 31, of Wombourne, led the 1st Netherton guide group. Miss Lottie Hare was the Dudley guide commissioner. Mrs Betty McGowan was 37.

The case has long been filed under Wombourne, Staffordshire. But Wombourne was only where Mrs Grainger lived. A catalogue of UFO dates describes three women at a camp in Himbleton, near Droitwich, Worcestershire, on the same night, with the same object. It is almost certainly the same event. A camp would also explain why three guide leaders were standing in a field at eleven o'clock on an August night.

Thursday, August 12, 1971. 23:00. The first thing was the sound. A roar. The women thought a plane was coming down and was going to crash.

Instead, they saw a cigar-shaped object. It carried red and green lights. They judged it 30 to 40 feet long. It came over and stopped. "Around 50 yards away, in the next field, it stayed hovering silently, for over an hour."

An hour is a long time to watch something that should not be there. No occupants were reported. No contact, no after-effects. Just the machine, the lights and the quiet. Then, according to the catalogue, it rose with a noise and disappeared over the trees.

The story broke on Tuesday, August 24, 1971. The Times carried it on page 2. The Wolverhampton Express and Star ran it on page 28. Researchers took note as well. The APRO Bulletin covered it in its November to December 1971 issue, and the BUFORA Journal followed in January 1972 with a piece credited to Mrs K. Smith.

No official investigation is known. The National Archives holds a Ministry of Defence file of UFO sightings for 1970 to 1971, but whether this case is in it has not been checked.

No one has alleged a hoax. The one sceptical note is brief. The Wikipedia summary of the case ends with the remark that the object had red and green lights, "which all aircraft have." No named investigator has taken that idea further. There is also a tension in the record. The press described a silent object, while the catalogue adds a roar on arrival and a noise on departure. Both agree on the long, silent hover in between.

The case's strangest afterlife is musical. The band Henry Cow read the news item about the three women and turned it into a suite of three instrumentals called "Guider Tells of Silent Airborne Machine". Each part bears a witness's name: "Olwyn Grainger", "Lottie Hare" and "Betty McGowan". "Lottie Hare" was written by John Greaves and has been described as "a neo-classical miniature".

The band recorded the suite for John Peel on 24 April 1973. The BBC broadcast it on 8 May 1973. It was their fourth Peel session. In 2009 it appeared as tracks 17 to 19 of The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set on Recommended Records, with the origin story told in Chris Cutler's booklet. Three Girl Guide leaders watched a lit cylinder over a field for an hour. They ended up as song titles. The object itself has never been identified.