Vrillon Calling

At ten past five on the evening of Saturday 26 November 1977, viewers in parts of southern England were watching an ITN news summary. Ivor Mills was reading an item about the war in Rhodesia.

Then, for those receiving their signal from one particular transmitter, the sound went.

The picture carried on perfectly. Mills kept moving his mouth. What came out of the set was a deep buzz and then a slow, distorted male voice announcing itself as Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command.

It spoke for somewhere between four and six minutes. The message was that humanity had very little time left, that the weapons had to be given up, that there were false prophets about, and that if the planet could manage it there would be a great awakening as the Earth passed into the New Age of Aquarius. The delivery was calm throughout. It continued over the cartoon that followed the news.

Then normal sound came back.

How

The technical explanation is fairly well agreed.

Hannington, on Cottington Hill in Hampshire, was a relay. It did not receive its feed down a landline from the studio. It picked the signal out of the air from another transmitter at Rowridge and rebroadcast it.

Anyone within range of that receiving link with a strong enough transmitter and the right frequency could push their own audio into it and Hannington would obligingly amplify it across Hampshire, Berkshire and beyond. It required equipment, some knowledge and a certain nerve, and it was not beyond a determined amateur.

Who

Nobody knows.

The IBA investigated, the authorities investigated, the press investigated. No arrest, no prosecution, no confession. In nearly fifty years nobody has come forward. The entire value of a stunt like this is normally in telling people about it afterwards.

The content points somewhere. Ashtar is a real fixture of the UFO contactee scene, a supposed commander of a space fleet who has been channelled by mediums since the 1950s, so whoever wrote it was either inside that world or had read enough of it to imitate the register exactly.

The press could not even agree on the name. Contemporary reports give Vrillon, Gillon and Asteron.