The following account refers to events that possessed a major connection to the county of Hampshire.  However, the presumption that such bizarre events are centred upon locations does not appear to be entirely true.  Instead, I would venture to suggest that locations possess a great deal of instructive symbolism, and that these phenomena are more closely connected to people.

Whilst the following ‘essay’ is years old, the bizarre transmissions it refers to are still present after a period of 18-years.  Minor grammatical corrections have been made to the text.

The story behind ‘The Gizmo’, by Stephen Clementson

The Gizmo, as it came to be known, only formed a minuscule part of a vast array of bizarre phenomena.  Nevertheless, the Gizmo supplied an awful lot of data, although the method of information extraction frequently employed observational techniques that were essentially the reverse of the norm.  In this passage, I have attempted to provide as much information as I can.  But over the course of an entire decade’s worth of research into a number of factors, such results become a mighty tome.  Furthermore, the connections are not always so clear.

From the mid 90s onwards, other factors would have to be taken into account, and Gizmo research was finally halted in 1998.  Nevertheless, more than enough had been learned about the subject to write an account about it.  This account refers to the first, and most important, two years of Gizmo research.  A lot would happen that could be greatly expanded upon; sub-factors that could be expanded upon in their own right.  But that would make this report so hopelessly convoluted, that it would become utterly perplexing to the reader.  The following account is complex and knotted enough already.  However, any extra information required will be gladly supplied to those who wish it.

Very much entangled within the overall scheme, this device was born as a response to several electrical interference reports from TV camera crews in English crop circles.  Until the spring of 1992, I was completely unaware of such reports.  But then I got to read about them in a crop circle book, published a year-or-so earlier.  There were two such reports, one from 1989, and the other, dated 1990, pertained to the first crop formation that my wife and I had ever visited.  Although that occurrence represents a story in its own right, the strange event that took place that summer’s day in 1990 added substantial weight to the subsequent electrical interference report.

Although I didn’t know it then, this would form a very small part of an otherwise very large “two-&-two” process.  And, by electing to build an electronic sensor, I was about to engage in a task that would unify phenomena that were previously thought to be separate.  This would prove to be a very hit-and-miss affair in the early days, and the first attempt, constructed from odd electronic components that I had stashed-away in a suitcase, detected nothing more than a distant VLF transmitter, whilst held aloft in a Hampshire crop circle.

The original design objective was based on the premise that this interference was electro-magnetic, and was occurring at the high-end of the audio spectrum.  I stuck with that scheme, and had another crack at the problem.  The second attempt had not yielded any results.  But circumstances would dramatically change in early hours of the 31^st of May 1992.  It had been by chance that my wife and I had switched venues; we had previously elected to keep a night vigil over the crop fields of ‘The Pepperbox’ (named after an old folly, near Salisbury), in the hopes of witnessing the formation of a crop circle.

I had walked away from the car, leaving Lesley, my wife, alone.  But upon my return, I discovered that a small group of youths had been threatening to assault her.  They had gone, but we agreed that moving-on would be the best thing to do.  Meandering through the countryside, stopping at a pub on the way, we made our way to Cheesefoot Head, Hampshire: a known crop circle hotspot in 1992.  Cheesefoot Head is located close to the ancient town of Winchester.

We arrived at the Cheesefoot Head Car Park around midnight, and found that there were already a number of people keeping an eye of the crop fields.  Out of curiosity, I switched the Gizmo on.  According to this device, there was nothing unusual happening, or, at least not at that stage.  But at precisely 00:30 hours BST (on May 31 1992) an inexplicable radiant heat was felt by all the watchers, seemingly associated by unexplained flashes of light in the woods behind us.  At that precise moment, the previously silent earpiece of the Gizmo started to emit pulsing noises.  It was oscillating, as though receiving a pounding from an extremely strong, local transmitter. 

At precisely the same moment, our dog, Heidi, began to act rather oddly.  She was sitting in the back of our estate car, and had been a contented passenger up until that particular moment.  Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Heidi became terrified.  She was growling in self-defence at something threatening that none of us could sense.  There were other dogs on site, but none of them were in the slightest bit perturbed.  We’d seen nothing like this since visiting a Wiltshire crop formation, back in 1990.  In that instance, Heidi had become inexplicably petrified.  The only times, prior to 1990, that Heidi had acted so oddly was on two occasions during the 1980s, and both of these abnormal responses had been triggered by UFO sightings.  Concerned for the well-being of our normally placid dog, Lesley went over to the back of the car, but Heidi, in a fearful panic, bit her.  Biting Lesley was something that Heidi, who died in 1994, simply never did.

Meanwhile, that pounding signal would go on for some time, enabling me to ascertain that there was some directionality to it.  However, I could not identify the source, nor could I see the amazing sight that two other, quite independent, researchers were seeing.  (Unfortunately, the Gizmo was unable to differentiate between signal sources that were in front, from those that were behind, its single detector coil.  The only strategy I had devised to overcome this problem was to triangulate, which involved moving the Gizmo through two positions.)  In any case, it wouldn’t be until the early hours of daylight that I, along with other night watchers, would spot the result of the previous night’s activities.

Not far from where we had been watching, on the other side of the road, there was field of green barley.  In that barley crop, we could see the tracing of a five circle set.  It was clearly incomplete, in as much as the crop hadn’t fallen.  There was a small white van in the rough car parking area behind that barley field.  As we approached, we could see that the two male occupants of the van were asleep.  The sound of our approach appeared to disturb the slumbers of one of them.  He woke with a start, and jumped out of the car in a lightning-quick action.

“You’ve got to believe me”, he demanded, gesturing towards the affected barley field.  From their location, they could see the events that everybody else had missed the previous night.  It would appear that the men in the van had witnessed two luminous orbs descend from the sky.  If that wasn’t strange enough, the orbs that the gentleman described as being blue-white in colour, had then proceeded to dance around in the barley crop.  Having done so, those self-same orbs rose up into the air, came together as one, and then shot off into the night sky.  No surprise, therefore, that this gent was so clearly agitated.

I was getting very quickly acclimatised to the ambience weirdness, and my lack of surprise at this mysterious activity report was supported by a new Gizmo observation.  Indeed, there was a mysterious crackling noise, seemingly emanating from the unfinished crop formation.  As I moved toward the formation, I observed that the signal direction altered in step, seemingly ‘locked’ on the formation.  This was weird, especially as the signal strength remained exactly the same.  If the signals had emanated directly from the formation, then surely the signal strength would have varied at a rate inversely proportional to the square of the distance.

The curious spookiness of the early hours of the 31^st of May 1992 was fast giving way to the boring conformity of the daylight hours.  The signals had vanished, and normalcy had become the predominant force.  Never mind, we’d be back to do another night watch on June 6.

I had some work to do before the 6^th.  I needed to do some improvement work on the Gizmo, and that would mean adding some more circuitry.  The Gizmo I had used was very crude indeed, and it only drove the sort of crystal earpiece that had been around for decades.  Its main advantage was that you could use this kind of earpiece on a crystal set.  This wasn’t really all that good, as such earpieces have a relatively poor frequency response.  In order to drive headphones, I’d need to install a power amplifier stage.  I got some writing paper, and scribbled-down the circuit diagram.  I was taking a calculated risk; I didn’t know what would happen, because I had absolutely no data on the power of that crushing signal.  I’d learn nothing if I got hit by that again.  The real problem here was that there was no signal at home, against which to check the gear.  For that, I’d have to go to Cheesefoot Head.

Come the evening of June 5, the Gizmo re-work was done.  My wife and I headed-off into the sunset, so-to-speak, making our way down to the Winchester area.  The story followed precisely the same pattern as it had, seven days previously.  It started-up, right on cue, at 00:30Hrs BST, on the morning of June 6 1992.  Same warmth, same light flashes in the woods behind us.  Just as before, the dog got scared.  And, just like before, the Gizmo burst into life, right on schedule.  But this time it didn’t have a nervous breakdown.  Oddly enough, the signals that I was receiving were well within the capabilities of the device.  As a matter of fact, the sounds were more akin to that of an old cassette data tape.

Those peculiar signals were very directional, too.  That’s when the blue-white luminous orbs came into view.  There, in a field some distance from us, were the balls of light that had been reported a week earlier.  Given the apparent directionality of the Gizmo, I seemed able to track the motion of these light balls.  By using the triangulation strategy (mentioned earlier), it soon became apparent that these ‘signals’ were emanating from an unseen source that can’t have been more than about ten inches away from the sensor coil.

But perhaps even weirder was the mysterious chase that I would later undertake.  In a bizarre manoeuvre, that bizarre signal would lead me away from the main Cheesefoot head Car Park, and across the silent A272 road.  This was a crazy situation, as I’m sure you can imagine.  I was chasing something that was entirely invisible, and was being followed by another, utterly mystified, night watcher.  What on earth was I chasing?  Just then, some distance along a dark bridleway, the signal stopped moving forward, and appeared to dart toward a hillock to our left.

As it did so, we both became aware of a blue-white light, just behind the summit of the hillock.  It seemed to be akin to that of an electric arc, and, if I am not mistaken, it had a plume of smoke above it.  Then, as we watched, that luminous source began to dart back-and-forth very rapidly.  As it did so, the signal source followed suit.  Then, just as swiftly and mysteriously as they had started, the light and signal vanished.  It was early June, so the light of day was never going to be far away.  And, at a little after three o’clock in the morning, the skies were beginning to lighten at Cheesefoot Head. 

During the course of these two night watches, we had also seen some pretty strange things in the sky.  There had been strange jet-stream clouds, that appeared to stretch-out across the sky in the blink of an eye.  Mysterious, fast moving, silent aircraft, that looked more like archetypal ghosts than real planes.  I vividly recall one that looked like Concorde.  There was no cloud cover, yet it vanished into thin air.  It was almost as though it had entered a worm hole.  

Ending the second night watch, and after trudging around the mysterious hillock for a while, I rejoined my wife in the car park.  It was time for a nap; we were both tired, and we had a further journey to make that day.  We both slept in the car until around midday, when we commenced our journey to see friends in Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast.

I couldn’t get those Cheesefoot Head occurrences out of my mind that day, and was determined to include a return visit to the site as part of our trip home.  We’d stayed in Lyme for the night, and those thoughts persisted throughout the following day; I felt a nagging, vehement, desire to go back to Cheesefoot Head.  As nightfall approached, we said our farewells to the folks in Lyme Regis, and commenced our long journey back to Hertfordshire.  Needless to say, I’d already made plans to include the Winchester area in that homeward bound route.

It was already gone midnight when we arrived at Cheesefoot, and my wife was asleep in the passenger seat.  Stepping out of the car, I felt a sense of unease.  With no street lights, the blackness of night, combined with the quietness and solitude, gave the area a worrisome feel.  Was there something out there to fear?  Could the reports concerning ‘The Greys’ be correct?  And, if those stories were true, was there a chance that I’d fall victim to abduction?

“Am I nuts?”, I asked myself; what, I wandered, was I doing in a remote place like this, all on my own.  After all was said and done, those strange signals could have been a rouse to lure me back here.  Switching on the Gizmo, I tried to overcome my fear.  What I heard on thee Gizmo next didn’t exactly help calm my nerves.  As I was walking down the road from the car park, I was hearing the sound of laughter on the Gizmo.  Yet all around was utterly silent.  It was just a transmission.  But where was the transmission coming from; what did it mean, and why was it being transmitted?

All on my own, it was getting pretty worrying.  There was nothing about this transmission to suggest that it was breakthrough from a radio station.  Unlike accounts of people hearing bizarre messages through radio sets tuned off station, this wordless transmission of laughter was not connected to anything remotely intelligible.  Then I received a transmission, the clarity and loudness of which implied to me that the transmission was coming from very close range.  It was the sound of somebody blowing a raspberry.  Again, there were no words, intelligible or otherwise.  As before, there was nothing to suggest radio frequency break-through, and this early version of the Gizmo was filtered against such interference.

Nothing like this sort of irrational transmission is permitted on the very tight VLF band either, where bandwidth is at a premium.  By their very nature, these things had to be from a localised source.  As a result, I became more than a little concerned for my own safety.  I made a mad dash for the car, and hastily drove off in the direction of the M3.

Nerves would be more settled, come the 13^th of June.  Once again, it was time to join the other night watchers.  Unfortunately, Lesley was feeling rather unwell that night.  She went to bed.  Without moral support, I elected to go alone.  Lesley and Heidi stayed at home, whilst I made my way down to Cheesefoot Head, for what seemed to me like an important meeting with forces unknown.  I hope that you can guess what happened next.  Yes, that’s correct.  At exactly 00:30Hrs BST, on June 13 1992, the very same heat was felt, and the very same noise was detected by the Gizmo.  Again, the signal had directionality, and again it appeared to track distant balls of light.  There had been a problem with the Gizmo, and I asked if anyone had some tape.  One of the wires had become detached, and, rather fortunately, someone had a spare roll of masking tape. 

Having fixed the device, I continued to monitor a situation that went on continually, between the hours of 00:30, and about 02:55.  At the latter time, the unseen signal source decided to take a hike down the deserted A272.  It was apparently moving in the direction of Winchester, but at a snail’s pace in roadside terms.  It appeared to be ushering me to follow it, so I did.  As I gave chase down the road, I started to question my actions again.  Still pitch dark at that time in the morning, the tree-covered section of the road possessed a worrying potential.  It would be all-too-easy to get abducted and/or physically assaulted, by someone hiding in those trees.  I froze.  As luck would have it, moral support was close by.  This was in the form of a young fellow named Simon, who had been wondering why I’d started to move away from the rest of the group.  He’d decided to follow me down the road, and he joined me at the edge of the tree-covered section.

Together, we continued our walk down the A272.  Passing through the canopy of trees, I noted that the signal had drawn to a halt, a short distance beyond it.  Using the triangulation technique, I was able to ascertain that the signal had: 1. Stopped dead, over a fire Hydrant marker.  2. That the invisible signal source was no larger than 7 to 10 inches in diameter.  3.  That the signal source was in the shape of a shaft.

What could I say?  From its motions, the signal was clearly intelligently controlled.  I did the only thing that I could think of, and greeted it.  At that precise moment, the mysterious signal source shifted away.  Beyond the bushes on one side of the road, I could see the flickering of blue-white orbs.  It was in their direction that the signal appeared to leap.  It was now approximately 03:05Hrs BST.  Feeling that this episode was all but over, Simon and I headed back toward the car park.  I remember stopping several times, to view those dancing orbs.  I recall one of the night watchers asserting that these were the lights of a farm house, to which I replied that it was unlikely that a farmhouse would be located in amidst the crop itself.

I finally returned to the car at about 04:00Hrs BST, and immediately drove away from the area.  Having driven a distance of nearly 90 miles, mainly along quiet motorways, I arrived home at about 05:30Hrs BST, and went straight to bed.  I suspected nothing at this stage, but I was in for quite a surprise the following afternoon.  The problem I’d had with the Gizmo was that one of the wires had become detached, so I got my soldering iron out.  Having re-soldered the offending wire, I needed to check that the device was working properly.  Even without that bizarre signal, all that I needed to do was to detect the ambient magnetic field of the mains.  I switched the Gizmo on.  Then, to my utter astonishment, I found that the bizarre noise was in the room with me!

From this moment on, the Gizmo story becomes even weirder.  With hindsight, the first part of the Gizmo saga can be seen to have been deliberately staged.  In itself, this would be a major clue.  And in so staging the Gizmo events at Cheesefoot head, there were also a number of clues as to the relationship between different types of phenomenon.  To start with, it was an amazing coincidence that or dog, Heidi, should have had such fearful experiences in two places where crop circles were to be found, and on two occasions in which UFOs were seen.

At Cheesefoot Head, we were getting crop circles and UFOs at the same time.  What an amazing coincidence it was that this strange Gizmo signal should also have been detected at Cheesefoot Head.  And it was all happening at precisely the same place that Heidi had become so fearful.  Another amazing coincidence was that my 3am, June 13, intercept had been made at a location adjacent to a feature of the landscape, known as Telegraph hill.  Telegraph…A long-distance message?  Well, there was obviously a lot of data to be gleaned from this particular message.  Thanks to that hair raising experience at the commencement of June 8, this information included a link to Electronic Voice Phenomena.  Although not a word had been uttered, the sound of laughter and of a phantom raspberry blower directly related to aspects of human vocal activity.

That EVP connection is often attributed to the voices of spirits, but what an amazing coincidence to find it occurring at precisely the same location as crop circles and UFOs.  The very absence of words actually spoke volumes here.  The meaning of broken speech can often be misinterpreted, as the human brain will always attempt to make sense of incoherent words.  But in this instance, it cannot be argued that this was misinterpreted, or that it was break-through from a radio station on the ‘Long’, or, ‘Medium’ wavebands.

The information that could be gleaned from this first two-week period included a very mechanical observation about the nature of the events.  It was all done in a very precise manner, as though controlled by a white-coated scientist with a stopwatch.  Later research revealed that the Gizmos used on all four occasions were not in keeping with requirements.  As I could not possibly have known those technical requirements, I must conclude that I had been given help.  In retrospect, it became clear that the Gizmo used on May 31 1992 was so utterly inadequate for the job that it had to be ‘clobbered’ with a very powerful signal, just in order to get a result.  Although better, the second Gizmo attempt had only worked because of a fortuitous constructional error.

The events of June 13 1992 were equally pre-determined.  I was later able to deduce that it had all been a deliberate numbers game.  Furthermore, the intelligence behind the signal generation already knew who I was, and exactly where I lived.  One of those later deductions had to do with the bizarre, unscientific, manipulation of numbers that is known as Numerology.  Through what I had found, I was not only able to tie UFOs to crop circles, but also able to tie UFOs and crop circles to EVP.  In itself, this suggested that the EVP phenomenon was not quite what it appeared to be.  Perhaps it was as bogus as the other things I later discover discovered.

This contrivance of numbers and, of course, names, was inclusive of the A272 itself.  It is known as the Petersfield Road, and with the knowledge I would later gain, I was also able to deduce that there was a deliberately concealed religious message.  In short, I now had a connection between UFOs, crop circles, EVP, and religion.

But the events of June 13 were also to reveal another link.  It should be considered that we had been experiencing peculiar, and somewhat erratic, poltergeist phenomena in our home for the previous seven years.  Prior to June 13 1992, this poltergeist activity had been relatively subdued.  Yet upon the arrival of this signal, the poltergeist activity jumped to a frequency that we’d never experienced before.  What an amazing coincidence, if that was what it was.  But, as I was soon to learn, this signal could also play the role of a ghostly figure.  Back in the early days, it was occasionally observed to move in human-like manner.  Equally true were the observations regarding the signal’s abilities to smoothly shift polarity, as though it was a directed beam from a UFO. 

The interconnections were getting ever more convoluted.  And, returning to the activities of May 31 & June 6, the adverse, fearful, reactions of our dog, Heidi, had also been observed in a 1990 crop formation.  That 1990 formation was the first we’d ever visited.  It was also in this formation that a weird signal had been picked-up as electrical interference, by a TV camera crew.  The formation was called ‘The scrolls’ and, whilst I would also go on to deduce it’s meaning according to that name, it also looked like a pair of headphones.  This was one of the two reports that had led me to develop the Gizmo, and final contact, on June 13 1992, involved the use of a pair of headphones.

Very quickly after that June 13 experience, I was able to deduce a link between UFOs, ghosts, crop circles, and EVP.  During the rest of that summer, there was further confirmation of the link to crop circles.  With genuine circles/formations, my wife and I discovered that the signal’s polarity would alter in such a way that, no matter where we stood, it would remain aligned with the crop circle.  If the crop formation was invalid, we noted quite the opposite effect.  Not only was there no lock, but we couldn’t get that signal alignment where ever we chose to stand. 

Whilst the nature of the signal was still the subject of investigation, the use of two Gizmos would demonstrate that there could be more than one of them.  Right at the end of the 1992 crop circle/formation season, we were challenged to check the validity of one particular crop formation.  Located near Ramsbury, Wiltshire, the outline of suspicious crop formation could still be seen amidst the stubble of an already gathered crop.  It was a test set by Ralph Noyes, who, a little suspicious of our motives, wanted to see just how effective this device really was.

Ralph knew that the 1992 Ramsbury formation was a hoax, but had kept this knowledge under his hat.  We arrived on scene, and stepped out of the car.  We could both see the formation, and turned both the Gizmos on.  To our complete surprise, the two signals had shifted to the maximum angle that they could away from the formation, but not so far as to confuse the fact that there were two different signals.  No matter where we stood, we couldn’t get either signal source to align with that formation.  Upon our return home, we got in telephone contact with Mr Noyes.  He seemed rather surprised to hear that we had found it to be a fake.  Ralph had assumed that, like the motives behind so many other gadgets, the Gizmo was just another fame-seeking fraud.  The truth is that this case is so utterly bizarre, that nobody could be blamed for not accepting it.

During the course of a lot of experimentation during 1992, I discovered that the very nature of the signal defied the standard model.  Studying the effect in our home, I had noted a distinct drop in the level of 50 Hertz background electro-magnetic radiation in relation to the strongest point in the mysterious signal source.  This had come directly after finding that the signal would simply vanish if all possible traces of magnetic feedback coupling were removed.  This was found, because I’d actually built another sensor device, in order to replicate the effects seen in the previous one.  There was nothing to be heard, until a very small amount of magnetic coupling between the output and the receiver coil was permitted.  Yet in tests prior to the events of June 6, the previous version had not revealed the merest trace of feedback oscillation.

This was getting really weird.  The signal source seemed to be sucking-in the ambient magnetic field, and I needed to inject something to get a response.  Yet, through the use of a large saucepan as a screen, I’d already proved that these signals were coming from outside.  There was no evidence to suggest that the Gizmo had been generating them by itself.  It couldn’t have, given what had happened at Cheesefoot Head.  There were simply too many unlikely coincidences for that to be true.  But there it was; with no feedback, there was simply no signal to be heard.  With no feedback, I could detect a drop in the level of ambient magnetic field.

It was at this juncture, that I was to learn about a device that I’d never heard of before.  This device was known as a UFO detector, and, though I’d never heard of the device, it’s parameters were a match to the ones that I’d accidentally unearthed.  This UFO detector connection was yet more evidence of the link between UFOs, and just about everything else.  Things got even stranger as experimentation continued.  Not only had I found the magnetic factor, but I went on to discover that it involved the consumption of energy.  Whist the effect looked like reversed magnetism, its effects were being observed through the said consumption of energy.  I could get precisely the same effect, by feeding-back a very restricted amount of electrical current.  The levels of this electrical feed-back were minimal; levels less than those required to generate spontaneous oscillation.

Then I discovered that the same effect could be achieved through the use of capacitive coupling.  Following that, I found that the effect could be replicated by injecting minute amounts of energy from an asynchronous oscillator, tuned to the right frequency band.  I could achieve this electrically, magnetically, or through capacitive coupling.  The oscillation source was running in the range of 15 to 20 kilohertz.  It could be any wave-shape, it made no difference whatsoever.  I used a square-wave oscillator technique for quite a while. 

Then, in June 1994, after a couple of years of research into the subject, I discovered that these mysterious signals were best detected by a sensor that emulated some sort of crystal.  It still used a 500-turn coil on ferrite rod detector, but the associated circuitry converted it into a tuneable, self-resonating device.  I have not since found a more efficient form of receiver.  Two and two most certainly equals four here, as the Gizmo had effectively linked a number of phenomena together, as well as adding an unknown technology to the list.  This unknown technology was clearly linked to UFOs, and involved the use of crystals.

Stephen Clementson.