It was 60 years ago... Beatles, UFOs in news

Eugene Byrne looks back to the summer of 1965, when Bristolians were arguing about education (even though it was the school holidays), Concorde got the go-ahead and everyone was talking about the Beatles and the Warminster Thing.

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HAROLD Wilson was Prime Minister, Elizabeth II was Queen and President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States was already trying to get out of the mire he found himself in a war in Vietnam which would ultimately prove unwinnable.

Ian Smith's white minority government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) began a long and bloody process of clinging on to power and in August, India and Pakistan fought a short and inconclusive war over Kashmir.

But the big talking points for those less interested in politics and international affairs were the Beatles (of course) and the Warminster Thing, two subjects that could be relied on to fill airtime and newspaper pages during the slow news days of summer.

If you weren't around at the time, you may never have heard of the Warminster Thing, and even if you were you might only half-remember it, but it was big news at the time. Unidentified flying object sightings - with plenty of witnesses - had been going on since the previous Christmas Day and turned the Wiltshire town into a destination for the curious. It was Britain's first great UFO craze, climaxing that summer with the publication of a photograph of a flying saucer taken by a local factory worker.