Pinner, Middx, 30 Aug 1969
Dear Mr Winslow,
Mr A. E. Whiteland of Saxmundham has let me know your address in connection with his mother's observation of a flying platform at some time during the first war. I am very interested in Mrs Whiteland's story, and if you have any ideas as to what the object might be, I'd be very grateful to hear them.
Yours sincerely, C. Grove
He then wrote to Mr Whiteland.
Pinner, Middx., 2 Sept. 1968
Dear Mr Whiteland,
Very many thanks for the completed questionnaire and for the photograph - the more I hear about this case, the more interesting it becomes.
I was particularly interested to hear about the telegraph and electric wires. Was the electric power house already working at the time of the incident, do you think, and would I be right in suggesting that it was one of the first built in the area?
I have one or two more questions about the observation itself, but I expect your mother must be sick of answering questions by now, so these I'll leave for the time being. I'm sorry to have upset her over the possibility of publication. She can remain anonymous if she wants; when I suggested the idea I thought she wouldn't mind as you had already published the letter in the Mirror. But I can say that I don't think anyone interested will suggest she was "seeing things".
I would be very grateful for any other background information, such as you sent regarding the local aerodromes. One question, which may seem rather stupid: at that time, can you remember there being any so-called haunted houses in the area? -or were there any ghost stories, or anything unusual of that sort? (perhaps you had better not mention this to your mother, or she will think I am a bit funny!)
Thank you for Mr Winslow's address - I have written to him. I have had a reply from Mr Graham, but he cannot remember anything about what his mother saw.
Lastly, I wonder if you have a telephone number where I can contact you, since it is somewhat faster than writing. Actually I don't think there is much else I can ask about specific points, but if in thinking back your mother remembers any odd details* (such as seeing the men's boots as they moved away from her) I'd like to hear them. Thank you again for going to so much trouble.
Yours sincerely, C. Grove
p.s. I too wonder why it is that no-one else reported seeing the object. I am of the opinion, though, that there are a lot of people alive today who saw similar things, and yet didn't dare to say so for fear of ridicule. I had hoped that the publication of your letter in the Mirror would induce some of these people to come forward, though unfortunately, it seems, they haven't. (Unless of course this Mr Winslow is one.) - C.G.
* Particularly with regard to the men
Having sent the above letter, Carl Grove was somewhat dismayed to receive this reply from Mr Winslow.
He then wrote another letter to Mr Whiteland.
Pinner, Middx., 4 Sep. 1968
Dear Mr Whiteland,
I thought I'd let you know that you can expect a letter from Mr Winslow, angry at you having given me his address. I wrote to him on 30th August asking for information, and his reply, dated 3rd September, was the most unpleasant letter I have ever received. For some reason, he considered my letter insulting (his underlining). I have enclosed copies of both my letter and his, and I think you will find that, as far as writing offensive letters goes, Mr Winslow has a considerable lead over me.
I thought it best to send you all the information, and I hope you aren't concerned over this. Whenever someone has their address published in connection with such an incident, there is always someone who writes to them, claiming to know all about it, and often saying that they've ridden in one of these objects themselves. Recently, quite a well known writer wrote me two or three letters under assumed names - as a joke, apparently!
Yours sincerely, C. Grove
p.s. I haven't replied to Mr Winslow, and I don't intend to.
Mr Whiteland's reply was delayed as he was away for most of September.
Saxmundham, Suffolk, 29/9/68.
Dear Mr Grove,
Your two letters awaited me when I came home, and the one from Mr Winslow did surprise me as he had seemed a bit eager to supply his knowledge to me about the object. With this in mind I thought he would be only too pleased to write, but it seems as if I was greatly mistaken. After all I only gave you the part of his letters in which he described the materials that the platform was made of. Having received a letter from him at the same time as yours arrived, he no doubt thinks I owe him an apology and after these four weeks has given it up as a bad job.
Well now to your letter of the 2nd, the electric light station was working during the War '14-'18, as far as Mother can remember it would be about 1912 when she thinks it started. "I remember the machinery being taken there, and the people who worked there" and she mentioned two names I had heard of and others, but of course they are dead by now, those two persons are I do know.
"Well as for haunted houses, nothing around here" Mother said. People always made up different tales but they were something I suppose one started and others added pieces on. But I can assure you that I's ve never known of anything of that kind, all the time I've lived around this part. My Mother has told us of things when she was young and what she had heard, etc; but not of around here.
Other details she cannot remember about the men, no doubt something one day will be mentioned when her memory is stirred by something said. I'll let you know.
There is a telephone in this village, but I am not much good on these things. Sorry over the delay.
Yours sincerely, A.E. Whiteland
Carl Grove wrote and thanked Mr Whiteland, but appears to have made little further progress with his inquiries. The following year, Gordon Creighton, who had also written to Mr Whiteland, published an article about the case ("The Aldeburgh platform", Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Jan./Feb. 1969). Eventually Carl Grove wrote to the Editor, summarising his findings on the case.
Pinner, Middx., 3 June 1969.
C. Bowen Esq, Editor, FSR
Dear Mr Bowen,
I was interested to see Gordon Creighton's article, "The Aldeburgh Platform", in the January/February issue of the Review because I had done some research into this case late last year, like Mr Creighton, by correspondence with Mrs Whiteland's son. He very helpfully provided a lot of information about the event, some of which is absent from the FSR article, so I thought I should send this along.
1.Mrs Whiteland was somewhat worried as the object approached her, as although she could see no guns on it, she felt it might fire on the houses. She suggests she was "more puzzled how they kept up".
2. The object approached her in a perfectly straight line, neither wavering nor changing height.
3. The men were all looking straight outwards, not moving, and Mrs Whiteland feels that they could have seen her.
4. The object was flying at about 30' height, and this indicates that at its closest point the witness must have had an excellent view of its base. Unfortunately she cannot remember any details with regard to colour, construction etc. There were no ropes attached to the object.
5. When Mr Whiteland read out my question, "were there any lights on (the object)?" Mrs Whiteland's response was: "What, in daylight at 12 o' clock?" I think this testifies to the fact that to Mrs Whiteland the object was real and solid, and did not have the quality of a dream or hallucination.
6. When the object turned, it turned very quickly, a right angled turn within perhaps two or three yards; the men did not seem surprised; it was "as if they knew they were going to turn". Apparently when it turned the leading edge became the new left hand edge, and the old left hand edge became the back edge - to elicit this information I provided two diagrams and tried to make the query free of any leading, as it is clearly a critical point.
7. To my question, "Are you quite sure that, had there been an airship above the object, you would have seen it?" Mrs Whiteland's answer was: "I looked up but couldn't see anything. If there was an airship it must have been high up. Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place."
8. The object could have turned in response to one of the "men" catching sight of the local station through the gap between the buildings; this was the witness's impression.
9. The area is of some possible strategic importance. The object first appeared a few yards from a recently constructed (about 1912) electricity generating plant, and both telegraph and electricity lines lie over the crossroads. An army camp was situated only 150 yards or so up the road from the witness, and there were two aerodromes within 3 miles of the area, apart, of course from the railway yards over which the object moved.
10. There were no haunted houses or any other unusual phenomena in the area.
11. Mr Charles Gibbs-Smith, consultant to the Review, kindly supplied me with photostats showing the sort of observation gondola carried by the Zeppelins in this period. I sent one of them on to Mr Whiteland, and asked him to show it to his mother only after she had answered a few other questions relating to the object. She states firmly this was quite unlike the object.
12. I wrote to one or two other people who had written to the witness who seemed to have some information about the activities of Zeppelins in the area, but received no useful information.
13. All in all then, my information on the event may be summarised as follows.Duration, about 3 - 4 minutes. Speed of object, 5 - 10 mph. Since the road is about 45 feet wide, at its nearest point the object must have been no more than 25' from the witness. The turn came suddenly, and the radius of the turning circle must have been in the order of 10 ft. Witness did not see men's boots until it had passed close over the roof of the building beyond the 30' gap through which it had passed.
On the basis of this, I think the "airship" explanation may be discounted on the following points:
1. The lack of sound.
2. The lack of ropes, or even if ultrafine wires were used, the lack of any wavering or swaying typical of a suspended object.
3. The fact that although the witness was actively looking out for a Zeppelin, she couldn't see one. (Quite possibly it might be argued, however, that her view would have been obstructed by the overhang of her roof, although this fails to apply when the object was distant.)
4. The extremely sudden and sharp turn, with no outward sway, and no tendency for the object to twist round after the turn due to the suspension wires.
5. Apart from purely physical reasons, why should the Germans, or anyone for that matter, drop an observation device within 30' of ground level on a clear, sunny day, and place in it 12 men when 4 could have done the job? Why endanger these men with a turn through a narrow gap which would in any case be beyond the capabilities of an airship at that date?
I think that the above summarises all that I have been able to glean from my correspondence with Mr Whiteland. I find it interesting that, although there was plenty of opportunity for Mr Whiteland to do so, he never mentioned any possibility that the object might not have been of terrestrial origin - and of course, I carefully refrained from any comment as to what I thought the object might be.
Mr Whiteland has kindly promised to let me know if his mother succeeds in recalling any other details of the alleged event, and I shall naturally pass on anything I receive in this way.
Yours sincerely, C. Grove
DISCUSSION
A rather odd feature of the above correspondence is that there is only one brief reference to an incident which might be highly relevant to this case. This is where Mr Whiteland, in his letter of 22 August 1968 writes:
"By the way, the Zeppelin Graham wrote to me [about] in his letter did meet its end at 3 A.M. in the morning, and that it was a bright moonlight night. (checked up)"
In his letter to the Daily Mirror Mr Whiteland said that his mother recalled that the incident happened "about the middle of World War One", and in his letter of 19 August 1968 to Carl Grove, Mr Whiteland quotes his mother as saying, when he asked her what time of the year it was: "I don't know[,] must have been around summer time[;] I know it was a nice day and bright."
The Zeppelin referred to, L48, crashed on the night of 17 June 1917, only a few miles away from Aldeburgh, at Holly Tree Farm, Theberton. The Zeppelin crashed in flames killing 16 of its crew of 18. A brief account of how it was brought down is given in an article titled "The History of Stow Maries" on the Anglia Model Flying Club web site. For pictures of L48 and its crash site see the Zeppelin web site, and for a stereoscopic photograph of an observation car recovered from a wrecked Zeppelin, see Stereoscopic Images of Lighter than Air Flight.
The dead crew members were buried in the churchyard of St Peter's church, Theberton, and their remains were moved to a military cemetery many years later. There is a memorial plaque in the churchyard, and a piece of the Zeppelin's framework is displayed in the church porch. For further details see the web sites Suffolk Cam and Simon's Suffolk Churches.
In view of the Zeppelin crash, in which 16 men apparently burned to death, and the fact that it occurred only a few miles away from Mrs Whiteland's home, it is impossible to believe that she remained unaware of the details of this incident. Is it possible that her apparent observation of the flying platform was what some psychologists call a screen memory? On the mailing list Psychoanalytic Studies one of the list members defines screen memories as follows:
Screen memories are those memories that serve to mask other memories. They are like a screen that separates two rooms. What one sees is only the screen. Yet the purpose of the screen is to hide what lies behind it, to keep it out of sight and "out of mind". The memories deceive us in the sense that they portend to be the only memory when in fact they are but a protection, a defense against the recollection of other memories that they hide.
Perhaps this case has nothing to do with screen memories, but in view of the facts that the object reported by Mrs Whiteland obviously had only a conceptual connection with airships and that no one else reported seeing the object, or anything resembling it, some kind of psychological explanation seems to be indicated. However, her evident lack of interest in stories of ghosts, or other strange occurrences, suggests that she was not the sort of person who tends to "see things" unlike many persons who claim to have witnessed strange and elusive phenomena. This makes the sighting rather puzzling, even though there was only one known witness.
ANOTHER FLOATING PLATFORM
I am grateful to Peter Hassall (New Zealand) for drawing my attention to another platform report, concerning a sighting by the Reverend Pitt-Kethly in London on 18 October 1955 (Jonathan M. Caplan, "Another floating platform", Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, May/June 1969). At 4.10 p.m. he was travelling on a train which was halted by a signal at West Hampstead viaduct when he "immediately noticed the strange craft as it sailed effortlessly into view. As in the Aldeburgh case, the platform was travelling on a perfectly straight course at a speed of about 20 m.p.h. The craft was reddish-brown and grey, quite soundless, the size of a small bus, and at a height of approximately 120 ft."
"During the three to four minutes that the object was in view, Reverend Pitt-Kethly noticed about 30 immobile helmeted figures with human faces - all apparently dressed in khaki uniforms - some of whom were seated and staring fixedly forward."
