The Bat Beast of Kent, sometimes referred to as the ‘Saltwood Mystery’, is often considered to be an extraterrestrial sighting. Let’s begin with the story as it is roughly retold today.

November 16th, 1963, Four teenagers were making their way home from a party through Sandling Lane. Something unusual in the sky caught their attention: a golden oval shaped orb, seemingly a few metres in diameter. The object was intensely bright, they began to run from it, and it followed them, before returning back to its original position, it then slowly descended behind some trees. Curious about what it might have been, the boys headed to where they thought the object had ‘Landed’, but all was now dark. Soon they heard some rustling and felt a change in the air to cold and ‘charged like static electricity’, they looked towards the sound to see a hairy figure, around 5 feet tall, headless, with bat-like wings and webbed feet shambling out of the trees.

It seems reasonable to think that there was no evidence of a deliberate hoax, there is some corroboration from the pub landlord that the original group were indeed spooked by the encounter, and there is a fair amount of consistency between the reports from the three boys. While additional sightings of the figure can be questioned as influenced by previous reports or even fabricated, there do appear to be some kind of unusual lights appearing with some frequency in the area, which may have various explanations, although none confirmed.