English UFO Investigator Cites Childhood Encounter with Black-Eyed Being as Reason for Interest in the Unknown

UFO investigator Ben Walgate, 35, of Malton, North Yorkshire, England, blames a childhood encounter he reportedly had with a slender, olive-green, black-eyed being for his current interest in the otherworldly.

Walgate recently recounted his experience in an interview for The Mirror, in which he explained that he had his life-changing encounter as a child of only seven or eight years old.

According to that interview, Walgate was returning from a Cub Scout camping trip at Snowball Plantation, near York, and had left the minibus driving everyone home when it stopped to allow its passengers a chance to stretch their legs.

The day was bright and hot as he climbed a small embankment near a wooded area featuring a clearing with a derelict outbuilding.

It was then that he saw, approximately 25 meters to his left, a creature whose appearance haunts him to this day.

The wooded area wasn’t that dense, so I got a good look at this thing. It might have only been a few seconds, but we made eye contact, it had black eyes.
This thing was out of the ordinary; it looked at me, I looked at this thing.
It was definitely not of this Earth. It was such a weird vibe. Its head in proportion to its body was tiny.
It’s not like the stereotypical alien with the grey skin and the big black eyes. This thing was more lizard. I’m not saying it had scales, it wasn’t snake-like.
It was olive green from head to toe, a very sleek, slender-looking thing, dark black eyes, little, tiny head, long over-proportional size arms that came past the knees.
It was just otherworldly; it shouldn’t have been walking on two feet. This thing was walking right through the woods.

As it walked, he said, the creature appeared to be hunched over, as though struggling to stand or perhaps to avoid being seen.

The creature was surprisingly impassive about being spotted by him, remembered Walgate, who assumed at the time that he had fallen victim to a prank.

He returned to the bus, expecting to be met with the laughter of his friends, but no one said anything. It appeared to have been a phenomenon known only to Walgate.

Being an outdoorsy child with little interest in sci-fi or alien beings, Walgate promptly forgot the encounter for over a decade.

Later, in his 20s, he said, the memory of his encounter came "flooding back to me like a bolt of lightning."

That experience prompted him to begin researching and investigating the unknown, and five years ago he set up a YouTube channel, 401 Files, to document his investigations.

Walgate regularly investigates strange phenomena in England for his more than 12.6 thousand followers.

"I am still very scientifically minded, I won’t just jump to anything and say it’s an alien," he said. "I'm getting out there and investigating some of these areas and following up on some of the stories that people have shared."

The loss of memory reported by Walgate is not unusual among people who have reported encounters with otherworldly beings.

In 2018, investigator Tobias Wayland spoke with a man who said he had recovered memories of an abduction experience from a decade earlier after suffering a concussion.

Nor is it unusual for witnesses to have experiences with such beings as children that have a significant effect on their lives.

Earlier this year, Wayland interviewed a man who, as a boy, had reportedly seen two solid black creatures with pointy ears and red eyes in a small Ohio town back in the early ‘60s.

“Most people think you’re crazy or something. But I’m 68 years old; I might as well get it off my chest,” the man said of his experience. “I would take a lie detector test; I swear I would. It’s followed me since I was a young boy. You know what you saw. You can’t get it out of your mind.”

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