The Mystery of the Sandown Clown: Britain's Answer to Bigfoot

This is the first installment of a new VICE column called THE WOO, and was published in the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.

Her father had seen them a couple of times before—once in October 1970, cherry red balls of light blazing through the night sky on the road between Shanklin and Ryde that were able to keep pace with his car. A few months later, there they were again; glowing yellow this time, emerging from beneath the waves as he stood pinned to a rocky outcrop by an unusually wild incoming tide down in Compton Bay. Because he’d seen these things himself, he didn’t dismiss his daughter’s story of encountering the entity that has since become known to enthusiasts of the weird as “All Colours Sam.” What many may have written off as the playful fantasy of a child, he folded into his own experiences; he interpreted it as a further communique from the eerie lights in the sky and the sea. It’s why he decided to share her story with local Isle of Wight-based UFO researcher Leonard G. Cramp, who in turn transmitted all the lurid details to the British UFO Research Association’s BUFORA Journal.

But was the Sandown Clown really a trans-dimensional alien being? Or could he perhaps have been a ghost, a very human fetish enthusiast, or the idle Cottingley Fairy-esque daydream of a little girl encouraged by a few too many prompts from a credulous father?

The Sandown Clown incident occurred in May 1973.

Fay, as she was named by BUFORA Journal, was playing with a boy slightly younger than her ten years of age in the countryside surrounding Lake Common near Sandown; today, a quiet seaside pleasure town of arcades, caravan sites, and pier-side drinking dens, then, much the same but busier. As the crepuscular hour approached, the children, growing up in an era when parents still trusted kids that age to play out in fields after dark, heard an eerie, rhythmic wailing call ring out across the landscape, a sound unlike any they’d heard before. They decided to head towards its source, across a golf course, through a hedge, and into marshland adjacent to Sandown’s tiny airfield.

The sound stopped abruptly as they approached a small footbridge on the other side of the field. As it did, a hand with three fingers and blue gloves slapped upon the planks and a figure hoisted itself up from beneath the bridge, fumbling with what appeared to be a book, dropping it in the water and splashing through the stream in a hapless attempt at retrieving it. The children then watched as—with a strange, rabbit-like gait—the figure hopped into a windowless metal hut. From within, it retrieved a microphone with a white flex, and the wailing noise returned at cacophonous volume, causing the boy to bolt in terror. But once more, the wailing ceased, and this time the children—by now some distance from the figure—heard the creature ask in a friendly tone, “Hello, are you still there?” as if it were right beside them.

Gingerly, Fay and the boy approached. As they drew closer, they could now observe the strangely attired entity clearly, despite the falling darkness, for the first time.

There’s a bit in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, a film about first contact with extraterrestrial beings, where Amy Adams’ character nervously asks Forest Whitaker’s Army guy, “What do they look like?” just before she sees the aliens for the first time. “You gotta see ‘em for yourself,” he replies, or words to that effect, as if these are incomprehensible entities, completely beyond description. But if you’ve seen the film, you know that they just look like a big squid. So if Amy Adams had asked me, I’d have said, “You know what squid look like? Like that, but bigger”—in that same spirit of honesty and clarity, I’d describe this figure as “a tall clown, but weird.”

“‘Well, what are you, then?’ they asked. Its response to them seemed strange and gnomic. ‘You know,’ smiled the entity.”

The entity that Fay and her friend had discovered in the fields was close to seven feet tall, its head wedged upon its shoulders. It wore a yellow pointed hat, with a black spherical knob at the tip and wooden antennae attached to the sides. The hat was attached to the red collar of a green tunic. Protruding from its sleeves and white trouser legs were what are described in the BUFORA Journal only as “wooden slats.” Its facial features consisted of a brown nose, triangular shapes for eyes, and motionless yellow lips. There were further round markings over its cheeks and across its pallid white forehead, a few wisps of brown hair.

The creature opened the book it was carrying and began to scrawl, perhaps worried it would scare the children with any further wailing. It turned the pages to face them, and as it pointed in turn to the jumbled words, Fay read them aloud:

“Hello… and… I… am… All… Colours… Sam.”

The creature began to speak to them without the aid of the microphone. It never moved its lips and its voice was unclear and at times difficult to understand. It quizzed the children about themselves and in turn they had questions of their own. Why were its clothes so tattered and worn, they asked, to which it explained that these were the only clothes it had.

The children enquired if it were a man, as its voice and appearance possibly indicated. “No,” it chuckled. “Are you a ghost, then?” they asked. “Not really,” it replied, “but I am, in an odd sort of way.” The children, unsatisfied, pressed on. “Well, what are you, then?” they asked. Its response to them seemed strange and gnomic. “You know,” smiled the entity.

(At this point, I’d like to acknowledge the obvious difficulty with interpreting tone in an event that was at least third hand in the telling by the time it reached the BUFORA Journal in 1978, years after it allegedly took place. Presuming the conversation occurred at all, we really have no way of telling if the creature was being playful, evasive, or just an irritating cunt.)

There were things it was prepared to offer up less cryptically; it told the children that there were others like it. It explained it was afraid of people and would be unable, or unwilling, to defend itself if attacked. It then invited the children into the large metallic hut. Crawling in through a flap, the children could discern there were two levels. The ground floor was spacious, decorated in blue and green ‘wallpaper’ with a pattern of dials. There was an electric heating device and wooden furniture. This was only one of the creature’s abodes; it indicated it had a camp on the mainland, but true to form was scant with details.

“I get the impression that Fay was somehow taken into a bubble of alien reality created by this strange personage.”—Fay’s father

It was apparently time to eat. The creature produced some berries it claimed to have collected earlier that day. It removed its hat, exposing thin brown hair and small round ears. Before eating the berries it performed what BUFORA Journal describes as an “odd conjuring trick”; it inserted a berry into its ear and jerked its neckless head forward sharply, causing the berry to reappear in one of its humanoid eye sockets. When the creature jerked its head forward again, the berry now appeared in the mouth part of its face before disappearing into a hole. BUFORA Journal speculates that this may have been some kind of scanning device attached to a type of protective dietary mask, but frankly that smacks of trying to bring a bit of real world logic to a situation that was somewhat beyond the bounds of regular human experience.

After half an hour more of chit chat, the children said their goodbyes and left the hut, dashing back across the golf course towards Sandown town center. Despite the deep strangeness of the encounter, the children, or certainly Fay, believed the experience was real, utterly, and some weeks later she confided her meeting to her father. He felt that even though the tale was bizarre, certain parts of it rang true, having himself experienced highly peculiar events a few years prior. “I get the impression that Fay was somehow taken into a bubble of alien reality created by this strange personage,” he surmised. “He told them he had just made the hut. Also, Fay told me that whilst talking to this ghost, two workmen nearby were repairing a post. They paid no attention to the weird charade—as though they could not see it.”

What was the Sandown Clown?

The most obvious explanation is that the Sandown Clown was pure fantasy, made up by a little girl, encouraged by her gullible father. The whole tale feels like something you might end up with if you asked a child the question “and then what happened” over and over again, until the whole narrative has been unfurled. It could also have been fueled by the unsettling images of BBC test cards F and G, which would’ve been running on British television at that time—perhaps implanting themselves into the subconscious when observed early in the morning or late at night in that hazy, liminal space between wakefulness and dream.

The clown in test card F in particular shares characteristics with the Sandown Clown, occupying an undefined space with a little girl, complete with scrawlings on a chalkboard, perhaps substituted for the book in Fay’s story. Then there’s the term ‘All Colours Sam,’ which sounds close to a child mishearing or pronouncing ‘Alakazam.’ Was the Sandown Clown a local eccentric having some fun? Or a sexual deviant attired in bondage mask and hood, garb for which a child would have no frame of reference? A simple, mundane explanation seems unlikely; as the BUFORA Journal notes, why would anyone “go through all the trouble” of planning and executing a Doc Shiels style hoax?

Perhaps we should finally consider the possibility that this was a genuine encounter with a preternormal entity—not an alien, not a ghost, but some “thing” from another place interpreted by the children’s minds in a form they could just about understand. It’s an interpretation that feels pointedly Albionic in flavor, and 1970s Albionic at that. The Sandown Clown would’ve been right at home in Pertwee-era Doctor Who, slipping about uselessly in the water in its unconvincing costume of car-boot sale cast-offs, flailing with Post Office stationery, shouting into a sports day megaphone. In no slick North American close encounter reports do we hear about the unearthly beings tripping on the ramps of their UFOs and pratfalling into cattle shit. In this sense, the Sandown Clown feels a bit like Frank Spencer shunted through a Scarfolk lens by Nigel Kneale.

Perhaps it’s this distance that gives the story of the Sandown Clown its power. The further we get from 1973, the more of a (three-fingered) glove-fit it seems with the atmosphere of that era. Then again, all these years later, nobody has come forward claiming to be Fay despite the case finding a resurgence in popularity with content goblins on YouTube.

So, was the encounter totally fabricated? In the absence of a breathing witness, we are left with the forever dissatisfying conclusion that the Sandown Clown must remain a mystery, and all the more compelling for it. Although Sandown is definitely missing a trick not having a statue of the fucker.