In September 1942, with Britain still deep in the war and its coastline bristling with the radar installations that had helped win the Battle of Britain two years earlier, Albert Lancaster was working as a guard at just such a site near Cresswell on the Northumberland coast. According to his own account, he felt a sudden, inexplicable urge to go outside, followed almost immediately by an equally sudden compulsion to look directly up at the sky, where he saw a glowing light wrapped in dark mist hanging above him.
His first, entirely reasonable wartime assumption was that he was looking at some kind of German weapon, and he moved to raise the alarm as his training would have required. Instead, he described being struck by a beam of light shining down from the cloud, followed by a distinct floating sensation, before finding himself back at his post with no clear memory at all of what had actually happened to him in between those two moments.
What makes the Cresswell case genuinely unusual among UFO reports is not the original 1942 sighting itself, but how the story developed over the following decades. Lancaster reported nothing beyond the light and the beam at the actual time; it was only around two decades later that he said fuller, more detailed memories began to resurface, describing walking up the beam of light and being taken aboard a craft by a small, pygmy-sized figure waiting for him there. He also reported believing he had developed genuine psychic abilities for a period following the experience. Lancaster did not go public with this fuller, more elaborate account until he was in his seventies, decades removed from the original wartime incident, which makes any independent verification of the later recovered memories essentially impossible today, even though the original 1942 light sighting itself continues to be treated as a real, if entirely unexplained, wartime observation in its own right.
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