This UFO testimony had me hooked

In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick up a strange frequency. At first he thought it was just tuning in to a local channel, but then voices came through discussing some kind of nuclear war – and issuing bomb reports.

Recalling the incident decades later, the driver described the simultaneous appearance of a star overhead followed by the sudden realisation that he could see through the floor of his car.

‘I hadn’t done any dope, I wasn’t doing any beer,’ he adds so casually that you feel inclined to believe him. And yet his body felt like jelly. The episode only lasted what seemed like five or ten minutes, but on arriving at the dance, the man realised that the half-hour journey had actually taken nearly two hours. He never found a logical explanation for what had happened.

Between 1980 and 1992, a Cornell graduate from Ohio named John P. Timmerman travelled across America with a recorder and case of cassette tapes. Diversifying from his day job as the owner of an air-conditioning business, he spent his weekends conducting interviews in shopping malls as a volunteer for the Center for UFO Studies. In each mall he visited, he asked shoppers whether they had ever experienced anything inexplicable. The jellified driver was just one of nearly 1,200 people he spoke to across the course of his peculiar career.

We Are Not Alone, which airs on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday evening, replays a selection of these interviews in one continuous stream. There is no introduction – and no explanation – and the only interruptions during the programme are the clicks of a tape ending, the ‘this is side two, cassette one’, type markers made by Timmerman himself and, in the final three minutes, some appreciative reflections from Timmerman’s son.