Scoriton Mystery Terminus

I forgot to mention something in my post on The Scoriton Mystery. The author, Eileen Buckle, paints a good picture of her impression of Ernest Bryant, the man who met saucer-riding Yamski in a field one day in 1965.

Bryant, whose face was suntanned and deeply lined, was obviously used to rouging the elements out-of-doors, but underlying the rather rough-hewn exterior I could detect a deep sensitivity. He was rather quietly spoken, with a sober manner. As time went on and we felt more at ease, flashes of humor sparked from him. He told us about his family - he was happily married with three children, a son aged 17 who was working, and two daughters aged eleven and nine. He was 51 and had a wonderful job as a gardener/handyman at the old people's home in Newton Abbot . . . He had lived at Scoriton for the previous eight years, for the past seven residing at Hawson Farm Cottage which lies just below the field where the metal pieces were found. An ex-Commando and a seaman during the war, he had worked as a security officer at Gibraltar and afterwards became a prison officer at Dartmoor where he was stationed for five years. (p. 53)

In their first interview, Bryant tells Buckle that he had gone to the doctor due to the strain of his experience. Apparently two or three days after the contact he began experiencing attacks of migraine at two-day intervals which wore off after a fortnight. Buckle was, of course, interested in this phenomenon as possibly a manifestation of UFO interference in the human electromagnetic system.

Actually, Bryant died two years later from a brain tumor, at least according to a couple of different internet sources (Mysterious Universe does not count). Maybe the incipient tumor allowed him to see UFOs? Maybe it forced him to see a UFO (i.e., hallucinate)? Interestingly, Buckle got him to sign an affidavit a few months before his death about his experiences. So basically from the time of his experience up until his death various people were harassing him about his experience and What It Meant. That must suck even if you're feeling healthy.

If you have a low tolerance for uncertainty it's easy to find places on the internet that will show you how the Scoriton affair was all a hoax. However, I have to tout Buckle's book again because it still stands as decent front-line, participant-observation research. She's reporting on her lived experience of the affair which, if we're honest with ourselves, is all we're going to ever know about it anyway. This is a great ufological book and deserves  more attention than it has gotten to date, at least from the sociology and history crowd.

However, it strikes me as weird that the fact that her main informant was dying from cancer as she went to press with a book in which he was a central character didn't even rate a mention. Is that a British thing? A 1960s thing? A ufology "use 'em and throw 'em away" thing? Apparently Bryant had a brain tumor and died. No wonder his wife and kids were upset with all the ignorant. irrelevant UFO types traipsing in and out of their lives.