FOLLOW US

Oct 5, 1967

First North Devon cross-shaped sighting, three weeks before Willey and Waycott's encounter. Venus is blamed. Nobody tells the constables.

Oct 24, 1967 — 4:10 a.m.

The Devon Flying Cross encounter. Constables Willey and Waycott pursue the object for fourteen miles. A second object joins. Front page of The Times.

Oct 25, 1967

The Sussex Flying Cross: five separate police car crews in East Sussex report an identical object within minutes of each other. Wing Commander Cox also reports seeing a "fiery cross" in Hampshire the same night.

Oct 26, 1967

Angus Brooks — former RAF logistics officer — witnesses the Dorset object for 22 minutes. It transforms from a disc shape into a cross and back. He reports it to the MoD. They suggest he "entered a dream state."

Oct 27, 1967

Cheshire: two constables on foot patrol in Stalybridge, followed minutes later by a third officer in Glossop — all describe a cross-shaped object. MoD files this under reference AIR 20/11890. Classified.

Nov 8, 1967

Parliament debates the Devon case. Three MPs press the government. Defence Minister Rees says: "Nothing leads us to believe this is men from Mars." Files sealed. MoD would receive 365 UFO reports this year — nearly four times the previous year's total.

What the public did not know in 1967, and what UFO researchers only began piecing together decades later, was that the MoD's internal files told a murkier story than the official parliamentary answers suggested. The MoD file on the Devon case — reference AIR 20/11889 — was classified until 2005. When it emerged, it confirmed that investigators had concluded the object was Venus. But it also confirmed that the case had been handled with a level of bureaucratic seriousness rarely applied to astronomical misidentifications.

⬡ Breaking: The U.S. Government Finally Opens Its Files

The Devon case did not exist in isolation. Across the Atlantic, the same autumn of 1967 was generating its own classified paperwork — and that paperwork remained locked away for nearly sixty years. Until now.

On May 8, 2026, the United States Department of Defense launched PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — and began releasing the first tranche of declassified UFO-related government records, spanning incidents from 1944 to the near-present. The release included more than 160 files from the FBI, DoD, NASA, and State Department: eyewitness accounts, photographs, military reports, astronaut transcripts, pilot testimony.