Case description
Nellie Richardson, sixty-five, reported an unusual light from her bedroom at Bignall End, near Audley, Staffordshire, in the early hours of December 31, 1976. Jenny Randles’s May 1977 MUFON UFO Journal account records an investigation by UFORA and an interview around twelve hours afterward. The precise setting is more specific than the catalogue’s northeast-of-Audley label.
Awakened by a loud bang at approximately 2:42 a.m., Richardson saw an intensely bright oval object over the Cheshire plain. A neighbour heard the bang but did not see the object. Richardson went downstairs after noticing an apparent clock stoppage, then returned to watch. As the object moved and became orange, she described two tiny silhouettes moving like toy soldiers against its glow. Her son John, thirty-one, later returned home and saw the orange object, without being independently established as a witness to the figures.
The report says the object remained visible until about 4:15 a.m. Investigators found no explanation and discounted the Moon, but this does not authenticate occupants or an electrical effect. The plate combines the mother’s figure phase and her son’s later observation, with a cat at a separate downstairs window. Its caption labels the sequence composite, and the two distant silhouettes remain unresolved.
