T h e--M o o d y--B l u e s--U F O--E n c o u n t e r




The Moody Blues is an English progressive rock band that came on the popular music scene in the 1960's and its surviving members still perform today. Among their innovations was the fusing of rock with classical music, most notably in their 1967 album “Days of Future Passed”. During their career the band has sold more than 70 million albums worldwide and been awarded 14 platinum and gold discs. The Moody Blues were part of 'The British Invasion' and supported The Beatles on their final UK tour in December of 1965. They followed the tour with their first trip to the U.S. appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The Moodys originally had appeared on the pop charts with a heavy beated tune called “Go Now” It was in between the first iteration of the band and the progressive version described above that what appears to have been a close encounter occurred. Graeme Edge and Mike Pinder; members of the original line up of the band recall the events they experienced in 1966 while returning on the motorway from a gig they had done in Manchester that evening. Also present were band members Denny Laine, Ray Thomas and Clint Warwick.

Like many rock and rollers, it's not unusual to be up late at night returning from a show, and so it was that the Moody Blues were outside of London when they noticed something following their cars. Mike Pinder recalls, “We were coming back from Manchester around midnight and we always wanted to get back to London before dawn, otherwise we'd have trouble getting to sleep. We were coming down from Manchester on the day they opened the M6 motorway doing sixty miles an hour. So we're driving home about one o'clock in the morning and I'm sitting in the back, and I'd put my head back and looked out the back window to look at the stars. There was this red light and I said, I don't remember that radio station tower around here.”

“At first, I was convinced it was an aircraft; however, it acted most peculiarly. What was really strange was that when this thing passed nearby, there was no traffic on the road in either direction, and there were none of the usual nocturnal animal or bird noises.”

“So I told the guys to pull over and we got out. We all looked over the top of the car and there was this red ball kind of thing moving across the freeway that turns into a square … like a red dice. As it approached us, it got bigger and bigger, and we were all sort of bathed in this blue light. We ended up getting home three hours late and wondering what the heck was that?”

From what Graeme Edge told his friends, it felt like they were “mesmerized as if in a dream.” The object looked like “a fat cigar with a low protrusion on top, with seven dull red lights on it.” He told Peter Willsher, who relayed the story to the British Flying Saucer Review, that “The upper half of the object appeared metallic, whereas the lower half was red and pulsed from left to right.”

Eventually the group decided to leave, as they were overcome with a feeling of “dread and panic.” Sometime later Graeme Edge was asked to make a sketch of what he thought the aliens on-board looked like, and he drew what has recently become known as the typical ET-type creature, even though very few renderings of such entities had been made at the time. This leads some to believe that the Moody's might have been abducted on-board the craft that night.

According to Jim Dilettoso of Phoenix, AZ., who has worked closely with the group over the years as a special effects and lighting consultant, one of the band's hits written by John Lodge, called “Slide Zone,” is in honor of their sighting.

Thanks to “Educating Humanity” in a post on March 21, 2016, for some of the content of this article.

Here is the full article from Flying Saucer Review:



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