Withdean, Sussex being encounter — February 4, 1951

Sheila Burton’s account was published in the January–February 1979 BUFORA Journal from reports supplied by investigator Andy Collins. It concerned an experience when she was in her late teens and staying with her parents shortly before her wedding. The original published report dates it September 4 or 5, 1951, at about 6:30 a.m.; the imported catalogue’s February 4 date is a conflicting later version. The plate uses the year alone. Looking down from a bedroom window over the long garden at Withdean, near Brighton, she reportedly saw a flashing object descend onto the lawn. It was a fluorescent silvery-green dome, estimated at approximately forty feet across and twenty-five feet high. Three square panels opened near its base and three identical figures walked outward in separate straight lines. They were described as five to six feet tall, with bald heads, small deep-set eyes, pointed ears and noses, and small lipless mouths. Their green or khaki one-piece garments covered the feet and had high collars, black diagonal shoulder bands and waist belts. Each held a black cylindrical device with rectangular projections, likened to a machine gun; she did not report them firing or using it. After about thirty feet, all stopped simultaneously and walked backward into their respective openings. The panels closed, red lights flashed and the object rose vertically. The silent episode reportedly lasted forty to fifty seconds, too briefly for Burton to call her parents. No physical traces were found. This was a decades-later recollection, not a contemporaneously documented landing. The illustration follows the published anatomical and clothing details rather than the catalogue’s generic small-humanoid shorthand.