Email from Eric Rush to Martin Shough, 14 Aug 2003

". . . As the event on that day [in 1956] is still quite vivid I will do my best to relate the circumstances of my sighting.

"I was in my bedroom in a house not far from St. Mary Cray Railway Station. The view was of the houses at the bottom of the garden with the gasometers(?) (big gas tanks) rising above their roofs. I seem to remember I was ill so was kept upstairs. The weather was cloud just breaking up with small blue patches, the skies improved through the day. Living close to Biggin Hill I used to watch the aircraft and had an interest in them as at that time you could still see the Spitfires and other propeller planes plus the new emerging jet planes, I did have an interest in the stories of flying saucers as well. The sighting, late morning, was very brief but everlasting. Looking out of the window for planes there was a blue patch directly in front about 2 o’clock high as I glanced at it I saw an object just like a bright light bulb pass across the gap; its speed could only be described as faster than any jet plane that I had seen. I told my father what I had seen (I cannot remember if he was home at the time) and he said I should report it to the Daily Mirror that day (August 13th, I think). We got a copy of the A-Z of London and rotated it in line with the nearby main road and railway line, from this we decided on the direction the object had travelled.

"We decided that it had come from the direction of Orpington and would have passed over Greenwich in an almost South to North direction. So armed with this information my eldest brother (I was not allowed out, mumps I think!) took some pennies from my father and with the number of the Daily Mirror went to the red telephone box by the railway bridge.

"We scoured the papers over the next few days but saw no mention of my sighting. A little while after my brother (Ivan) received an envelope from the Daily Mirror containing a 10 shilling postal order and a slip of paper which was typed saying that the postal order was payment for the reported sighting of a UFO (Flying Saucer) only a couple of lines and the amount of 10/- was typed over a blue area of printed characters designed to stop alteration. On the back of the paper was a patch of black ink as used on carbon paper behind the blue box. This piece of paper I kept until the early seventies, then I mislaid it. This event became general knowledge among my family, and now and again I would take the slip of paper to school. The only way I can fix the date is by memory and the fact that I took the slip of paper into school on my first day of term in September just after when it happened."