The Unexplained Creature of Ilkley Moor

In the 1980’s, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park of northern England, a retired policeman had a very unsettling experience. On December 1st 1987, retired policeman Phillip Spencer set out on a walk across a windswept Ilkley Moors in the early hours of the morning, taking with him a camera in the hope of photographing the ‘strange lights’ that had recently been reported in the area. As well as it being dark, the moor was swirling with mist and Mr Spencer doubted that he would get any pictures at all, despite having loaded his camera with ultra-light-sensitive film. Suddenly, to his immense surprise, he spotted a human-like creature ahead of him in the gloom. He clicked the camera and duly photographed one of the most talked-about photographs in the history of unexplained phenomena. Although very blurred, the photograph appears to show a ‘humanoid’ figure over 1 metre high, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘Greys’ of UFO legend. Spencer claimed that he ran after the creature, which entered a ‘dome-shaped’ craft that rose rapidly into the sky before he could get a shot of the craft. Spencer remained adamant that what he had seen was an alien, and donated the photo to UFO watchers. Analysis carried out at the Kodak laboratories in Hemel Hempstead suggested that the picture had not been interfered with in any way, but a later computer analysis of the photograph by US Navy expert Dr Bruce Maccabee was inconclusive. When the retired policeman took the photograph on the Moors, of the strange ‘human’ looking creature and saw the craft, he believed the incident lasted merely a couple of minutes, yet when he reached his father-in-law’s house in the village, his intended destination, he noticed that the village clock was an hour fast, or so he thought. It wasn’t – and he appeared to be have ‘lost’ some time. It was this which led him to suspect something else had happened to him after seeing the strange figure on the gloomy Moors. He suspected it was possible he had been abducted. In fact, he would later claim that he had indeed been abducted by an alien craft. When he walked across the moor that early morning, he had with him a compass to help him find his way, and through the gloomy fog he saw the strange-looking being ahead of him on the slopes of the moor. Intrigued, and too surprised to feel any fear, he found himself running toward it, trying to get closer and make out what it was, and it was then that he realized there was a flying craft of some sort, with a dome on top of it, rising up from the moor. It disappeared from sight within seconds however, and the unidentified creature was gone too. He hung around for some time, hoping that both would return so that he could figure out what it was he had just witnessed but neither returned and so he made his way to the village. His compass however was now of no use to him – it was pointing south now instead of north and when he got to the village, his watch said a different time to the village clock. He had lost an hour of time. The photograph that Spencer took was first analysed by a wildlife expert. He concluded that whatever was in the photograph was not any known animal. There was no way to ascertain what the creature in the photo was however. It was dark and quite blurry given the conditions of that morning but analysis of the image in the photo concluded that the strange figure hadn’t been superimposed or added in later, and indeed the photo had not been tampered with at all. It was after this odd encounter, that the policeman began to experience strange dreams at night. It was this that led him to undergo hypnotic regression, organised through the researcher Peter Hough, to try to get to the bottom of what had happened to him on the moor. A Dr Jim Singleton conducted the session and surprisingly it seemed that from Spencer’s recall, his encounter with the creature came after his abduction, and indeed, in his words, the creature was “waving goodbye to him” when he sna...