SOLVING THE THE RISLEY SILVER MAN MYSTERY
The case of the Risley Silver Man is one of those forgotten classics of the 1970s that deserves another look. I say “forgotten”, although Jenny Randles wrote about the episode in these pages in 2013 (FT305:29), describing it as “one of the strangest” encounters that she and her colleague Peter Hough had ever investigated. They considered a wide range of explanations, but could not find one that “fully accounts for some of the riddles surrounding the ‘Man on the Moss’”. I revisited the story in 2018 and, with a little bit of luck, managed to get to the bottom of the mystery.
THE ENCOUNTER
It was about 11.30pm on 17 March 1978 when 39-year-old service engineer Ken Edwards was driving back from a union meeting in Sale, Greater Manchester, to his home in Fearnhead. His journey had been a quiet one, at least until he got within a couple of miles of home.
His route took him along the largely empty edge of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) site at Risley. Travelling along a service road called Daten Avenue (its name came from ‘Department of ATomic ENergy’), he was approaching the roundabout near the Universities Research Reactor building and the UKAEA site fire station when he encountered something very strange – a large silver man.
It’s not hard to imagine Ken’s shock as he saw a 7ft (2m) tall silver figure coming down the steep embankment to his left, from the side of the road where the nuclear reactor was located. Stopping his van, Ken watched as the figure descended the slope in a most peculiar way. He would later recall that it moved with a very stiff-legged gait; so unnatural a gait, in fact, that it gave the impression the figure lacked any knees.
Ken sat frozen in his vehicle as the ‘Silver Man’ continued to walk towards and then across the road, coming within 15ft (4.6m) of him. When it passed in front of him,
