Journal of Geomancy vol. 4 no. 2, January 1980

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‘SKYWAYS AND LANDMARKS’ AND THE STAR FELLOWSHIP
a chapter in the history of Geomancy

by PHILIP HESELTON

Some 20 years ago, there sprang up a small organization devoted to contact with flying saucers.  It has not existed now for many years and yet an article in a journal such as this is justified in terms of the indirect effect which it had on the geomantic movement.  It was known as the STAR Fellowship. 

Flying Saucerology was at a rather low ebb at the beginning of the 1960s.  Kenneth Arnold had made his famous sighting from which the name was coined some 13 years previously and students of the subject had been eagerly cataloguing the scores of thousands of sightings that had subsequently been reported without any major breakthrough in understanding being apparent.  The Flying Saucer Review had started up in Britain in 1955 and by 1960 had established itself as the leading journal in this field. 

Some were beginning to feel, however, that the only real advance was likely to come through the possibility of contact.  By ‘contact’ I mean the various stories that had been coming to public attention during the previous ten years or so of claims that beings from other planets had come down and met individuals from Earth and had imparted information.  Those claiming contact came to be known as ‘contactees’, the most famous of whom was George Adamski from California, though there were dozens of other stories being published, in Britain as well as in America and other parts of the world. 

Now, ‘contact’ was rather a dirty word amongst most ‘serious’ saucer researchers of the time and there developed quite a split in the ranks of enthusiasts between those who were content to quantify and analyze and those who were prepared to accept that contact had occurred.  Brinsley le Poer Trench had resigned the editorship of the Review in 1959 and it seemed to be taking up an anti-contactee stance. 

It was in response to this that an ex-RAF pilot, J.A. Dunkin (Tony) Wedd, decided to submit an article to the Review to redress this balance.  Tony had seen his first flying saucer during the war, at Thorney Island in Chichester Harbour, and, after hearing a lecture about George Adamski in Tunbridge Wells, became convinced of the reality of other beings visiting the Earth.  His training as an artist and designer, coupled with a creative and fertile mind, saw the potential which could result from more widespread contact, in spiritual, social and physical fields, including an understanding of their technology and of the energies used to power the saucers. 

Tony’s article ‘Diffusionist Theory and the STAR Fellowship’, appeared in the January/February 1961 issue of the Flying Saucer Review.  In it, he put forward the idea, very popular nowadays, but less so then, that we had been colonized from other planets.  He suggested that the Earth could be likened to a penal colony from which we are only now slowly emerging.  The implications of this were that ours is not the only inhabited planet and that our visitors from space are in a very real way our brothers and sisters.  {10}

In the second part of the article Tony took this idea a stage further, and, after expressing the feeling that we must welcome these people, announced the formation of the STAR Fellowship.  It had three aims: to build a travelling exhibition of the evidence for flying saucers; to assist students on Earth to learn more about the space people; and to declare a welcome for our friendly visitors from space by means of the STAR badge. 

Some time previously, Tony had received telepathically the image of a small seven-pointed star and he put forward the idea of adopting a little star badge as a sign of welcome.  The badges which were produced had a small white star on a midnight-blue ground.  Membership of the Fellowship was informal – no one was put on a list – and the badge itself acted as a receipt.  It was hoped that those who wanted to spread the idea would order them in quantity for distribution at a shilling a time in a similar way to the Pestalozzi ladybird badges. 

Implicit in the idea of welcome was that of education and so arose the idea of the Travelling Exhibition.  This was intended to travel all round the world in due course and it was hoped that a trailer would be acquired to fit out with exhibits.  The Exhibition material could be lent out to groups of members to help them put on a Space Week in aid of the Fellowship.  It was hoped that the Exhibition would encourage people who visited it to come forward with their own contact stories. 

The educational aims of the Fellowship were to be accomplished in a variety of ways.  Whilst Tony Wedd was secretary, the chairmanship of the Fellowship was taken by Philip Rodgers of Grindleford, near Sheffield.  I hope that at some time the story of this remarkable man can be given the space it deserves.  Suffice it to say here that Philip claimed to have received communications from space beings, both telepathically and via the medium of his tape recorder.  Some of the messages received were very detailed and gave instructions for the making of devices to utilize what was referred to as ‘free energy’, which seems to be identical to what Wilhelm Reich called ‘orgone energy’.  The foot-warming ‘Wenceslas Boots’ certainly worked and development was well in hand with the ‘Coffoostyn’ coffee pot.  There were hopes of the STAR Fellowship manufacturing these devices for sale to members. 

Bernard Byron was also involved in the formation of the Fellowship.  He claimed to be able to receive songs from the space people in their own language and it was intended that records of these could be produced for sale. 

Another project was the production by members of a book of contact stories to be called Earth Men, Space Men.  Tony had received the idea for the book in a thought communication.  Forty contacts were covered, including some which were not widely known.  The approach was clear: they were all to be taken at their face value for, as Tony said, “who on earth can judge them with proper authority?”

The book was never published.  The records, tapes, free energy machines were never produced.  The Travelling Exhibition never materialized.  So, was the STAR Fellowship a failure?  This would be an understandable conclusion were it not for two aspects: the STAR rallies and the booklet Skyways and Landmarks. 

The response to the Flying Saucer Review article was encouraging, with letters and donations from many countries wishing the endeavours well.  A notice was therefore placed in the May/June 1961 issue informing readers that there was to be a picnic on Saturday 27th May 1961 at Tony’s home at Chiddingstone in Kent.  It requested that {11} spades and sandwich lunches be brought as they were hoping to dig up a field where an old track was supposed to run, “in connection with a theory that the old straight tracks were aligned on the same markers that the flying saucers use.” As far as I am aware, this was the first time that a suggested connexion between UFOs and leys had appeared in print. 

The picnic was the first STAR rally, and it was a modest enough affair, with about a dozen members turning up.  After an hour or two’s hard digging, we certainly found a surface which could have been a track, but the contact with others was far more important to me as I had met very few other saucer enthusiasts up to that time.  The outstanding character, however, was Tony Wedd.  I remember sitting for hours on the patio outside the bungalow in his walled garden, drinking cup after cup of extremely strong Lapsang Souchong tea, symbolic perhaps of the new ideas which I, as a 15-year old, found fascinating.  I heard talk of free-energy devices, plans of which had been obtained from the space people, of Wilhelm Reich and his orgone energy accumulator, of telepathic and tape recorded contact, and, for the first time, of Alfred Watkins and The Old Straight Track. 

Tony Wedd had first read The Old Straight Track in 1949 and, after reading it, took a walk across Hampstead Heath.  He spotted a solitary Scots Pine among the beeches and immediately recognized it as a mark as it stood at least 10 feet above the other trees.  He felt intuitively that the mark was intended to be seen from near where he was standing.  On looking around, he saw that only 50 yards to his left was a tumulus, topped with Scots Pines and encircled by a crown of thorns!  Plotting this line later on the map, he found they fell on a direct line through Westminster Abbey.  This, for him, was immediate confirmation of Watkins’s theories. 

It was not until 1960 that he first suspected the connecting link between the old straight tracks and the flying saucers.  After moving to Kent in the 1950s, Tony started to plot the positions of prominent tree clumps and other mark-points in the countryside around his home.  He was also at the time reading contact stories and Aimé Michel’s Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, and was investigating local sightings.  The revelation came in August 1960 when he investigated a sighting of a saucer over Mark Beech, a clump of beeches and pines situated in a very prominent position not far from where he lived.  It was the report of sightings at Keston Mark, further to the north, in the same month that provided the conjunction of the two place-names and the clue that the saucers’ crews knew about the leys.  The statement by Buck Nelson, one of the contactees, that “the places where the magnetic currents cross is comparable to a crossroads sign” also took on a new significance for him.  Could the crossroads signs referred to be the mark points for the old straight tracks? 

And so, Skyways and Landmarks was born.  It was issued as a simple duplicated booklet at the first STAR Rally in 1961 and was intended as one of a series of Information Leaflets to be produced by the STAR Fellowship, though it was the only one to appear.  The booklet described many of the clumps and prominent landmarks in the West Kent area and the parallel ley system which Tony had uncovered.  It tied in several saucer sightings with this system.  The conclusion reached was that the saucers use certain landmarks to navigate by, that alignment of these marks would follow from Aimé Michel’s theory that the saucers travel along straight lines even when they make a change in direction, and that further investigation may reveal the magnetic currents and centres which would be common to both the ley system and saucer propulsion.  Skyways and Landmarks was reprinted, with the addition of {12} photographs and a new introduction and historical postscript, in 1972, and copies are still available (see details below). 

The STAR rallies continued to be held, on the first Saturday after Whitsun, until 1966.  The last Rally was the one recorded by Eileen Buckle in her book The Scoriton Mystery when contactee Arthur Bryant came to talk and impressed those present very much with his story.  After 1966 the rallies were discontinued.  As Tony pointed out to me later, “The few people who come would probably come and see us anyhow, which is probably the arrangement which suits all parties equally.” Membership was scattered and one rally a year was probably not enough to maintain interest.  Individual energies were moving in other directions and, in 1970, Tony Wedd emigrated to Australia.  The formal end of the Fellowship came in 1972 when the last of the funds were withdrawn to help pay for the reprinting of Skyways and Landmarks. 

So, was the STAR Fellowship anything more than an ephemeral organization such as often springs up in movements like ours, only to fade away again?  Perhaps the very fact that this article is being written suggests that there might be something more.  If the STAR Fellowship still has any significance, I suggest that it is to be found in the following:

1. I see the broad approach which was taken by the Fellowship to the subject of Flying Saucers as being a particularly fruitful one.  It was not interested in proving or disproving anything, but rather finding that which was of value in a particular story.  It accepted the reality of contact, took the contactees’ stories at face value and looked at the practical results to emerge from them: philosophy, social and spiritual sciences; music and technology.  That this approach had practical results can be seen not only in the prominence given in the Fellowship to the development of machines and equipment which would demonstrate the reality of ‘free energy’ as a useful force, but also in the many clues to geomantic discoveries which were received through contact, either directly through thought communication or indirectly via the writings of contactees like Buck Nelson, who gave the first indication that the earth and sky networks may be functionally identical.  It seems of secondary importance in such a case to try and ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ his story if information of value can be obtained from it. 
2. We are becoming increasingly aware of the Earth as a living being and that all of us, people, animals, plants and the stones themselves, are bound together in one system.  A universal consciousness is beginning to emerge that even world awareness is not enough and that we must look beyond at our place in the universe.  It is here that the little STAR badge has shown the way.  As Tony Wedd put it it was “a small but significant gesture to make amends” for our attitudes of destruction.  It shows the way forward, and the right approach to contact is important, for it may well prove to be vital for the survival of our planet. 
3. The most obvious significance of the STAR Fellowship was to channel the searchers of the skies into a new awareness of the landscape.  Both Jimmy Goddard and myself, for example, were inspired by the idea of alignment of ancient sites across the countryside, and, on learning of the demise of the Straight Track Club, set about forming The Ley Hunters’ Club.  This is not the place to tell of that particular venture, but it was, however, this added dimension of the landscape which put UFOlogists onto a new track.  {13}

Could there be any place for a revived STAR fellowship in the 1980s?  There is still a need for welcome, for education and for the non-judgemental approach to new information.  Do feel free to write to me at the address below if you are interested.  Something worthwhile could again emerge. 

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