An Author's Experiences of Loch Ness, UFOs and a 'Phenomenal Universe'

three books by F. W. 'Ted' Holiday (1921-1979)

 
 

I still have the paperback edition of The Great Orm of Loch Ness (1968) that I purchased at the age of 13 or 14 in 1970.  The same author published The Dragon and the Disc in 1973 and The Goblin Universe was published posthumously in 1986 with an Introduction contributed by his friend and author Colin Wilson, who was instrumental to the book reaching the public.  Holiday made use of the expression 'the goblin universe' that had been mentioned to him during a conversation about 'the Loch Ness monster' with Professor John Napier, Director of the Primate Biology Programme at the Smithsonian Institute of Washington, D.C.  The phrase was said to relate to the alternative to considering "the whole affair is a Great conspiracy."   This blog article includes some of Holiday's descriptions of illuminating firsthand experiences from his three books.  In addition to the description of his first glimpse of an unknown aquatic creature in Loch Ness featured here, the earlier book also presents his personal accounts of two other sightings that he made there on two occasions in 1965 when the colorations observed were "yellowish-brown" and "jet black."    

Excerpts from The Great Orm of Loch Ness  

 

I entered Scotland on August 22nd, 1962 . . . curious people had been making similar pilgrimages for thirty years . . . after a two-day drive from my home in West Wales . . . I intended to sleep on the shores of the loch . . . If anything happened I wanted to be on the spot, not in a hotel bedroom. 

 

 

[two nights later]  Around midnight, I awoke.  The Glen was intensely silent and starlit.  From somewhere along the shore came a curious sound and for several minutes I tried to decide what it could be.  It moved nearer, crystalizing and gathering itself, and presently resolved into the crash of water breaking on the beaches.  When it reached the stony beach it rushed ashore in the shape of several considerable waves and then it moved down towards Foyers and silence fell once more.

 

 

At about 4 a.m. I dressed and drove towards Foyers on an impulse without bothering to make a hot drink or even to wash.  At Foyers the Fort Augustus road climbs the steep shoulder of the hillside and affords perhaps the best view of Loch Ness shore.  It was near this spot that Tim Dinsdale obtained his film of the Orm in 1960.  In the gray light of pre-dawn, with the illumination falling obliquely  across my field of vision from the right, the contrast and visibility were excellent . . . I found myself watching the Great Orm of Loch Ness.  The time was almost 6 a.m.

 

 

A dozen or so yards into the loch, opposite the leat, an object made a sudden appearance.  It was black and glistening and rounded and it projected about three feet above the surface.  Instantly, it plunged under again, violently, and produced an enormous upsurge of water.  A huge circular wave raced outwards as if from a diving hippopotamus.

 

The light was ideal and my position was good.  Hardly breathing, I stared at the leat with enormous intensity.  The water—which was sheltered from the breeze by Foyers headland—was flat calm and the binoculars missed nothing.

 

Just below the surface, I then made out a shape.  It was thick in the middle and tapered towards the extremities.  It was a sort of blackish-gray in color.  To demonstrate that it was no trick of light-defraction, it moved steadily from one side of the leat to the other than back again.  When a chance puff of wind touched the surface it disappeared in a maze of ripples and when the water stilled it was always there.  Its size—judging from the width of the leat—was between 40 and 45 feet long.  No details were visible nor did any portion of it again break surface.  It was simply an elongated shape of large size moving purposefully to and fro at the edge of deep water.

 

The spell was broken in an unlikely fashion.  A few hundred yards from the mouth of the leat is a small pier and from somewhere in this area an early workman suddenly started to hammer on metal.  As the strokes rang across the loch, the shape departed.  One instant it was there and the next instant it was gone.  It was rather like running a damp sponge over a picture drawn on a slate.

 

I kept vigil for two more hours but, clearly, the time of revelation had come and gone.  The Orm had returned to the deep and I could make of it what I would.

 

 

Excerpts from The Dragon and the Disc

 

On 6 January of that year [1966], at about 6:30 in the evening, I was on the wall of Saundersfoot harbour in Pembrokeshire fishing for whiting.  The night was cold and still with a slight sea mist.  Along with other fishermen, I then saw something moving out in Carmarthen Bay.

 

Across our front, from left to right, a luminous object was travelling over the waves at about a mile range and no more than a hundred feet above the water.  It seemed to be a glowing, spherical mass giving out a white light which pulsated with a periodicity of about two seconds.  Each pulsation lit up the surrounding haze for several times the apparent diameter of the object.  It was on a level course and moving at about 250 m.p.h. which soon took it out of sight behind Monkstone Point heading south.  The display was in total silence.

 

Although I worked for several years at an R.A.F. experimental establishment and took part in numerous airborne experiments and also worked at Cambridge Airport and with Cambridge University squadron as an engineer, I felt unable to categorize the object as anything mechanical.  I decided it must have been an electrical phenomenon of the atmosphere.

 

On 8 October of the same year I was again fishing, this time in Tenby harbour.  It was about 7:30 in the evening with the sea calm and the sky clear.  Presently I became aware that several nearby fishermen were watching the sky directly overhead.  Looking up, I saw what can only be described as a small, luminous blue-grey cloud.  It was orbiting slowly in a circle equal to about three times its own diameter.  Since it was opaque and blotted out the background stars this motion was plainly visible.  It resembled a lump of shiny blue-grey cotton-wool.

 

Ten minutes went by in which interest diminished when, quite suddenly, there was a spectacle as vivid as it was unambiguous.  Out of the south-west side of the cloud had emerged a dark object which beamed an intense ruby light down on us.  At that point I remember feeling a slight shock following the realization that, whatever were the nature of U.F.O.s, I was at that moment looking at one.  Very slowly the red light object moved away towards the south-west.  A moment or two later the blue-grey cloud began moving east.  In a short time both objects were out of sight on their respective courses.

 

Exactly a week later I was driving up the A478 road near Foel Dyrch mountain in the early evening when I noticed a moving light in the sky.  I had now taken to carrying binoculars around.  The object was moving north, nearly parallel to the road, and was about 500 feet above the floor of the valley to the right which brought it almost level with where I was standing.  It was about half a mile away when I got it in focus and travelling on a level course at no more than 50 - 60 m.p.h.

 

I had a very good look at it.  It was large but not enormous — perhaps twenty or twenty-five feet long.  It was a flattened oval in shape.  As the night was clear and starry I was able to look all around it and make quite sure it was not, for example, a window in an aircraft.  It was an oval object with a firm outline.  No trail was visible nor anything to indicate how it was propelled.  I saw no surface details.  In colour it was yellow-gold and it had the appearance of being constructed from a glowing, translucent substance.  The effect was both beautiful and majestic.  I watched it travel through an arc of about 70° before it passed out of sight over the hills to the north.  Like the others, this episode was completely silent.

 

Excerpts from The Goblin Universe 

 

Glandovan Mansion or manor is one of the oldest country houses in Pembrokeshire with parts dating back to the 16th Century . . . some friends of mine leased it for a three-year period.  The family consisted of Francis and Charles Mason and Chris, the 15 year old son of Mrs. Mason's former marriage . . . In September 1959, Mr. and Mrs. Mason spent a few days in London on business.  Chris was an apprentice engineer and couldn't get away so I agreed to stay at the lodge and—in view of the [recent] weird happenings—keep him company.  Mrs. Mason set a bed up for me in a corner of his room.  The spooks wasted little time.

 

On the very first evening . . . Chris was sitting on the kitchen table swinging his feet and discussing something while I sat in a chair with my feet on the floor.  Suddenly, a most peculiar quiver ran across the floor, and for a few seconds it seemed to shake like jelly.  Chris, who was not in contact with the floor, didn't feel this effect.  Short of postulating a very localized earthquake, I could not account for this experience.  (article mentioning two similar paranormal shaking incidents)

 

 

. . . When we returned to the lodge in the late afternoon, we headed for the kitchen to make some tea, with Chris leading the way.  Other footsteps followed us in and I paused in the kitchen doorway, glancing over my shoulder to see who had arrived.  There was no one visible.  Meantime, the footsteps continued past me down the corridor to the old part of the house, where they seemed to fade away.

 

 

[while staying overnight in a front bedroom of Grasspoint, a house on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides]  About 1:30 a.m. I was awakened by footsteps.  In some way they sounded peculiar, much as did the footsteps I had heard 10 years earlier at Glandovan lodge.  It is hard to define how these sounds differed from ordinary footsteps except to say that they had a peculiar timbre, almost like a double echo.  Once heard it is hard to mistake.  The time-hallowed description of a ghost walking with "hollow" footsteps is by no means a bad description.  These footsteps sounded like heavy boots mounting the stone stairs leading to the landing.  The interesting thing is that they were clumping on bare stone, whereas the stairs today are well-carpeted.  Presumably they had mounted all the way up from the bottom, but I became awake and conscious enough to hear only the last four or five steps.  They then turned left in the direction of my room . . . A man's voice, speaking in a strong Belfast accent, suddenly demanded, "And who the hell are ye?"  Simultaneously a heavy blow crashed on the headboard above my head, exactly as if delivered by a hard fist.  I not only heard the blow, but felt it, since my back was pressed hard against the board.  For several minutes I remained frozen in position, expecting an even more unpleasant manifestation.  Gradually, however, I realized that the power which had produced the effects was depleted.  I could sense the atmosphere returning to normal.  Even so I didn't care to sleep until dawn began to lighten the window, when I turned over and slumbered for several hours.

 

 

. . . I should mention the one other time that I heard a paranormal voice.  I happened to be riding up a rough track in the country at night on a motorcycle and was approaching a steep bend.  Quite clearly, a voice said: "Mind the cows!"  I throttled back and took the bend cautiously.  Sure enough, the lane was filled with lively young bullocks which had broken out of a field.  Since these sportive creatures each weighed about half a ton, a nasty accident could easily have occurred.

 

 

. . . I went down to Devon to meet Donald Omand [author of autobiography Experiences of a Present Day Exorcist (1970)], and found him to be a Highland Scot with Scandinavian family connections . . . we discussed the Loch Ness monster . . . I agreed to meet Dr. Omond at Loch Ness on June 2, 1973, for the exorcism.

 

The affair of the Loch Ness monster had been getting ragged around the edges for a long time.  It didn't make sense.  There were too many associated effects which reeked of synchronicity, as if someone were constructing a gigantic guessing-game . . . There was the involvement of Steve Gorzula and his friend Kenny Cameron, for instance.

 

 

Steve Gorzula and Kenny Cameron were now going up to Loch Ness fairly regularly on weekend driving trips.  They then began to experience what I call the "toothache syndrome," something I had already encountered in Ireland during the dragon netting experiments.  It is a severe form of mysterious neuralgia which lasts as long as one is investigating the phenomena. 

 

 

I had already come across a reference to the "toothache syndrome" in an ancient Babylonian text reproduced by Sir. E. A. Wallis Budge in his Babylonian Life and History, the last verse of which runs:

 

 "And the Worm [dragon] said: What are these dried bones to me?  Let me drink amongst the teeth, and set me on the gums that I may devour the blood of the teeth and of their gums destroy the strength.  Then shall I hold the bolt of the door."

 

 

. . . I had time to think of other things, such as Sundberg and his UFO [three 'not human' figures wearing helmets were reported to have been encountered by Mr. Sundberg, a Swedish freelance journalist in Scotland to collect material on the 'Loch Ness monster.'  Holiday wrote that the landed UFO as described "had a shutter or hatch on top of it."]

 

 

Mrs. Cary [The Carys had provided their house as a rendezvous point along with the use of one of their boats to help Holiday with the  exorcism being conducted] cautioned me strongly against visiting the UFO landing site.  She was sitting in her usual armchair with her back to the window overlooking the front garden.  I was facing the window.  Basil [Mr. Cary] was on my right pouring a drink at the sideboard.  Mrs. Cary said, "One reads of people being whisked away.  It may be nonsense but I shouldn't go."

 

 

At that precise moment there was a tremendous rushing sound like a tornado outside the window, and the garden seemed to be filled with indefinable frantic movement.  A series of violent thuds sounded as if from a heavy object striking either the wall or the sun-lounge door.  Through the window behind Mrs. Cary I suddenly saw what looked like a pyramid-shaped column of blackish smoke about eight feet high revolving in a frenzy.  Part of it was involved in a rosebush, which looked as if it were being ripped out of the ground.  Mrs. Cary shrieked  and turned her face to the window.  The episode lasted  10 or 15 seconds, and then was instantly finished.

 

Holiday mentioned in ihe chapter The Exorcism of Loch Ness, "I am not formally religious.  I would define myself as a progressive agnostic."  The concluding chapter of the book presents the author's perceptions about life and cosmology: "In a sense, everything that occurs is 'natural' in that it manifests in the phenomenal universe.   For that reason, terms like supernatural and paranormal merely beg the question . . . The question of Mind is the key to all these mysteries . . ."  Holiday had learned about Uri Geller and found significant the experimentation results showing at times he had been able to "determine the subject of drawings he has never seen."  I noticed that information in my case study book Testament and articles at this blog would have changed some of Holiday's impressions (as related in his final book) concerning such topics as Christianity, Joan of Arc, Nostradamus and transcendental communication.  Holiday considered there being 'a Super Mind or Universal Field.'  Regarding this awareness, an important point to consider would be the emotions, needs and potential plans and expectations of this 'universal Mind' while simultaneously existing as an intrinsic aspect of all individual iotas or 'consciousness units.'  The relationship between oneself and this Loving Being is eternally something felicitous for reflection.