Arthur Shuttlewood

Arthur Shuttlewood (1920–1996) was a British journalist, author and ufologist. As a reporter for the Warminster Journal, he documented the strange noises and aerial lights that brought Warminster, Wiltshire, national attention in the mid-1960s. He became the phenomenon's chief chronicler, and his books and sky-watching events helped turn the town into Britain's best-known UFO hotspot.

Early life and entry into Warminster

Sources differ on his birthplace: Wikipedia gives Chelmsford, Essex, while other wiki-style sources give Bishop's Stortford. He moved to Warminster in 1940, served in the Grenadier Guards and the Air Ministry Constabulary, and raised five children there. His job title at the paper is also described inconsistently (features editor, editor, or reporter), but he is consistently remembered as a local journalist whose beat before 1964 was ordinary local news such as minor crime and council meetings.

The 1964–65 sightings and the press

The story began on Christmas morning 1964, when Mildred Head reported sounds on her roof at about 1:25 a.m.; more than 30 people reported similar noises that morning, according to Mental Floss. Pigeons died in February 1965, and aerial sightings followed from June 1965. Shuttlewood was initially skeptical. He later said that after gathering witness statements he became convinced of a UFO link, and Wikipedia reports that he saw an object himself from his window in 1965.

In August 1965, factory worker Gordon Faulkner (23) photographed an object over the town. Shuttlewood passed the picture to the Daily Mirror, which ran it in September 1965. The same Mirror coverage, reported by Ron Rickett, carried a striking counterpoint: engineer Roy Coombs admitted faking a different 'Thing' photograph using a model hung from a tree in Surbiton, and a Mirror photographer showed that a thrown ashtray could look like a saucer. Faulkner insisted his own picture was "definitely NOT a stunt" (Daily Mirror, 13 September 1965, transcribed by Patrick Gross). Shuttlewood, for his part, told the paper his phone line "has been burning hot since Friday."

A 2008 post by local researcher Danny Howell carries the headline "How Gordon Faulkner And Roger Hooton Faked The UFO Photograph Of The Warminster Thing". The article body is behind a login, so this remains an unverified allegation rather than an established finding.

Books, broadcasting and later career

Shuttlewood's major books were The Warminster Mystery (1967), Warnings from Flying Friends (1968), UFOs: Key to the New Age (1971), The Flying Saucerers (1976), More UFOs over Warminster (1979) and UFO's: Visions of a New Age (1981). His UFO writing was launched by a BBC West documentary, Pie in the Sky (1966). In 1976 he was the patron of the Fountain Journal, a Warminster-based UFO publication whose editors clashed with him and co-owner Margaret Tedder-Shepherd; it closed in 1977 after eleven editions. He organized sky-watching events and later retired from them because of ill health. He died in Warminster in 1996.

Assessment

Shuttlewood is best understood as a witness-recorder and promoter rather than an investigator. Critics question the authenticity of parts of his work; one analysis of his books found at least one misdated sighting and a possible misattribution, and reported that the sightings in The Warminster Mystery were more sensational than those his newspaper had printed earlier. Some commentators argue that his enthusiasm shaped the story as much as it documented it. The underlying Warminster reports, including the noises and lights of the mid-1960s, have no accepted explanation, and the wider phenomenon faded by the early 1970s. His record is therefore best treated as contested: an important primary chronicler of a real local wave of reports, whose own interpretation and promotion deserve scrutiny.