1963: The Year UFOs, Beasts, and Dark Forces Swept Three Continents
1963: The Year UFOs, Beasts, and Dark Forces Swept Three Continents  
Podcast: Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Published On: Tue Jun 30 2026
Description: A gigantic cigar-shaped craft shadowed a NATO airliner over the Atlantic in 1963, the same year similar motherships appeared over Australia, Canada, and the skies of a Britain overrun by headless creatures and desecrated churches.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/1963DarkForcesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p87kmstFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A “gigantic cigar-shaped UFO” is spotted over the Atlantic in 1963, but the witness is so terrified by her experiences that it takes her twenty years to come forward to tell her story. And in that same year, elsewhere in the United Kingdom, people were dealing with dark, paranormal, even satanic forces - with numerous events that still remain unexplained.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:18.783 = Show Open00:02:35.157 = The 1963 Atlantic UFO – Part 100:16:32.034 = The 1963 Atlantic UFO – Part 2 ***00:32:15.933 = 1963: Dark Paranormal Forces Invade The UK – Part 1 ***00:50:26.206 = 1963: Dark Paranormal Forces Invade The UK – Part 2 ***00:56:44.362 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“The 1963 Atlantic UFO Encounter” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/z2j2zp88“Dark Paranormal Forces Invade The United Kingdom” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p93a79s(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January 05, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness opens over the north Atlantic in May 1963, where a NATO English-language secretary based in Paris, flying on a near-empty DC-8 carrying fifty staff from Orly Airport to ministerial meetings in Ottawa, looked from her window and saw a dark grey, torpedo-shaped object six to seven thousand feet below the plane — its rear cut off sharply and squarely, with no wings, windows, or visible propulsion — before it vanished into cloud and the aircraft dropped into violent turbulence. Terrified and certain no one else aboard had noticed, she said nothing for almost twenty years, until a 1980 letter to Flying Saucer Review brought the account to light and the magazine published it the following year. The segment threads her sighting into a longer record of cigar-shaped craft: Melvin Vagle Jr. and his wife spotting a windowed object hovering over a plowed field near Grafton, Nebraska on November 22, 1961; Miss Footner tracking a silver, hundred-foot craft over Saanich Mountain near Victoria, British Columbia in early 1960; Reverend Lionel Browning and his wife photographing a grey mothership over Cressy, Tasmania on October 4, 1960 as smaller discs darted out of the clouds and explosions later shook nearby houses; RCMP Constable James Blackwood watching a cigar-shaped object near Clarenville, Newfoundland on November 26, 1978 mirror his patrol car's flashing lights for nearly two hours; a couple camping at Hexham, New South Wales in late December 1984 seeing discs swarm a lit craft that seemed to carry a helmeted figure; and an anonymous Swedish driver on Route 55 near Orsundsbro in June 1985 stepping out of her car to study a windowed craft she first mistook for a police helicopter.From there the episode crosses to England, where the night of November 16, 1963 brought four teenagers walking home from a dance past Sandling Park near Hythe, Kent face to face with a human-sized, headless creature with wings on its back; seventeen-year-old John Flaxton and eighteen-year-old Mervyn Hutchinson had first watched a bright gold oval descend behind the trees, and Flaxton felt a sudden, unexplained cold as the thing came at them through the woodland. The same evening in Saltwood, Tony Harrison and three companions saw a glowing oval and a figure in a scarlet cloak holding a flickering lantern, and within days John McGoldrick discovered three giant footprints, each roughly two feet long, near the spot where Keith Croucher had reported an identical object over a football field. The story then opens out into a year-long British wave: a flying saucer interfering with a woman's car headlights near Bluebell Hill in Kent; two men setting up a tripod that fired colored lights into the sky over the Britannia Barracks in Norwich; a market researcher named Joelle in Castleton encountering men who claimed to be extraterrestrials with bases on two of Jupiter's moons; and a dome-shaped craft that reportedly landed at RAF Cosford on December 10, washing the base in green light before vanishing. Stranger creatures shared the year — the Surrey Puma and other big cats stalking Shooter's Hill in London from July 18, a half-man, half-horse centaur seen in Sefton Park by witnesses including a police officer, a bulldog-headed monster rising beside two fishermen on Loch Ness, and a dinosaur-like animal that scattered seals along Cardigan Bay and left a half-eaten carcass behind. The episode closes on a darker thread of occult activity: two children found playing with a human skull taken from the ruined St. Mary's Church at Clophill in Bedfordshire, where Maltese crosses, cockerel feathers, and six tampered women's graves were uncovered; six decapitated horse heads and a cow, their jaws wrenched apart, discovered in Bluebell Woods at Caddington; clay effigies pierced with thorns and a sheep's head studded with thirteen thorns nailed up at Castle Rising in Norfolk; and a group of self-styled Devil worshippers interrupted mid-ritual at an active church in Westham, Sussex on December 7 — all set against a 1963 that began with one of the worst winters on record, claimed Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and the poet Sylvia Plath, saw Ian Brady and Myra Hindley begin the Moors murders, and ended weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy.