SAM THE SANDOWN CLOWN

So now the being had a name. There’s been much debate about whether there should be a comma after All Colours, but at any rate, the kids knew him as Sam.  Now the children and Sam had what has to be considered one of the most bizarre conversations ever recorded by man.

It seemed to be a mutual question and answer session, where the kids would ask Sam questions which he tried to answer and Sam would then ask them things. We don’t have a very accurate record of how the kids responded to Sam’s inquiries, which is too bad, because they would certainly be interesting to read. However, the children did a much better job of recording Sam’s answers to their questions.

Oddly enough, they first asked him why his clothes were in such bad shape. Sam’s answer was that they were the only clothes he had. “Are you a man?,” they next asked, to which he gave a very straightforward “No.” as a reply. Noticing his extremely white skin, the pair asked if Sam was really a ghost. The answer was cryptic: “Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way.”  The kids cut to the chase by asking “What are you, then?”. The reply was less satisfying, as Sam rather shyly said “You know.” 

The conversation became even stranger. Sam said he had no name, even though he had written it down earlier. Or maybe “All Colours Sam” had another meaning of some kind? Using the same sketch pad where he wrote his name, he drew a picture of a being that looked much the same as he did. Was the picture of Sam himself or was it meant to be another “clown” like him?  He also indicated that he meant no harm to anyone and that people actually frightened him. He stated that if he was attacked by humans, he would offer no resistance.

Eventually, Sam invited Harry and Fey to join him in the strange windowless hut he used as his base. Again conflicting with normal common sense, even for small children, the two accompanied him inside the hut. They entered through what seemed to be a curtain or flap into a two leveled structure that was a combination of familiar and odd elements. The “ground floor” had a sort of bluish green wall paper with patterns of dots on it. Occasionally something that looked like “radio dials” jutted from the wall. There was some plain wooden furniture in odd places as well as a simple electric heater. The upper floor had a metallic floor and seemed to be more plainly decorated.

Sam took off his peculiar hat, revealing small ears and brownish hair. If his behavior was unusual before, it now reached new heights of insanity, as Sam ate some berries he said he gathered that morning in the wood. But his method of “eating” had nothing to do with any human activity. He would shove a berry into one of his ears and it would later appear in one of his triangular “eye holes”. The berry would then disappear and reappear at his motionless yellow lips, where it finally vanished for good. At this point, I would have run screaming out the door, but Fey and Harry stayed. Was there some kind of hypnotic effect working on their mind? As for Sam’s berry trick, perhaps he was really some kind of bizarre robot. Or maybe a demented clown that knew magic tricks...

The kids spent about a half hour in Sam’s hut. When asked if there was anything to drink, Sam said he drank water from the stream but had to put it through some kind of purification process before it was fit to drink. He had no water for the kids. The details of what was talked about in the hut are very fuzzy. One wonders if Sam was on some kind of “fact finding” mission from either another world or another dimension. If so, the method he chose was extremely awkward. He obviously knew English, but whether he understood the actual meaning of everything is up for debate. Realizing he was talking to children, he perhaps chose to appear as a “clown” but seemed to have an imperfect idea of what a clown was.

At any rate, the children were free to go with no issue after a half hour in Sam’s hut. At no point did they seem to be under any threat or duress. As they walked back to the golf course, they told a man working on the course that they had just seen a strange “ghost”, which the man disbelieved. Now it is worth noting that when the kids were talking to Sam outside the hut, Fey noticed some workmen on the golf course. These workers didn’t seem to notice either Sam or the kids. Was the hut and the small area around it in some kind of “bubble” that people in “normal” space couldn’t look into?

The children were soon reunited with their father, whom the BUFORA Journal called “Mr. Y”. At first, the kids didn’t tell Mr. Y about the encounter with Sam, but about three weeks later, Fey told him the whole story. At first, the father was disbelieving, thinking Fey’s imagination had run wild. But Harry backed up most of what she said. Did they have a “shared hallucination”? Mr. Y considered the possibility and as time went on, he came to believe in the story. The details were so particular and so outlandish that he thought it would be very hard for young children to fake. And there was another reason he believed them...for Mr. Y had had his own encounter with the unknown several years prior.

On October 20, 1970, Mr. Y was driving to the small enclave of St. Helens on the Isle of Wight when he had a peculiar UFO encounter.  En route, he noticed a large airborne craft surrounded by a ring of lights that varied from cherry red to sky blue to pure white.  The object was flying parallel to him and slowly rotating...it was clearly no ordinary aircraft. Finally it settled into an easy pace trailing him by about 300 yards.

Next, Mr. Y did something very odd. He stopped his car, stepped outside of it and signaled to the UFO using his flashlight. The reasons for doing this were never made clear and after the object hovered the same distance behind him, he got back into his car and continued on to his destination where he met a friend. The friend did see something of the mystery craft glowing hehind the trees near his house. But it vanished and Mr. Y continued to visit his friend. When he left later on in the evening, there was no further sign of the UFO.

That was not Mr. Y’s only paranormal experience. On March 1972, he stopped at night near Compton’s Bay on the Isle of Wight, where he encountered a strange kind of tidal disturbance that seemed to be caused by an unknown underwater craft. Mr. Y was on a cliff watching this and noticed two bright yellow lights “like the eyes of a terrible sea monster” seemingly staring at him. Captivated, he kept watching this phenomena until the tide went out, breaking the spell and allowing Mr. Y to get back in his car and leave the area.

So Mr. Y was no stranger to weird events...although not as weird as what his children experienced. Did Mr. Y’s encounters lead to Sam meeting Harry and Fey? Or was the whole family prone to wild imagination and fantasy? Perhaps having someone like Mr. Y as their Dad led to a household where the paranormal was much more “normal”? That would be the skeptic’s position.

Or instead was this family somehow “targeted” by unknown forces? What exactly was All Colours Sam? If he was an alien, he was surely the strangest ever reported. In ancient times, he would have surely been described as a magical creature...a fairy or a “bogey” of some kind. The resemblance of modern aliens to ancient fairies has been well noted and the Isle of Wight was known as a haunt of supernatural beings.

Could Sam have actually been some sort of bizarre prankster...a real clown who could perform magical tricks? Perhaps Harry and Fey exaggerated some of Sam’s aspects, like his great size and the weird “Berry trick”. But how many clown-magicians could be wandering around the scrub near the golf course at Sandown? It seems almost as far fetched to believe Sam was some kind of mischievious human being as it would be to say he was an alien or a ghost..

Sam had some aspects in common with the “Men In Black”, those eccentric figures that appear in connection with UFO incidents. Many of the MIB are known to act and speak in very peculiar fashion, like they were familiar with the general form of ordinary humans...but not the substance. Sam talked and acted in much the same way, like a visitor from someplace very far away.

What was Sam’s purpose? Was he on some kind of “fact-finding mission” from another dimension or another planet? It would certainly help to know more about what Sam discussed with the kids, but details on that are scarce. Speaking of which, the actions of Harry and Fey are unusual even for young children. Many would have been scared of a giant clown that looked and acted as weird as Sam did. It is almost as if they were under some kind of influence. Mr. Y acted similarly odd when he signaled to the UFO he saw. The area around Sam’s hut seemed as if it was “apart” from the real world...the nearby workers on the golf course never noticed him or his hut. And the hut was never found.

For all of Sam’s weirdness, he was never the least bit threatening. In fact, he seemed timid and against any kind of physical action or violence. He also seemed physically awkward, like he came from a place with different physical laws. His fumbling with the book, his weird hopping gait...could it be he just wasn’t used to our gravity?

Is the whole thing just one big hoax? Are there even any such people as Mr. Y, Harry or Fey? It does seem extremely unlikely that the writers of the BUFORA Journal article would make up a story out of whole cloth. The Journal had a good reputation in paranormal circles and was never involved in any kind of scandal. It would be very reckless for them to just start printing fake stories. Yet there’s no way to substantiate any of what’s in the article. I prefer to think that Mr. Y and his kids were real people. But how much of what they experienced was real? It’s impossible to say.

All Colours Sam has become something of a cult character in the world of the paranormal...the ultimate example of a “high strangeness” encounter. The writer John Keel made a career out of studying those cases, with Mothman being the most famous. But even Keel never encountered anybody like Sam before. He believed that there was some sort of cosmic force beyond the world we know that is playing games with us poor humans. Maybe Sam is an example of one such “game”.

We’ll never know for sure, but it’s fun to think about.

This is Dr. Abner Mality, turning out the lights.