Birmingham UFO Group Case Report
Author: Dave Hodrien
Release Date: 07/07/2022
Note: For reasons of anonymity pseudonyms have been used for some witnesses
On Saturday 10th July 2021 I gave a talk at Bases 2021 conference at Pewsey, Wiltshire. After my talk I was approached by a man named Matthew Branson who wanted to discuss a number of varied experiences since his childhood.
In the weeks following the conference I arranged a number of extensive Zoom conversations with him to go over everything in depth. This report covers many of experiences which may well be linked with contact and the paranormal.
The Elderly Man
In 1965 when Matthew was 4 years old he moved to Devizes with his parents and three brothers. They rented a cottage on Castle Grounds in the vicinity of Devizes Castle.
On numerous occasions he would see an elderly man come into his room at night who would sit on the bed and tell him stories. He informed his mother Mary about these experiences but she did not initially believe him. However on one occasion his cousin came to stay the night, and also witnessed the same man. He informed his mother of what had happened.
Soon afterwards the two mothers got together and it came up in conversation. This is where they found out that their boys had both described the same thing! Matthew does not actually remember these incidents taking place, he was informed of them by his mother many years later in his teens while discussing various paranormal events that had gone on at the property, some of which are mentioned below.
This and other similar experiences have been included as many contactees report seeing paranormal activity in their vicinity.
Ghostly Dog
The cottage lay below Devizes Castle and had quite a lot of woodland around it. On a number of occasions Matthew and others would see a black and white coloured collie dog running through the trees. Sometimes he and his older brother Luke spotted it when they were walking home together from school. At other times it was witnessed by the family down the bottom of the garden.
The dog would always run off into the trees and vanish from sight. His mother asked around the neighbourhood to see if anyone owned it, but had no response to this. Sometimes Matthew and his Luke gave chase but it would always disappear before they could reach it. However they did find a small grave in the woodland with a dog’s name on it, which is still there today.
Matthew believes that they were seeing the ghost of this dog, however he cannot fully rule out the idea that it was merely a stray which lived in the area.
Glowing Eyes
When his parents weren’t around, Matthew and Luke would sometimes step into the fireplace of the cottage and look up the chimney breast to see if they could see daylight at the end of it. Matthew says that on one occasion when they did this they saw what appeared to be a couple of red coloured eyes staring down at them. He says that both he and his brother witnessed this. He does not recall telling his parents, but says that if he had they would have been sceptical.
It is of course possible that it was just their imagination, however it was apparently seen by both of them. One possibility is that there was a bird or another wild animal in the chimney and the light was catching its eyes. But Matthew has always wondered if the incident had a paranormal explanation.
Physical Attacks
One night in 1966 when Matthew was 5 years old, his brother Luke suddenly called out really loudly waking him up. His mother came rushing into the bedroom. Luke said that something had punched him really hard in the middle of his back.
Mary, thinking that it was just a dream, settled him back down and everyone went back to sleep. However in the morning when he got up she found a large bruise right in the location he claimed the impact had occurred. She was really frightened by this and asked Matthew if he had hit his brother, which of course he denied.
In the summer of 1967 another incident involving Luke took place. It was the middle of the day when suddenly everyone heard Luke shouting for help. He, his other brothers and parents all rushed outside to where the calls were coming from. There used to be a pit in the ground for car repairs and Luke had fallen into this. When they asked him what had happened he claimed that something unseen had pushed him from behind and that he had not simply fallen in of his own accord.
Scoop Mark
Around the age of 7 or 8 Matthew found a small circular indentation on his left leg. He had no idea how it appeared, and it did not hurt when he pressed on it. The indentation did not go away and remained.
Many years later when Matthew started looking into the contact subject he watched a Youtube video on body markings (Unfortunately he has not been able to locate the link for this video). The hairs on the back of his neck stood up when the video started to discuss scoop marks, one of the more commonly described body markings. He immediately thought back to the indentation on his leg.
Over the years it has diminished and is now very hard to find, but in his childhood it looked identical to examples which were shown in the video. There is of course the possibility that the marking could well have been natural, as he had no recollection of any experience linking it with contact.
Contacting the Spirits
When Matthew was 12 his mother used to work at the local market. She met another couple at the market who had two sons. One weekend Matthew and his younger cousin Rob were invited to stay over at their house.
During the day time they were playing outside when Matthew found a coin. He went and told the boy’s mother. She informed him that any coins he found he could keep. Strangely he then began to find many more coins, both in the flowerbed outside, and also behind the lining of the bathroom floor which had started to peel back. This felt strange at the time but obviously could have just been coincidental, or had been put there on purpose as a game for the kids to play.
In the evening the adults put their two son’s to bed early as they were younger than Matthew and Rob. They then informed them that they could contact the spirits. They then said that they were going to play a game with them called the Ouija Board. Another adult came round the house and they set up a board on the table. They informed them that if they were scared they could ask to stop at any time.
They started to use the board and asked if anyone was there. At first nothing happened, but they then went on to ask if there was a message for anyone present. The glass began to move, and started to spell out Matthew’s name. At this point he became frightened and asked to stop, which the adults agreed to. They got up and went through to the living room, leaving him alone with the board sitting at the table. He felt almost like he was rooted to the spot.
Suddenly he heard a scraping sound coming from the glass on the table that they’d been touching while using the board. Looking at it he realised it had moved right to the edge of the table next to him. He began to feel short of breath and knew something was wrong. He called the adults who tried to lift him up and take him to the bathroom, but as he reached the stairs he vomited on the floor.
The adults put Matthew and Rob to bed in one of the bedrooms of the house. They then also went to bed in one of the other rooms. Matthew and Rob were lying down in bed still awake. Suddenly a bright orange plastic piece of Hot Wheels track came under the crack at the base of the bedroom door and started swishing about back and forth!
Rob got out of bed and went to the door to find out who was doing it. When he opened the door there was nobody there. He closed the door and got back into bed and then the same thing happened again. After a short while the piece of track disappeared back under the door. Both Matthew and Rob were terrified by this point.
They ran out of the bedroom and told the adults what had happened, saying that they couldn’t sleep in the room as it was haunted. In order to calm them down the adults allowed them to sleep on the floor of their room for the remainder of the night.
How you view this series of spooky events will likely depend on your beliefs regarding both the paranormal and Ouija Boards. It has been proven convincingly that people can subconciously push the object they are touching to spell out words without realising they are doing so. However, despite this, many still believe they are a way of contacting the other side and communicating with spirits or other entities. And it appears that in this instance the glass moved without anyone touching it after everyone left the room.
As for what happened later on, it would of course have been very easy for one of the parents or their sons to have played a prank on Matthew and Rob to frighten them. But according to Matthew the two boys were fast asleep, and it would seem odd for the parents to intentionally scare them. Even so, this cannot be entirely ruled out.
OBE
By age 25 Matthew had moved to live in Brazil. Around this time he was very ill and started to lose a lot of weight. He was prescribed as having cancer in the lymph node of his left groin. An operation was arranged to have it taken out.
While on the operating table, Matthew says that he suddenly found himself up by the ceiling of the room looking down over proceedings. At first he didn’t realise what he was looking at until he saw the blood and the surgeons leaning over him. He remembers feeling grateful that he was up out of his body rather than having to experience what they were doing to him first hand.
He started to drift up, like he was going to leave and go someplace else when suddenly he heard what sounded like a cork coming out of a bottle. Immediately he was pulled back into his body and woke up mid-operation! He started screaming out and struggling to get away. He could not feel any pain but could see what was going on. Fortunately the surgeons quickly gave him another dose of anaesthetic and he blacked out. When he next came round the operation was over.
What Matthew experienced sounds very much like an out-of-body experience. It is quite common for people to experience OBE's while under anaesthetic. There are many similar cases on record, and I myself experienced an OBE many years ago at the dentist while having a filling and knocked out with gas. Whether people genuinely leave their physical body during experiences such as this is still very much open to debate.
Slamming Door
By his early 40s Matthew had returned to the UK and had moved into a house on Brackenbury Road, Hammersmith, London.
Soon after he moved in one of the other residents upstairs informed him that one of the previous tenants had commit suicide there. He wondered whether this story was true but soon afterwards he decided to change the carpets. When he lifted them up he found an area of floorboards that were much newer than the surrounding boards and were roughly the size of a human. He assumed that this is where the man’s body had been found and that the floorboards had been replaced.
Matthew didn’t think too much about this and was ok with it. However on a number of occasions the door to the flat would suddenly slam of its own accord quite forcefully. He never saw this happen directly, he would just hear the sound and find it had closed.
Light Beings
Matthew's recolllected visitation experience occured in the summer of 2012. It was really hot weather at the time and he decided to sleep in a tent in the back garden to keep cool. The tent was quite small and cramped.
During the third night in the tent he suddenly awoke for an unknown reason. When he opened his eyes he saw that he was not alone in the tent. Kneeling down either side of him around his waist were two short beings. They appeared to only be a few feet in height and were glowing a bright white colour. No facial features were visible. However thinking back to the incident Matthew feels like he may have seen their eyes but can’t recollect this.
As soon as Matthew became aware of the beings time seemed to slow down to a crawl. He tried screaming but no sound came out. One at a time the two beings turned and looked at him. Then one of them reached out and touched the centre of his chest with its finger. When it did so he felt winded. This went on a number of seconds with him unable to make a noise.
Then suddenly the beings vanished and he found he could move normally again. Terrified of what had just happened he unzipped the tent and ran inside the house. He stayed up the remainder of the night thinking about what had happened.
In the days following the experience he found it very hard to get to sleep. He could sense the presence of something there in the house with him. He decided he would need to take action and try to get rid of this presence from the house.
For a number of years he had been interested in Chinese tarot card reading, known as I Ching. Looking for help online, Matthew discovered beings similar to what he had experienced had been reported before. The website he looked on recommended that a priest would be able to perform a ritual to get rid of them. However he had no idea who to get in touch with. After asking around a number of restaurants in the area, he was finally directed to a local Chinese priest. However when he informed the priest of what had taken place, the man appeared to be frightened, and refused to help.
In desperation, Matthew then turned to the Aetherius Society, the UFO influenced religious movement. When he informed them about what had happened they recommended he used a form of psychic defence to cleanse the property. This method involved him imagining a white glowing light which would protect him from harm.
Matthew followed the instructions and after performing the activity he felt that the presence in his home had disappeared. He did not see the glowing beings again, although there is of course no way of knowing whether the technique had any physical effect or not.
Missing Time & Body Marking
By 2014 Matthew started renting the spare room in his house out to another man who I shall call "Simon". At the time, Simon worked night shifts at Heathrow Airport. One evening in the winter he headed out to work at 6.30pm, leaving Matthew alone in the house.
At 7pm Matthew had a bath and then went and sat on his bed in his dressing gown to relax. About an hour later he heard the front door open and Simon re-enter the house. This was not out of the question, as sometimes the flights would be cancelled and he would return home early. He heard him walk along the hall and enter his room.
Assuming it was roughly 8pm Matthew decided he would get dressed and go to the local shop to pick up some milk. He put some clothes on and opened his bedroom door. Outside his room he realised all the lights had been switched off. He opened the door to Simon’s room and mentioned “I’m just heading to the shop to get some milk.” Simon responded in a puzzled voice, asking “What, at 4am?”
Matthew was confused by this, and rushed back to his own room to check the clock. At this moment he realised Simon had come home at his normal time and it was the early hours of the morning! There was roughly 8 hours of time he could not account for! He was shocked as he was certain he had not fallen off to sleep, he had not even laid down on the bed. He had not been drank any alcohol and felt completely normal. To him this missing time was completely inexplicable.
Several days later Matthew was having a shower. He looked in the bathroom mirror and noticed a strange marking on his body. On the left side of his ribs he could see what appeared to be three separate equilateral triangles of dots, each about the size of a fingerprint. The markings were not sore when he touched them. At the time he had not looked much into the contact subject so did not realise their potential significance or take any photographs.
The markings did not fade away immediately. Two of the three faded slowly over a period of months. However the third one can still be seen today. It is unknown if these markings were contact-related and in some way linked with the missing time he had experienced three days previously. However the proximity of these two incidents to one another is interesting, and may suggest that he was abducted, even though he has no knowledge of this at present.
Demonic Entity
Soon after discovering the markings on his body another disturbing incident took place. In the early hours of the morning Matthew suddenly woke up to find his face being pushed into the pillow. Sitting on his back was a small demonic creature which was laughing horribly. This creature was reaching out and pushing his head down.
Terrified of what was taking place Matthew started to fight back against what was happening. He struggled against the pressure. Suddenly everything went back to normal and the creature vanished.
Many aspects of this fit with the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, including the presence of an evil being pushing his body down in some way and the way in which he managed to struggle against it and it suddenly all disappeared. Given the details of what occured, I feel it is likely that this is what took place.
Conclusion
Matthew has had many strange and interesting experiences over the years. While a lot of them appear to be more paranormal in nature, the visitation by the two glowing beings certainly appears contact related. There are also other incidents which may be linked with contact including the missing time and various body markings he has discovered.
As a witness, Matthew comes across as sincere. He clearly has interests of an esoteric nature, but the depth he has gone into suggests he is talking about real incidents that have taken place as described. I feel that given the frequency of his experiences Matthew may well have other incidents going forward from this point. If he decides to keep in touch with me, this report may well be updated in the future.
Copyright Dave Hodrien 2022