Phantom Bomber
Barnoldswick, Lancashire 2004
“The plane looked as though it was going to hit both her car she and her partner were travelling in, as well as nearby houses, but a second later it had disappeared without trace.” The Craven Herald
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Well.. yes.. it’s a plane. But it’s a plane notorious for its role in Operation Chastise during World War II… and it’s not actually real.
The Avro Lancaster was the Royal Air Force’s most infamous bomber during World War II, assisting the Dambusters raid on the Rhur Valley dams. These mechanical giants flew 156,000 journeys throughout the war and dropped over 600,000 tonnes of bombs. Whew. So why was this historical plane making headlines in The Craven Herald in 2004?
The Craven Herald reported on a couple who had been travelling through the Lancashire town of Barnoldswick. They were stopped in their tracks, and quite taken aback, by a very low flying Avro Lancaster plane above the Rolls Royce company building. They told the newspaper that the plane was skirting so low that it appeared it was going to collide with their car and the surrounding houses. Just as the plane appeared, however, it faded back into the mist and vanished…
But they weren’t the only people to report this sighting in Barnoldswick in 2004. Several reports of the same Avro Lancaster were sighted on this very same day, flying low and disappearing without a trace. A local newspaper, noticing the pattern, ran an article soon afterwards asking readers to contact an aerial phenomena expert to report their sightings.
Not long after, a man reported seeing an Avro Lancaster plane flying silently towards a small airstrip in Barnoldswick that was supposedly an emergency landing site during World War II. A veteran, after hearing this man’s report, went on to validate the claim by confirming that an Avro Lancaster did, indeed, make an emergency stop on that very airstrip during the war.
A few theories have sprung trying to explain this phenomena. The RAF confirmed they do use old planes for training and entertainment, but the witnesses have dismissed this, claiming there was only one fully functioning Avro Lancaster in the U.K at that time, and it wasn’t in Barnoldswick.
The Rolls Royce company, of which the first sighting of the Avro Lancaster was reported, confirmed that they did own and fly a Spitfire, but people have noted that the Spitfire plane is a very different design to the Lancaster Bomber.
Paranormal studies put forward the Time Slip Theory to explain this phenomena, indicating that witnesses may have seen moments of the past replayed at other points in the present. That this plane was not a ghost, but an echo from history. Some paranormal scholars claim there is a correlation between energy fields and magnetic residue surrounding industrial manufacturing…
Did you spot the phantom bomber around Barnoldswick in 2004?
