Sam, the Sandown Clown

• The Talking Mongoose Case
• The Mangnoson Affair

Thomm Quackenbush

The Sandown Clown reminds one unfavorably of Gef the Talking Mongoose: something that by all rational accounts cannot exist and yet, reportedly, did. Gef had the benefit of being a long-lasting phenomenon and having been "witnessed" by many. To the best of our information, the Sandown Clown existed only this once, despite what they said of there being others in the world. (A world, at least, though perhaps not this one.)

Though people have an instinct to shout "Me too!" when hearing an anomalous story, no one ever claimed that they too had been in the presence of this creature. In a world of copycats and pretenders, no one wanted to admit they had been charmed into a metal shack.

But, if one is to discuss these sorts of accounts, one must examine the report as written (or rewritten by Norman Oliver for publication in The British Unidentified Flying Object Research Associate Journal, Volume 2, Number 5, January-February 1978, titled "Report-Extra! Ghost or Spaceman '73?"). One cannot wave their hand and say that it did not happen. If it were a matter of it not happening, there is nothing much to discuss beyond a fakery motive. So, let us say that this did occur on some level and proceed from there.

(Despite potentially calling themselves "Sam" -- we will get there -- we cannot presume a gender for the Sandown Clown, nor should one objectify them as an "it." I have known both male and female Sams, and none of them were also robot clowns. "Sam" may be beyond gender, so the singular "they" will be used. Also, Sam wasn't their name--don't worry, it will soon make as much sense as it can.)

The shortest version of the story is that two children encountered a creature who had dropped their book into some water and fumbled to retrieve it. They were startled by the children, dashed back to their metal shed, retrieved an object that is described like a poor man's karaoke machine, and was friendly enough that the children went into the shed with them, where they write a disjoined message, draw a picture, and eat a berry with their ear.

All standard stuff and reason enough to decide the case is nonsense. Why waste a word exploring further? This case may have more to it than it seems.

Now that we have the basics down, let us entertain the facts as reported, much as the clown mulled over the berry they poked into their face.

Detailing their physicality seems appropriate. They were nearly seven feet fall, possessing only three fingers and toes. The former were inside blue gloves, but the latter were on barefoot display. On their paperwhite face (attached to a too-large spherical head that sat, neckless, directly on their shoulders) were features seeming to be crudely painted: blue triangle eyes, a brown rectangle for a nose, an immobile thin yellow oval for lips. What hair they had hung in sparse, reddish strands. Two wooden antennae stuck out from the sides of their head and slat-like ones projected from their wrists and ankles. They wore what can best be called a clown costume -- with a face like that, why not lean in? -- including a tall pointed hat with a black knob that interlocked with the red collar of their tattered green tunic, white trousers, the blue gloves, and long and frilly sleeves. (We cannot know if the slats were part of the costume or something that grew from the clown.)

Though not related, the children -- a boy and a girl -- were vacationing at Lake Common, Sandown, on the Isle of Wight on May of 1973. While exploring the Shanklin & Sandown Golf Club, the children heard a sound like an ambulance siren. Curious, they opted to seek it out, climbing through a hedge into a swampy field near the airport. Once they reached this point, the siren ceased. They continued to search. While crossing a footbridge, they saw the clown's gloved hand below them, then the clown himself appeared. The clown had just retrieved the notebook that they had dropped into the shallow water. They then hopped away as though they were an astronaut on the moon, entering a small metal hut resembling a windowless version of those used on construction sites.

The children, having had enough of the weirdness for the day, started to leave. The clown reappeared fifty meters away, holding a black-knobbed microphone attached to a small speaker by a white flex, as though about to sing the saddest karaoke. The siren resumed, frightening the children. It then stopped, and the creature said into the microphone, "Are you still there?" which the children heard as though the clown were next to them. As they sounded friendly and shy, the child forgot crucial lessons about stranger danger (and what could be much stranger than this?). They decided to approach.

Up close, the creature could be understood without the microphone, but his speech was unclear as though issued from a mouth that could not move -- which was, of course, the case. The children also found that the clown's clothing was ripped. The clown explained that this was the only set of clothing they had.

The clown beckoned them to crawl the shed through a flap. It had two levels; the bottom was covered in a blue-green wallpaper with a pattern of dials. The top was smaller and had a metallic floor.

They removed their hat to show the children a pair of round ears and that they were balding.

The clown then wrote in a notebook in introduction, "Hello and I am all colours, Sam." What does it mean to be "all colours"? What is the significance of the phrase? The creature had to point out the message to the girl, as it was not written in a conventional sequence. Nonintuitive actions bring us further from the world we have come to expect. Knowing better the order in which Sam indicated the words would give us a bushel of new information, but one cannot expect too much from a child witness. Still, it is a detail a little too strange to be worth the effort of making up.

There is not a way to rearrange the words to cause it to make more sense, so the actual message may be more profound than idle speculation could provide.

Given how white the being's face was, the children asked if they were human. The clown chuckled and said no. The being stated that they did not have a name, despite the message earlier about being Sam. (Was this not a name? Was it a species affiliation? Some other category of identification of something that is "all colours?" Was he addressing the girl as Sam?)

The clown drew the children a picture of one of his kinsmen, though it is unclear how this would help them better understand. Wouldn't a sketch of another clown, crude features and all, look about the same? They informed the children that they had a camp on the mainland where others of its sort might be, though they did not reveal the exact location.

The clown said that they feared humans and, if attacked, would not defend themselves. They were bashful but friendly with the children, trusting them in a way a seven-foot-tall clown robot shouldn't have needed to.

The clown knew what a human was, at least enough to fear us, which is a sensible position to take when one is alone. Add a few more seven-foot clowns to the mix, and it becomes a force to be reckoned with. Though one clown could easily have eliminated two small children, this creature knew to be cautious. Where there are two humans, there are apt to be others who may not be so accommodating.

What experiences did they have with humans before, given that no one has ever reported another encounter with their "species?" Did it meet a human in another form? Why wouldn't it defend itself when it likely could have?

There may be a reason children have an instinctive fear of clowns, something passed down in their genes. Perhaps what we call clowns were created in mockery and warning. Maybe other children have seen the clown or their ilk, but they never escaped the metal shed to tell anyone. Those who did not know to fear clowns did not survive to reproduce.

They said that they drank water from the stream, but only after cleaning it. Though we could say the same, it is curious that the clown brought this up at all. We must presume there is some importance to it, then, and wonder if the robot clown was concerned about bacteria or something else inherent to the substance. Vampires cannot cross running water, it is said. Holy water dispels evil.

Much is made of the creature's manner of eating the berries they said they collected in the late afternoon. It was, as noted above, ear-first. They popped one in and thrust their head forward. The berry reappeared at their eye, at which point they jerked their head again, and it appeared in their mouth. It was something like a magic trick. Oliver speculated that perhaps their face was a mask that scanned the berry for toxins, though his foundation for mentioning this seems to be nothing more than his imagination.

Delving into the psychology of the clown is a dicey prospect. Things in this realm are not given to behave in ways that make a linear or logical sense.

It would be too simple to write the whole thing off as nonsense, but that is its nature. Here we have a strange humanoid figure, speaking curiously to children, behaving in a way that does not make sense to mere mortals. Our ancestors had a name for these, though they cautioned against our using it for fear that they would hear us and come. If we were to find them first, they could be kind. If the Sandown Clown could take the children unawares, they may not have returned to tell the tale.

The Fae, as we will call them (though, of course, this is a distraction from the truth beneath and the term I used for convenience) have been with us as long as there have been human eyes to see them. Their ways are not ours but are adjacent. They interfere with us for reasons that are not ours to know, only to speculate.

And now we come to one of those synchronicities that plague the researcher of the trickster daemons. It could mean nothing -- it probably means nothing -- but it is curious. Though we do not know the children's actual names, we have the pseudonym the girl was given in the report: Fay. Of all the names that could have been chosen, she was labeled Fay. A little on the nose or a coincidence without distinction. The trickster likes us unbalanced, sounding ridiculous enough that no one sensible would consider our ramblings.

Researchers call them Sam because they pointed at the word in the book, but they said they had no real name. One is reminded of the power knowing something's true name gives them. Oliver also designated Fay's father as Mr. Y, meaning that the girl's full pseudonym would be Fay Y. Fae, why are you so tricky that you slipped a hint into a BUFORA article?

We must treat matters like the Sandown Clown as visitations, not sightings. We need to dissect it as we might a poem. What happened to the children was true, but that does not make it real.

The weirder it is, the stronger it is. If the children had just happened upon a tall man in the woods who had shown them the inside of his shack while saying strange things to them, the only place we might be hearing about it would be in a true-crime podcast. Being a paperwhite, macrocephalic karaoke enthusiast gave it the zhooshing it needed to be reported, perpetuated.

A problem with this case is that it is filtered through two adult men who, in the way of these things, adulterate it. Added to this is the potential that Fay's memory of the event drifted and fuzzed given that she was chastened enough by the laughter of the adult she initially told to keep it to herself for three weeks, until June 2, 1973. (One ought to know that her father was not at first willing to believe it was anything more than fancy, which may have distorted her retelling more as she tried to get him to accept her truth.)

First, we have Mr. Y, who reported it at the behest of a Mr. Leonard Cramp four to five years after the sighting occurred; we do not have a report straight from the girl's mouth promptly, so there are likely details that would be more than helpful for researchers of which we are deprived. We may assume from necessity that Mr. Y said everything he could, but we are dealing with a parent who may have unconsciously omitted and added. We can credit that, though he did have difficulty communicating with him, Mr. Y found the boy and extracted corroboration that this event occurred as Fay had said.

Then we have Norman Oliver, writing for the BUFORA Journal. He read a "complete dossier" from Mr. Y and distilled it down to the only case report. If he saw fit to share his notes with anyone else, there is no mention. We are forced to assume that Mr. Y's dossier is no longer in existence and thus cannot be consulted. (One doesn't want to defame Oliver, but there is also the possibility that he made the whole story up, and there never was a Mr. Y. Our only assumption here is that he didn't. A seasoned UFO professional would have chosen to fabricate something less ludicrous.) Some articles state that Oliver interviewed the children, but that seems to be authorial confusion. Fay is never directly quoted, for instance, though Mr. Y is repeatedly. Oliver took Mr. Y at his word and, as far as the record shows, didn't ask Fay or the boy questions that might better clarify. Likewise, articles say that the children persisted in their version of the events were true through the rest of their lives, but they have given no public reports or even outed themselves as the witnesses. As such, this may be an exaggeration for effect. We can allow that, from the time of the sighting in 1973 to the time of the BUFORA article in 1978, at least Fay remained insistent, which might be enough. She might have been a teenager and would likely instead have said that she had not had a conversation with a robotic clown in a bog. There is no mention of a Mrs. Y, though we can't extend ourselves much in wondering at the importance of this. Was he not married, or might she not have approved of telling this story?

Several prominent authors of Fortean phenomena have glanced the Sandown Clown case in their books, including Jenny Randles, but they offer nothing in the way of a confident theory. This demonstrates impressive restraint on their part.

However, this incident with the clown is not the first potentially paranormal event to occur around Mr. Y. He stated that, for years, he would encounter an object in the sky. The first was halfway between the road and Bembridge Downs on October 20, 1970. He stopped his car to watch this object with lights "like a bright red cherry" hover over the River Yar. He observed a while, then continued on his way to a friend's house. When he returned that way, the lights were still there, though there is no evidence that anyone else had this experience, nor that Mr. Y told anyone. Some, seeing a hovering object that remained for hours, would try to rally other witnesses, but not Mr. Y.

A more frightening recurrence of this experience occurred on March 1, 1972 (though there were other encounters between these two that Oliver excised so that he only had to write an article and not a book). The tide was high and strange on the cliffs of Compton Bay, trapping Mr. Y for a time on a ledge where he saw, forty feet away, two yellow lights "peering up at me like the eyes of some horrible sea monster" from just beneath the surface. Once they went out, the sea calmed.

Though Mr. Y had years' worth of hide-and-seek with a UFO, it is odd that he would associate it with what happened once to his daughter. Two (or many more, given the frequency and longevity)strange events can occur and have nothing to do with one another, even along bloodlines. Had he been the one to have shared a half-hour tete-a-tete with an inexplicable being, he would be in a better position to state that one had to do with the other. Instead, he threw his lot in with Fay, possibly against her will. She described only a metal shed -- unremarkable if it had not included a robot astronaut clown -- and nothing resembling the object Mr. Y witnessed. Still, the researcher is left weighing the saliency of Mr. Y's experiences in measuring the parameters of Fay's.

Mr. Y was explicit that he never told his daughter word one about his sightings over the years, so he could not have influenced her story -- though the two tales couldn't be more different. Perhaps in telling her, he would have initiated her into a reality beneath our everyday.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Sandown Clown was a person in a costume. Every part of that individually is sensible. We've all met people, we've all seen costumes, most have cowered from a clown. It is baffling that this costumed person would be barefoot in a swamp, but stranger things have certainly happened. And if they had a limb difference, it is not for us to call them names. However, it doesn't seem likely in our everyday world -- which is not to say that any other theories hold more water than this confusing but comparatively mundane explanation.

Even if one assumes it was a person in a costume, we cannot allow that this was a hoax. Not that the children made this up, for that is something entirely different than a hoax. Instead, this was a willful act by some person who wanted to...what? Accidentally encounter two children while wearing a confusing costume, invite them to a two-story shed, show them a magic trick with a berry, and then say goodbye? If it were not for the children, all it would have been was a person in a costume, squelching about in the muck of the English countryside for reasons known only to themselves.

The evidence against this is primarily physical, namely that the clown was an unlikely seven feet tall and had three fingers and toes. These would be odd and challenging things to fake, particularly if one had no reason to believe one would have an audience. In short, there does not seem to be much reason to conclude this was a hoax, as it would require the hoaxer to have precognitive abilities, a crude clown mask and costume, and a portable two-story metal shed at the ready. Should we consider that wearing a clown costume was simply some strange person's hobby, and these children happened upon them at the wrong time? It seems a reach.

That they were an extraterrestrial seems more unlikely, though it does require us to define precisely what we mean by "extraterrestrial." That is a more significant issue than we can confront here. Suffice it to say, almost nothing about this event matches what is reported in abduction cases without stretching what we mean. (Whitley Strieber, serial abductee, and author of many books on the topic, has expressed that his Visitors are putting on a sort of show. They do not present what they genuinely are but instead a constructed face for humans. Though their methods and rationale are beyond us, they would have more for which to answer if they decided to begin wearing scribbled clown masks.) There were no observed UFOs at the time of the children's sighting.

We think of aliens being technologically sophisticated, or how would they manage to visit us? The clown showed the children nothing that would suggest better technology than they would know, if not something worse. All Fay and the boy saw was a microphone and speaker device (the likely source of the sound the children associated with an ambulance), along with a space heater in an austere metal shed. The being had rough wooden furniture resembling a table and chairs. In short, the creature at no point would remind one of any other report of aliens aside from being humanoid and peculiar.

The children did not think that they had seen an alien. That was a narrative imposed by Mr. Y and encouraged by the tale having been published in the BUFORA Journal. The kids, being more sensible, figured that it was either a ghost or someone dressed up, which they told the first adult they encountered.

Likewise, singular though they were, it is hard to believe that the children encountered a robot. At least, not a terrestrial robot. We have nothing that could quite do what the clown did -- now and certainly in the 1970s. What would be the purpose of such a device? One needs straightforward methods of filtering water and testing berries. Why have a robot able to use English orthography but unable to do it in sequence? Though it would require smaller leaps than some of the other proposed solutions for the clown, it raises too many questions without possible answers.

We come to what is perhaps the most straightforward answer and, as is unusual in this field, one that hits upon a good point. What if this clown sighting was nothing more than a shared hallucination between two children, a folie a deux? A hallucination was an agreed reality not shared by anyone else or even the kids themselves after the initial encounter. There are Marian visitations that are less detailed that are then enshrined as holy sites. That these children saw a robot clown is no less valid simply because it was not a celestially lit Caucasian woman. The clown's primary downfall is that there was not already a cult to their strangeness that this sighting could reconfirm. If this manifestation had included more -- details or witnesses -- there may have been other appearances of the clown. There would have been more psychic energy to open the barrier to wherever they are, whether it be a place that exists on solid land or only in the mind.

Mr. Y offers an explanation, which is satisfying on one level, confirming on one hand that this was something akin to "the Fae." On the other, it is so curious a thing for Mr. Y to suspect that his doing so becomes deeply suspicious. He wrote to Oliver:

"I get the impression that Fay was somehow taken into a bubble of alien reality created by this strange personage...he told them he had just made the hut. Also, Fay told me that while they were talking to this 'ghost,' two workmen nearby were repairing a post. They paid no attention to the weird charade--as though they could not see it."

What does it mean that, while the children had what was sure to be the weirdest experience of their lives, workmen were close by? One has to imagine that they would bring it up. It implies that what these children experienced did not occur in our consensus reality, but some other plane to which they were briefly admitted by seeing something they should not have.

Is the Sandown Clown a ghost, as the children wondered? Not as we understand the word, though the clown reportedly responded to that question with, "Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way." He was clear on the point that he was not human -- who could really question this assertion? -- but he was something that is like a ghost, but not. A spirit of some sort, then.

When asked to confirm what they might be, the clown would only answer with, "You know." Perhaps the children did. Maybe we do as well. On some level, deep inside of us, we want to say what they are. It's on the tip of our tongues, but we have been taught not to use the word. But we know.