Prince Philip was meant to meet an alien called ‘Janus’ at a flat in Chelsea, a new documentary has rather casually claimed.
The King of UFOs, which will be streaming on Amazon and Tubi on September 20, described how the late Duke of Edinburgh’s engineering background made him passionate about all things extraterrestrial.
So meeting an alien was an offer that the husband of Queen Elizabeth struggled to refuse, apparently.
The film’s director, Mark Christopher Lee, told Metro.co.uk that the meeting was arranged by the Prince’s top aide at the time, Sir Peter Horsley.
‘Horsley actually met this Janus entity in a flat in Chelsea in 1954 – he claimed that it had an ethereal otherworldly quality and it could read his mind and extract information about flying saucers,’ Lee said.
The pair were pencilled in to meet at a flat along Smith Street, a small residential road about a 10-minute walk away from what is now Sloane Square Tube station, on a ‘winter’s evening’.
‘Horsley wanted Phillip to meet with this Janus as Janus had a message to give him that the world needed saving as Philip was a man of great vision,’ Lee added.
‘Philip didn’t go to the meeting – and it’s most likely that Janus could have been a Russian spy – but Horsley stuck to his belief that Janus was not of this world.’
In the documentary, Lee adds: ‘It could have happened. It’s a very, very strange encounter.’
Horsley did mention this possible close encounter in his memoir, Sounds From Another Room, in which he described a serious ‘Mr Janus’ with an intimate knowledge of aliens that UFO experts have widely interpreted as being extraterrial.
Or, as Lee suggests, probably a ‘Russian spy’.
Experts in the documentary, such as Nike Pope, who investigated UFOs during his time at the Ministry of Defence, said that the monarchy has long had an interest in things not of this world.
‘Prince Philip was very much at the forefront of royal interest in this,’ said Pope. The Duke allegedly became enthralled by flying saucers after a spaceship landed in the Hampshire estate garden of his unclear, Lord Mountbatten in 1955.
‘[Mountbatten] had personally investigated this and was impressed by the credibility of the witness – who was one of his own witnesses,’ Pope said in the documentary of the lord’s bricklayer, Fred Briggs.
Royal aides have previously described how the Duke subscribed to the bi-monthly journal Flying Saucer Review and asked his former assistant, Sir Peter Horsley, to keep him in the loop with any UFO sightings from the RAF.
Haunted Skies: The Encyclopedia of British UFO and The Halt Perspective were just some of the books reportedly on Philip’s bookshelf.
The Mirror even reported in 1986: ‘Prince Philip has been a keen UFO follower for the past 36 years.’
Government records show that officials took UFOs just as seriously in the 1950s. Ministers even met weekly with intelligence officials to discuss them, files show.
In 1957, the government received reports detailing one UFO sighting a week.
‘What we don’t know – and perhaps one of the big unanswered questions – is to what extent King Charles III has inherited any of the documents, the files, the books, the magazine and most of all, perhaps, the interest,’ adds Pope.
Lee, however, has an inkling that the monarch may also want to know if the truth is out there.
‘I’ve also been told by a source who unfortunately can’t be revealed that Charles has had his own UFO sighting and that this source is in contact with Charles exchanging correspondence regarding UFOs and other strange phenomena,’ the filmmaker said.
While Pope didn’t exactly work with Agent Mulder in some shadowy basement during his time in the Ministry of Defence, officials documented sightings from 1997 to 2009. Cigars, saucers, coffins and blinking blobs were among the strange object seeing zipping over British skies.
Sightings peaked in 2006, with officials receiving 643 on their hotline.
A shadow 2000 study undertaken by Defence Intelligence, a military spy agency, called Project Condign found nothing to suggest any of the 10,000 UFOs (or UAPs, as the agency preferred they are called) officials examined are spaceships.
Most were stray Chinese lanterns, the report concluded.
About one in two Britons believe aliens exist and nearly one in 10 claim to have seen a UFO, a 2021 YouGov poll found.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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