The truth about the Bunns Lane UFO Crash

I suppose that after all of these years, it's time the truth about the Bunns Lane UFO crash is told. Sometime in the mid/early seventies at about 8pm on a winter Saturday night, there was a huge explosion in Bunns Lane Works. A massive mushroom cloud of fire lit up the night sky, windows shook for a mile and the bang & flash was seen in Colindale. Within minutes the police, the fire brigade and all sorts of dodgy officials turned up and sealed the area off. Bodies were removed and wreckage taken to a secret MOD base. The official cover up story? Kids had been playing with fireworks.

That's the myth that has lived locally. I can tell the truth. I come from a family of pyromaniacs who are obsessed with explosives. I don't share this obsession, but I suspect it stemmed from my dad. He flew Wellington bombers in the second world war and used to speak with awe about the feeling of dropping a 4,000 bomb or blowing up a Romanian oil refinery "You could see the fire for a hundrerd miles" he'd tell us. My oldest brother has a massive collection of legal firearms. He spends every spare hour hurtling around the fields of Hertfordshire shooting anything that moves. My other brother has even bigger targets, he became a rocket scientist and designed bits for the space shuttle. They all love big bonfires.

As a kid, my Dad taught us to make nitroglycerene before he taught us to read. He loved nothing better than tosssing a stick of dynamite in a lake to catch fish. In Blackall, Queensland Australia where he was raised on a goldmine, this was seen as quite normal behaviour for young boys.

Anyway one lovely winter evening in the early/mid seventies, he said "Jump in the car, I've got a treat for you". Whenever he said this, you knew it was something really special. We went and got some Kentucky fried chicken and spare ribs from Colindale, then drove to his workshops in Bunns Lane. He ran a car repair business. One of his biggest problems was disposal of waste thinners. This was rather expensive. Thinners is highly flammable and can't be poured down the drain. He had a novel solution. There was some disused railway land in Flower Lane, which he rented some of as a car park (where the warehouses are now). He had taken several 40 gallon drums of thinners, 3/4 emptied them and then we retreated to a safe distance. We threw the bones of the chicken and the spare ribs on top and retreated to a safe distance. He then produced several firework rockets and aimed one at the cans, using a hand held launcher he'd made. With the words "never tell a soul about this", he lit the rocket. Have you ever experienced a major explosion at close range? It sucks all of the air out of your lungs. Your eyeballs feel like they are going to pop out. For 5 or 6 seconds you are completely disorientated. All I can remember is a huge fireball making its way into the night sky. We'd cracked many windows in the yard. At that he whooped with laughter and said "Job done, we'd better get out of here". At which we jumped in his turbocharged Ford Capri Mark 3 and sped home. He said "Under no circumstances tell your mum".

I forgot about it until early 1980. I was at a party and I asked an old stoned hippy if he fancied coming down to watch our band rehearse at our newly opened studio in Bunns Lane. He said "I avoid there, it's a bad place". I enquired, he replied "A UFO crashed there a few years ago. We were having a smoke in Flower Lane Park. We saw the whole thing. UFO land, a huge mushroom cloud, a massive bang. The old bill sealed off the area and took away the bodies and debris. Afterwards we crept in and found some bones and some melted metal. The old bill put out a cover story that they found fireworks and it was kids".

I told my Dad this. He laughed. The old bill had contacted him and said that they'd had a report that kids had been playing with fireworks and made a fire. I kept my mouth shut about it, till today. I wonder if the truth about Roswell is so mundane.