This is an excerpt:

Frozen in the sky

…or… Plane sight

One night, in early October 1997, I was driving alone along the A40 road towards Oxford from Witney. It was between 10pm and 11pm the sky was clear and very dark. I wasn’t very far out of Witney, coming down the hill, when I saw an aeroplane in the sky, to the east over the village of Eynsham, between myself and Oxford. The plane was about the size of a small airliner and it had no lights on at all. As I got closer to Eynsham I realised that it was not moving. 

I could see the craft at all times except for when it was obscured by a stand of tall trees.

When I reached Eynsham and right beside the aircraft, I slowed almost to a stop and unwound the car’s window to have a good look at it. The plane was as silent as it was stationary; just hanging there over the village close to the road but much lower than you’d think. I gauged the height of it roughly from the trees nearby – about 3 times their height. It was a solid thing with its nose pointing north towards the road. I didn’t stop, I didn’t even take a photograph – though I had a camera in the car – I just carried on driving. As I drove away I kept an eye on it in the rear view mirror and wing mirror and it didn’t move, just hung there as if it was frozen in the sky.

The incident played on my mind all night and I tried to rationalise what it could have been. The only possibility I could think of was that it might have been an elaborately authentic-looking balloon tethered to the ground for some event in the village. I didn’t see any tethers and the plane didn’t sway at all (which blimps do), and it didn’t look like anything other than an aeroplane in every way but it seemed the only alternative to an extraordinary event. In the morning I phoned the Eynsham post office and asked if there was any special event going on in Eynsham? There wasn’t. I asked if there had been a giant blimp over the village within the last few days. There hadn’t been. A friend of mine drove to Eynsham to have a look for me but there was nothing there.

How I wish I’d stopped, got out and photographed it but it’s really strange
how often people see such strange things and then inexplicably don’t
think to photograph them.

© Ellis C. Taylor
October 1997

The details of the incident were reported at the time and subsequently in print and radio interviews. At the time I didn’t consider that this may have been a hologram, a test perhaps.

Four years later, authorities and eye-witnesses claim that planes of the same size flew into the World Trade Centre towers 1 & 2, and the Pentagon.

Ellis
1st October 2018

For more on Dogged Days, please click here