Encounter with a mysterious humanoid entity in Barnston

Even the dullest person has at some time gazed into the clear starry skies of the night and wondered what it’s all about and perhaps pondered upon his or her place in the scheme of things in the mind-boggling immense universe which surrounds our little planet on all sides.

The same goes for time; we live a short span, during which our world orbits the sun around seventy-odd times and then we’re gone – but during our ‘spins’ around the sun, some of us may reflect on the nature of the mind-blowing scale of time and the length of our infinitesimal (but oh so precious) lives in comparison.

The recently revised estimate of the age of the observable universe is that it is 26.7 billion years old; our lifespan is not even a brief spark compared to that phenomenal spectrum of time and during our short stay on earth we learn so little.

Our knowledge of history is quite fuzzy; we know something catastrophic happened to those mysterious and weird alien-like beings – the dinosaurs – 65 million years ago, but no one’s too sure exactly what happened; an asteroid might have struck the earth or a nearby star could have gone supernova.

The subsequent emergence of humans – according to the dogma of evolution – is still being disputed. Nature never over-endows a species beyond the demands of its everyday existence – and yet the human brain has a phenomenal cubic capacity (1,400 cc) that is way out of proportion for our everyday needs and goes right against the process of evolution.

When we look at our infinitesimal lives in such a way, against the cosmic backdrop of existence, we may realise that humans are not the only intelligent civilization in the universe and that in all probability we are receiving visits from beings in other dimensions as well as other parts of the cosmos, and the following alleged incident is a case in point.

On the humid night of Friday June 4, 1993, at around 10pm, a 23-year-old woman in Barnston, a village and civil parish in Essex, England, named Jenny decided to take her Jack Russell Benji out for a walk, as he had been cooped up in the house all day while Jenny had enjoyed a birthday bash at the nearby Devon Doorway with her family and friends.

As soon as Jenny reached for the leash hanging in the hallway of her home on Milner Road, Benji was leaping up at her, full of excitement.

Tonight then, the lovable Jack Russell would have a longer than usual walk, and Jenny, forever counting her calories, thought she’d burn off some of those huge slices of birthday cake she’d had at the Devon Doorway with a lengthy walk.

The young lady strolled with Benji along Barnston Road and down Storeton Lane, and there was a full moon in a cloudless sky to light the way on this warm night.

As Jenny went down Storeton Lane, she heard a loud rustling in a huge tree overhanging the road, and it sounded too loud to be an insomnolent bird, and Benji barked furiously at the upper reaches of the tree but Jenny could see nothing.

She walked on a little faster and then a car passed her, and the driver was actually considerate enough to dip the headlights of the vehicle.

Seconds after the car went by there was a screech of tyres and a crash, and then the car peeled rubber and left the scene. Jenny turned and saw what she originally perceived to be a large tree branch in the road, and her mind joined up the dots wrongly.

The noise she’d heard before in the tree had been the branch coming away, and now it lay on Storeton Lane, but why had the car sped off? Most drivers would pull over, perhaps to see what damage the fallen branch had done to the car.

Jenny went to have a look at the branch, and Benji somehow slipped out of his leash and ran towards it making a whining sound. That ‘branch’ got up off the road surface and stood up; it was the stuff of nightmares – it was some humanoid figure in a black, tight-fitting suit, and it had an elongated head with a single orange light where the eyes would be.

The height of this unearthly, spindly figure was about 20 feet, perhaps more and it turned and looked down at Benji, who was barking at the feet of the thing. Jenny felt a weakness in her legs as she was overcome with pure fear.

‘Benji! Come here! Benji!’ cried Jenny, and she could hardly get her words out. The thing started to walk towards her, and Jenny turned and knew she’d never be able to run; she was out of shape and as terrified as she was, she could not leave her dog to the mercy of that thing.

She backed away, wondering what to do. There was a cottage about fifty yards away – maybe she could call there and tell them to phone the police.

The weird giant figure halted, then walked off into a field adjacent to Storeton Lane. Benji raced after the entity, which Jenny suspected of being an alien.

She started to cry, when a car came up Storeton Lane and flashed its headlights at her. It turned out to be David, a former boyfriend of Jenny, and he asked her why she was crying and she couldn’t answer at first, and when David saw she was holding the yellow dog leash, he asked her where Benji was.

Jenny took a deep breath and then she gave an account of the extraordinary incident she had witnessed and she expected David to doubt her story, but he got hold of her hand and squeezed it and then he asked, ‘You say it went across this field?’ and nodded to the farmland that was silvered by the full moon.

Jenny nodded and David went back to his car and returned with a flashlight. He went into the field with Jenny walking behind him and said ‘I wonder what it is?’

‘I don’t know, I just want my dog back;’ replied Jenny, and started to cry again, and then she added, ‘David, thanks for believing me – I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t seen the thing with my own two eyes.’

‘We’ll find Benji, he’s a crafty dog,’ said David, and he said he thought he could hear a dog barking in the distance, where some woods bordered the field.

‘I can hear that dog – it’s not Benji,’ said Jenny with a very sorrowful expression, her tears glinting in the moonlight.

The couple walked around an old farm and the beam of David’s torch picked up something huge that headed north.

David said he wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, but it had looked like a giant figure, and it must have gone down an embankment to cross a railway line.

He and Jenny went onto Station Road then once again walked into a field, and eventually had to stop because the field ended at the M53 Motorway, and so they turned back, and Jenny burst into tears.

She told David she’d never see Benji again and blamed herself for not buying a new leash; the old one had been frayed, she recalled in a choked-up voice.

When the couple finally got back to Storeton Lane, they saw the giant figure in silhouette, striding from David’s car.

David seemed mesmerised by the sight, and he ran to his vehicle, urging Jenny to hurry up because he was going to drive after that thing, but upon opening the door of the car, he got the shock of his life as Benji leaped out and ran to Jenny, his tail wagging furiously.

Jenny scooped her beloved dog up and hugged him and David almost pushed Jenny and Benji into the car. He turned the vehicle around and drove after the towering figure but it seemed to melt away into the moonlight.

No one believed the story of Jenny and David, but there had been a few UFO reports around that part of Barnston and the Landican area at that time.

The astonishing experience brought Jenny and David back together and they later married.

What did Benji experience that night?

Whatever that entity was, it seems to have been an animal lover, placing Benji in David’s car before returning from wherever it originated. If only dogs could talk.