Jarring Jape of the Space Ape

Something was moving in the darkness on the 22nd of March 1979 - and this nebulous something was bothering many a motorist travelling north on Sheppey Way. The critter was loping around on the left side of the aforementioned road on the Isle of Sheppey, and was busy dispensing completely free confusion and questioning of previous assumptions about the nature of reality to all those moving along the road towards mainland Kent from the Isle.

## Metallic Monkey Business

Sheppey Way is (or at least was as of 1979) the only route going between the Isle of Sheppey and the Kent mainland in England, and so I can imagine that Mr. Frank Rossien was in the midst of making this exact journey on the fateful night in question when he caught sight of a very '*unusual*' entity to the left of the road. BUFORA investigator Valerie Martin felt it necessary to clarify that, although Mr. Rossien was originally from the Netherlands, he had been brought up in Britain and so presumably knew the country well. He was well-read and was regarded as intelligent, and apparently had very little knowledge about UFOs and no knowledge of the silver-suited entities that had been popping up all over Britain at the time of his encounter.

There was no lighting on the part of the road along which Rossien was travelling, and the nearest building is a secluded farmhouse 300 yards off the other side of the road - accessible seemingly only via a nondescript path. The scenery was dominated by marsh-lands and waterlogged fields, and grazing sheep were dotted about said rural panorama. Tall trees were very rare in this locale, with nothing much for the avid aborist to fawn over save for some sparse poplars lining the road later on - away from the point at which Rossien would eventually have his close encounter. That point, specifically, was roughly a mile away from the nearby Kingsferry Bridge, and was situated between a railway line (half a mile away) and a line of pylons.

Rossien initially took the entity with its '*curious loping walk*' to be an unfortunate human struggling down a bank on the left side of the road, but he also noted that an ordinary person should've had considerably more difficulty navigating the treacherous terrain in the dark. As he drove past the figure, he briefly caught it in his headlights and was thus able to get a better look at it - and what he saw would certainly not be something he was going to forget in a hurry. He hardly had a chance to slow down by the time that he realised what he was seeing.

He described the creature as being clad in a one-piece suit and helmet - seemingly lacking visible joints and specified not to be self-luminescent. He could only see the hind three-quarters of the head, but he could tell that said cryptic cranium was rounded in shape but that it also had a flattened top comparable to a tin can. The thing's head was rather small compared to its broad-backed and stocky body, and there seemed to be no distinct neck or joining point between the head and shoulders. Although Rossien could not see its full face, he got the impression that it was wearing some kind of a '*visor*'. He seemed to come to the conclusion that the odd critter was male, and noted that he was unable to recall anything about the hands and had failed to notice anything unusual (more so than the fact that they were attached to a bona fide spaceman) about the feet. There was no mud on the creature's legs, which was suggested to be quite odd due to the swampy conditions of the ground and the rainy day that had preceeded the night in which the metallic menace now lurked.

Other motorists claimed to have seen this odd figure, and they are known to have called the police to stress this point - but as of the article published in my source for this post, they were '*proving difficult to trace*'). Earlier that evening, at 9pm, a couple had been driving the opposite way along Sheppey Way when they spied a UFO. It was a glowing red shape with several white lights revolving around it, and it was apparently first seen '*in the direction of Sittingbourne*' before proceeding to follow the witnesses' car almost until they reached London.

## Sources

BUFORA Journal Volume 8 Number 5 (November 1979)

'Humanoid Encounters' by Albert Rosales