Voices from Space

The Communications
A Visit to Philip Rodgers
Further Voice on Tape by Norman Oliver

The Communications, by Philip Rodgers
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Sir William Hill, near Grindleford

As a boy, I had always been interested in the possibility of life on other planets, but it was not until October 1956 that I read George Adamski's second book "Inside the Space Ships". This story, I argued, was either the truth or a pretty fairy tale, and determined then and there to find out the truth for myself. Almost immediately things began to happen. A couple of weeks after finishing the book I received a strong verbal hunch to walk up Sir William Hill (a road over the high moorland above our house) at 9.0 p.m. the following Friday. I set off at about 7.30 and at 9.0 was just starting to descend again, after another strong verbal impression that I was not alone, and must not give up hope. My attention was drawn to a pin-point of light on the horizon ahead of me. It pulsated at roughly ten-second intervals, starting with red, then increasing in intensity to magnesium white, then diminishing to red again. At its brightest it gave me the impression of a cosmic opthalmoscope, testing the strength of my sight, which is very bad indeed, particularly in the dark. Friends with whom I discussed the matter were agreed that it was not a car headlight on the opposite hill, nor a star or an aircraft. I cannot say precisely what it was, but felt strongly that my journey had not been in vain.

On 5th January 1957 I had the hunch to climb the hill again, and as I was walking down a light appeared directly ahead of me at about the same strength as a car headlight at 100 yards distance, though I realise now that it was considerably above road level. I jumped on to the grass verge, afraid of being run over, but the light changed suddenly from white to red and switched off: two seconds white two seconds red, altogether. There was no sound of an engine, no car. I think this was a UFO, and, like the first, definitely intended for me. Later in the summer, I saw a red oval object in the sky over Endcliffe Woods, with three friends; and a few days after, a reddish circular one low on the horizon near Grindleford. During August I felt impelled to climb Sir William hill night after night. I saw tiny globes of white light, moving smoothly as if through treacle, separating from each other, advancing, separating again, gliding towards me in formation and then disappearing. I also saw them through binoculars. Enthusiastically I told my friends about these sightings, but I should have known better. "You're no good as a witness, Philip" they would say, "your sight is too bad". And the Space people must have understood the difficulty, and changed their policy accordingly.

On 31st August at about 10 p.m. I was amazed to hear a loud metallic note, varying in intensity but not in pitch, racing through the sky over Eyam Moor at about 100 m.p.h. It occurred to me that one of the flying objects had been made to emit a loud note; I heard it again the following evening, lower down the hill and going twice as fast. Then came the time when I was walking home from the village, and one of these things paced me, sometimes to left or right, sometimes in front or behind. On arriving home, I was greeted by an ecstatic chorus of four or five of the sounds.

These sounds were with me everywhere I went, whether in the town or country. Usually they played sweet single note, very pure and with absolutely no Doppler effect as they flew over me, sometimes quite low. This greatly puzzled my scientific friends. Being a musician with a sense of absolute pitch, I was able to name them according to the notes they emitted: F sharp was Freddie, C sharp was Charlie, and so on. Occasionally there were little scraps of melody, unrhythmiic but very celestial. Sometimes electronic bell notes were audible, on one occasion being heard by the passengers at the back of a bus. Once when I was playing at a concert a recorder solo in C Major, I could hear one of these things emitting a loud C Sharp, which put me off considerably. There were many such experiences, some of which I recorded in musical notation.

But my friends remained unimpressed. "You're no good as a witness," they would say. "Your hearing is too good!" However there were times when they were with me when I heard them, and then they heard them too. There were also reports of similar sounds from County Roscommon, Sheffield and other places. In November I began to make tape recordings of these sounds, with my microphone on the window sill of my bedroom. The first, which I still have in my possession, was a loud sweet C Sharp which sounded from the top of the ash tree on the other side of our lane, about fifty feet away. There it was on the tape, as clear as crystal, with the interesting addition of a peculiar double, rising fundamental note, rather like what a physicist would call difference tones, but which no terrestrial musical instrument, so far as I am aware, is able to produce. This would account for those reports of sounds being felt as well as heard.

In February 1958, when the snow lay thickly on the ground, I not only recorded some loud bleeps, but the voice of a small girl shouting "Howdy". Enquiries failed to show how this could have been made by a child in the neighbourhood; it seemed to belong with the bleeps.

Two weeks later came some beautiful musical signals, and sometimes heavenly chords. And then in March, when playing back the tape, I was amazed to hear a quiet, clipped,mechanical voice saying "Ship is real, people" I attribute tnis to a talking machine.

For the next few months I lost the habit of going to bed, preferring to snatch odd hours of sleep in an armchair. Practically every time I switched on that recorder, something appeared on the tape. The best recordings appeared around 9 pm. Nothing came unless I was in the building; and then only if I was awake. One foggy night I got a collection of musical sounds: a harp-like instrument, a sort of violin without the G string but with a top B string (a perfect fifth above the normal E string), and a woman's warm mezzo-contralto voice singing what sounded like an ecclesiastical chant. It was impossible to trace these to freak radio signals, direct pick-up, somebody's television next door or to sounds outside in the fields.

Just before Easter I recorded what sounds to be a number of children playing, shouting, speaking both English and an unidentified language and playing a trumpet-like instrument. This scrap of melody is modernistic and might be part of a Schoenbelgian Note Row; but a hint is given by one of the boys that they are in some enclosed space.

Five days later I followed a strong hunch to return home early and make a recording. Accidentally, I gave tne wrong style of time check, and when I played back the tape later that evening there followed the voice of a man with a pleasant, somewhat nasal accent, putting me right. At the time this was recorded nothing was audible: it appeared on playing. So this man was not only able to hear what I said but also to read my thoughts; and to transmit on to my microphone in some inexplicable manner.

Shortly after this I made a recording with the microphone indoors, at dead of night, with the curtains, windows and doors all closed. Though I myself heard nothing at all, tne machine had picked up a transmission of footsteps clattering about on what sounds like a metal deck, with hissing noises such as one might expect from the sliding doors of an air-lock chamber.

Then I took my recorder to Sheffield, about eight miles away, and picked up several fantastic sounds including the delightful voice of an apparently young lady whose uninhibited, musical laugh positively defies description. "It's Philip Rodgers come visiting" she seems to say. Four months later I heard that an ex-RAF pilot and his fiancée saw a large red object approaching them in the neighbourhood oi Firth Park, and streaking off to the South-West, towards Grindleford, five miles away. This was just a few hours after I had made my recording in Sheffield.

Shortly after this I received a visit from a Mr John Musgrave, a BBC engineer, who was fascinated by my recordings, and completely baffled by many of them. Using a battery portable, far better than my Grundig T.K.9., he placed his microphone on one side of the window sill, and I put mine on the other. We recorded simultaneously, and both picked up the identical signals, though his were stronger and clearer than mine. This recording culminated with the voice of a small girl shouting "Hello!"

Some weeks later I had a visit irom the BBC's "Tonignt" camera team, with Alan Whicker, who spent all day filming interviews with myself and friends. When John Musgrave came out with some remark doubting the interplanetary origin of my signals, the voice of an irate young lady appeared on my tape, ticking him off severely. However, the BBC team were about thirty feet away, and nothing appeared on their sound track.

Round about Christmas, after a long blank spell, I had some fantastic recordings, including a part of a BBC stereophonic broadcast made about a fortnight earlier, and a woman's voice, unknown to me, instructing a man in a series of numbers. It ended with a distorted piece of music which I later identified as an aria from Puccini's "Tosca", in which Cavaradossi, about to be executed, writes a letter to his beloved Tosca as he looks up to the stars. This I consider to be a clue: to look up to the stars to find the origin of this recording.

Forty-five hours later I had a strong hunch to switch on again, and the entire sequence was repeated for me more loudly and more clearly than on the first occasion. Twice during tne next two months I again had faint forty-five hour "echoes.

I have made hundreds of recordings; obviously the Space People have been at great pains to show me quite a lot about themselves, their technical achievements, their language and even scraps of their music. I have recorded men, women and children, but not the voices of old people. Perhaps, as Adamski says, space people do not show their age as we do. They sound warm-hearted and very friendly, more than the voices of our own people do. Some voices appear to be reproduced mechanically.

They laugh, shout, giggle and joke, appearing so uninhibited as to make us Earthlings seem formal and stuffy by comparison. Where the same person has recorded several times, it is possible to pick out their individuality. I cannot imagine a greater contrast than that between the small girl who calls "Howdy", and the shy young lady with the musical laugh. The child is so full of fun and mischief she would run up and say "Howdy' to the Queen; the other is shy and retiring, though capable of losing her temper if provoked.

Usually they called me "Philip", but on three occasions my full name was given. On two occasions they gave me their names. I have also recorded the words "In Space", "From Space" and "In my Space Ship". It is possible that the English where it occurs is the work of a translating machine. According to Dr G. Hunt Williamson, the Time Check correction and the "Ship is real,people" were made with just such a piece of apparatus: there is a peculiar whirring sound in the first, and a faint, irregular clicking in the second. He maintained that the machine resembles a typewriter, with rows of keys. It is also suggested that where this machine meets a phrase which it cannot render into English it transmits it in its original wording. There was a particular occasion wnen I recorded "Take part in Air Arm Yava nyanna donava ionosphere" to support this suggestion.

These recordings are either in English or in a totally unknown language; there are no recognisable phrases from other Earth languages among them; thus refuting the suggestion that their origin is in freak radio transmissions. In any case, the microphone is not sensitive to radio signals but to sounds.

I seem to have received two translations, if I may so designate the rapid follow up of an English word by one in an unknown language. These were given in the recording of the Children's Party.

Transcript of "Children's Party" tape

Two-note whistle
Croak
Shouting
Long whistle
"Let's go through" "Where?" "In here" (described by Philip but difficult to hear)
Shouting
Short whistles (like a bird)
Sputnik - anya pardoo (faint) (Important translaton, with correlations in Bernard Byron's song - "anya" seeming to mean "spaceship" and thus "pardoo" orbiting. This has been further broken down into "circling" and "flight").
Hallelujah - nyannapoda (very clear - sung) (Another translation with correlations in terrestrial languages).
Terrestrial motorbike
Shouts
"Hey you!"
"Yahoo!" ("With us"?)
Snatch of music (one note followed by series of five)
"Yahoo!"
"Ah - one two three, geedy gumbeda, eight in here!" (described by Philip, but does not describe the piece between three and eight).
Shouts
"Yadoo pardoo" (Can be translated as "with flight orbiting" ["we are in orbit"?] as "Ya" means "with" [from "Yaba Hoosita" - "With love we greet you"], "doo" means "flight").
Laughs
Shout

The first is "sputnik: an-ya-par-doo" and the second "Hallelujah: Nyanna Podo". In this sequence I also recorded one of the boys shouting Yaba Hoosita. Some months after this I recorded my "laughing lady" saying "Nyanna puisee" Thus the word nyanna has appeared in three different contexts. (This is the only one of the tapes now remaining - see Children's Party section).

Early one morning in 1958 I recorded a deep-voiced man saying "herashidoo" and again a few months later saying "hereshidoo check". Early in l959 there was the friendly voice of another man saying "Debom sera", with a stress on the second ayllable. In December 1960 there came a variant, in the voice of a different man: "Debom sior". The Laughing Lady says "Mee-see-mar" in June 1958, with a highly feminine and embarrassed giggle. Six weeks later one of several men says, without the giggle,"Mee-see-see". These recordings are certainly very fragmentary, sometimes being unmistakably clipped short.

Some of the most remarkable recordings are in connection with music. The Space People appear to be listening to our music, and transmit to me some of theirs, albeit brief fragments. Some of these are definitely modernistic in style: one snowing a Debussian Whole Tone tendency, and others marked chromaticism. There are two fragments that remind me of Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra". Their instruments include what sounds like an electronic harp, and various wind instruments that do not seem to be like any we are familiar with. One sounds to be the recorder or fipple flute, such as I am accustomed to play and teach professionally.

One of my recordings certainly seems to show that they were rebroadcasting the first performance by the BBC of Lennox Berkeley's "An Overture". After a considerable rumpus going on for half an hour, one hears a voice say "Quiet Now! Its ON " and thereafter not another word is heard, and the music begins.

Transcript of "An Overture" tape

The single word 'overture' appeared on a recording. Mr. Rodgers heard that 'An Overture' by Lennox Berkeley was to be broadcast as part of the B.B.C. midday Concert Hour the next day. Re-examination of tape showed faint 'an' before 'overture', also 'He only wrote one'. An original decision to copy concert direct from radio changed after a friend's 'telepathic' message: use normal method and start early, radio on, but not too loud.

Voices, appearing to come mainly from two men and a woman, start about fifteen minutes before the concert.

Philip Rodgers Time eleven thirty.
Woman Space
2nd Man I'd say five to one.
Philip Rodgers Sorry. Eleven forty-five.
Man (indistinguishable)
(Beautiful whistled motif, very loud, clear and musical) Man (singing in monotonous descending chromatic phrase) Mnyah.. ....... .Mnyah. (for five minutes or so)
1st Man (excited) Got Home Service on. How are you? (not clear, maybe 'Cahn du')
2nd Man Goot!
1st Man Want your name on the...(unintelligible)
2nd Man It's on Home Service
1st Man Right From space
Metallic m. voice How's tricks?
(few minutes' pause)
2nd Man Space. Take part in air arm. Yar-var niarna donnova - ionosphere.
Another man I've gone
(long whistle) Yonskaler Yes You touch (indistinct) (pause) You've jammed it. Go on.
Woman (quickly) He's shifting in time-space.
2nd Man Shut up. (N.B. This man speaks with a Yorkshire accent which becomes very broad for these two words, making them rhyme with 'book'.)
Man (sotto voce) My stoicranz is stuck
2nd Man Space
1st Man (sarcasm) Good old Einstein!
(modernistic musical phrase played on some kind of Xylophone)
Men (singing, nasal tone) Put your feet down
(Overture is now introduced on radio.)
? It's on. Go ahead
? (very quiet) Don't talk please.
(two seconds later the opening chords of the overture are heard the radio.)

No sounds are heard during the first three items of the concert, but during fourth, while Philip Rodgers at lunch, loud rapid tapping on microphone case, followed by some clanking noises. A little later,

Woman Use short waves Point one two siddibodlerias (authoritatively)

'Yonskaler' was the name of an instrument made by Mr. Rodgers. It had been in use for several weeks but at the time of the recording it was out of order ('jammed'). 'put your feet down' was a favourite phrase of Mr. Rodgers' instruction when he was training with his guide dog six years later. No explanation has yet been found for the loud rapid tapping on the microphone, but it does not appear have any connection with the recording.

Once after I had played a folk dance on my recorder there came a funny little voice saying "Thank you". On another occasion, after playing on the piano my arrangement of a Spanish folk song, I recorded the voice of a man with a foreign accent saying "Excellent".

One day in August 1958 I switched on my recorder and took my descant recorder out into the field opposite our house, and played various tunes of which one was the country dance "Sellenger's Round". The recording is astounding. Half way through the recording is cut clean out, and somebody else, playing an instrument something like a recorder, finishes the piece. Not quite correctly, for he arrived at the final G before I did.

Late in 1958 a Sheffield composer, Mr Colin Hand, wrote a sonatina for treble recorder and piano, dedicating it to me. In June 1959 I invited Mr Hand to my house to rehearse the piece, which was still in manuscript. I switched on my recorder around noon and went downstairs, where I played the entire movement through; it takes about two minutes. I played it fairly well, apart from a bad fluff at the very beginning. In the recording I made out three treble recorders playing different parts of the movement at different times; they paused for a few minutes and then started it all over again. Gradually the echoes of my recorder became weaker and weaker and flatter and flatter, until the whole thing ended in a peculiar scrunch, consisting of three recorder notes a semitone apart, a thing which couldn't be done on one instrument. These echoes of my playing went on for about twenty minutes.

When Colin Hand arrived, he was completely baffled: only he and I knew of the work at this time; it was some months later that it was published by the Oxford University Press.

At the time of writing, the recordings have largely become a thing of the past. The last really good ones came in 1961. In l962 I only made one on one occasion, though one night in August Mrs Anne Gooch, an old friend of mine, saw and photographed two yellow obects in the sky opposite her window, and recorded their peculiar throbbing sound: not unlike the whirring sound heard throughout my Time Check recording. But by 1963 the signals appear to have ceased. I have received the pieces of a jig-saw. What sort of picture emerges when one puts tnem all together?

I think of the Space People as coming here to welcome us back to an immense interplanetary union. Having studied us for thousands of years, they know only too well that they have to break down enormous barriers of ignorance, hostility, superstition and scepticism. They try every means within their power to contact us, to make various people interested, and to give us some small idea of their knowledge and wisdom. They show themselves in the sky. They seek out privileged individuals, some of whom they take up in their space craft. To me they have transmitted hundreds of tape recordings to analyse and study. My conclusion is first of all that the Space People exist; and secondly that their intentions towards our planet are friendly.

A Visit to Philip in July 1966
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On Monday, 25 July, Norman and I called on Philip Rodgers at his home at Grindleford, a village near Sheffield, lying within the attractive Peak District National Park. So interested were we in what he had to tell us about his many unusual experiences and tape recordings that our stay was extended to two and a half days.

His cottage is one of a small cluster on the steep face of Sir William Hill. His recordings were mostly obtained from his bed-sitting room which faces the small lane in front of the house. The microphone would be placed on the window sill and the window closed. He told us the best time for recording was found to be between 8.45 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. The weather conditions seemed to matter for he never obtained any space voices when it was raining. Too much wind could apparently also prevent a recording and this seemed to be in accordance with his theory that the sounds were projected on to the microphone by a kind of acoustic beam; he thought a strong puff of wind could deflect the beam.

He told us that his experiences began late in 1956 immediately after he had read Adamski's Inside the Space Ships, with some sightings on Sir William Hill. Before that time he did not believe in flying saucers. His eyesight had been deteriorating badly and in 1958 there was a dramatic change to auditory phenomena, when he heard his first sounds in the sky. He also obtained his first space recordings that year and was receiving them almost every day. Since then they have fallen off in number, but he still gets them from time to time. He now has a collection of several hundred, though some are more spectacular than others. We listened to one or two of his best recordings and also a tape he has made giving background information on these, but I will not describe them here for he is completing a book on his experiences and adventures.

Philip Rodgers is a musician by profession, he plays several instruments and is an exceptionally fine recorder player. If space people are contacting him acoustically it is not surprising, for although his eyesight is bad, his hearing is exceptionally acute. I found him to be meticulous and methodical in his approach to these recordings. Every precaution was taken to rule out mistaking an earthly phenomenon for space sound and every possible terrestial explanation given consideration. He is not a man who would fail to recognise sound due to an improperly erased tape. Neither could the explanation be put down to a prankster in the lane outside. In that small community every- body knows one another and would recognise each other's voices. Some of his best recordings have occurred when it was positively known there was nobody in the lane at the time. What is more, his recorder was an old-fashioned type with poor sensitivity; its range would not have enabled sounds to be picked up from the lane which the ear itself could not hear from within the room.

We were given a demonstration on our first evening. At the beginning of every recording, Philip gives the date and the time by the continental clock. If any noises were made by us in the room that might be mistaken for extra-terrestial sounds then Philip would tell 'Mike', alias the microphone, what had caused it, such as 'that was Eileen twanging my guitar!'

We were favoured with a 'space recording' that evening and again on the next, when we were given a greeting. On the second occasion Norman put the microphone of his portable recorder alongside Philip's on the window sill and a female 'space' voice was received by both recorders simultaneously and was heard against a background of our talking. Shortly after the voice was heard, a tractor started up in a nearby field. The sound was hardly heard at all on Philip's machine but Norman's sensitive portable picked it up too well-the noise nearly drowned every thing else.

'Some people tell me my recordings are made by spirits,' Philip told us. He has a humorous reply to such explanations in the form of 'Rodgers' Law'. This states that 'If a person claims a supernatural experience, such as a ghost or poltergeist, the phenomenon will be explained away as being due to some physical or natural cause, whereas if a person claims to have witnessed some remarkable physical phenomenon, such as a UFO in the sky or a light on the unilluminated part of the moon, such phenomena will be explained away as being psychic or supernatural in origin.'

I asked Philip whether he had ever had any insertions during 'play back', or whether his space recordings were received invariably through the microphone. Apparently there was an occasion when some music he had previously recorded was found to have been altered, the tune was finished off with different instruments, but this had been rather an exception.

Further voice on tape by Norman Oliver
Over the night of April 2nd. to 3rd. 1971 Mark Stenhoff and I were skywatching on the South Downs behind Worthing and had brought along a tape recorder and a blank tape, sealed in its box. Some time after 10.30pm. we opened the tape and put it on the recorder which was on the grass some few feet away from the car. We started recording, then went back inside the car. We left the recorder to its own devices for some twenty minutes or so, then stopped the recording and played it back. There was barely any sound at all – other than our very muted voices from inside the car - for some ten minutes, then, we were astonished to hear an (apparently) male voice very audibly saying two syllables that sounded like ‘SHUB-SHEE’ – really a very similar type of interjection to those recordings of Philip's. The microphone of my machine was quite sensitive, picking up – as I say – our own voices from the car and this ‘superimposition’ was much louder than they were. There was certainly no-one around within a quarter-mile radius – we were right in the country. Neither was any radio on; indeed, this isolated interjection was certainly not a broadcast one. It was later suggested to me that the word resembled the Urdu for ‘vegetable’. If this was so, I can only think some entity or other was a little contemputous of our discussion in the car and let us know what he thought of us!

Norman Oliver, New BUFORA Journal 9 August 2003
(Could this have been "Sheo-sheoi"?) ("To the apples we salt, we return", from George Hunt Williamson's writings - see Solexmal Glossary in Space Language on this site).
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