All Colors Sam

I took it for a faery vision Of some gay creatures of the element That in the colours of the rainbow live And play I the plighted clouds. I was awestruck And as I passed, I worshipped; if those you seek It were a journey like the path to heaven To help you find them. Sometimes the way such entities describe their interdimensional nature is through the terminology of light. What is light? The visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation: the different wavelengths or frequency of electromagnetic waves. All Colors Sam: The witnesses: The principal witness was a seven-year-old girl, given the pseudonym “Fay” in the BUFORA article. She was accompanied by a boy approximately her own age. Her father is identified only as “Mr Y.” The location was around Lake Common near Sandown, Isle of Wight, close to Sandown Airport. It was a Tuesday afternoon in early May 1973, around 4:00 p.m. And this was not initially a UFO sighting. It started with a sound. The siren: Fay and the boy heard what they described as a strange wailing noise, something like an ambulance siren. Instead of running away, they followed it. They crossed the golf links, went through a hedge and entered a swampy meadow adjoining the little-used Sandown Airport. Once they reached the area, the noise stopped. They then began crossing a wooden footbridge over a narrow brook. And from under the bridge, a blue-gloved hand appeared. A figure climbed out. The thing under the bridge: The figure was carrying a book. Apparently startled or clumsy, it dropped the book into the brook and splashed around retrieving it. The children watched it move away toward what they described as a metallic hut resembling a temporary construction-site building—except it had no windows. Its movement was bizarre. Rather than walking normally, it moved in a kind of exaggerated, bounding gait with its knees raised unusually high. It disappeared into the hut. The children moved away about fifty yards. Then it came back. This time it was carrying what the children interpreted as a microphone, with a black knob and a white cable or flex attached. The horrible siren started again, now extremely loudly. The boy panicked and began running. Then the sound abruptly stopped. The figure apparently spoke into the device: “Hello, are you still there?” The especially peculiar part is that the children said the voice sounded as though the speaker were standing immediately beside them, even though the figure remained some distance away. Its tone sounded friendly enough that the children stopped fleeing and approached it. What “Sam” looked like: This is where the famous clown-like description comes from. The original report describes something nearly seven feet tall, apparently with no visible neck; its head seemed to sit directly on its shoulders. It had a pointed yellow hat connected or interlocked with a red collar, beneath which was a green tunic. On top of the hat was a round black knob, and on either side were objects described as “wooden” antennae. The face was extremely strange. The children described: triangular markings where the eyes should be; a square brown nose; yellow lips that apparently never moved; extremely white, almost paper-white cheeks with circular markings; a fringe of red hair; blue-gloved hands; white trousers; strange “wooden slats” extending from the sleeves and below the trousers. Later Fay added an even stranger anatomical detail: three fingers on each blue-gloved hand and three toes on each bare white foot. This is why “clown” is somewhat misleading. The children apparently did not report, “We saw a clown.” They described a humanoid whose coloration and facial markings later caused people to call it the Sandown Clown. “Hello and I am all colours, Sam.” Its first close communication was apparently written rather than spoken. It took out a notebook and wrote in large letters: “Hello and I am all colours, Sam.” The words weren't written in normal sentence order. The figure had to point to the individual words in the sequence in which Fay was supposed to read them. And there is another major misconception. It is not actually clear that its name was Sam. During the subsequent conversation, the creature reportedly said it had no name. So “All Colours Sam” is our retrospective name for the entity. The original phrase might have meant something completely different. It could speak—but its mouth didn't move Once the children got closer, they found that it apparently didn't require the microphone to communicate. It could speak directly. But its yellow lips remained completely motionless. The speech was difficult to understand and was compared to someone attempting to talk without opening their mouth properly. The children began asking it questions. And the answers are arguably the weirdest part of the entire encounter. They noticed that its clothing was torn. It said it possessed only one set of clothes, so those were the clothes it had to wear. Because of its strange appearance, they asked: Are you really a man? It reportedly chuckled and answered: “No.” They then asked whether it was a ghost. Its answer was essentially: Not really—but in an odd sort of way, yes. Then they asked the obvious question: What are you, then? The answer: “You know.” And it refused to elaborate. It said that it had no name, but that there were others like it. It apparently drew the children a rough picture of another member of its kind. It also told them that it was afraid of human beings, because people might hurt it. If attacked, it said, it wouldn't fight back. That exchange is one of the reasons the case is so bizarre to me. It doesn't resemble the normal structure of an invented 1970s “space alien” story. There is no Mars, Venus, spaceship, cosmic mission, warning about nuclear weapons, etc. The thing's answers are evasive and almost nonsensical. Then the children went inside its hut Yes. The seven-year-olds accepted the seven-foot nameless being's invitation to enter its strange metal building. They crawled through a flap. Inside, the hut apparently had two levels. The lower level had substantial headroom. Its walls were described as blue-green and patterned with what looked like dials. There was an electric heater and simple wooden furniture. The upper level was smaller, and its floor was metallic. Nothing in the account describes obvious spacecraft controls or anything recognizably futuristic. It sounds almost like an improvised habitation. The being said it had another “camp” on the mainland. It said it survived by gathering berries in the late afternoon. It drank water from the nearby river, but only after it had somehow “cleaned” the water. Then Sam took its hat off. Underneath were round white ears and sparse brown hair. And then things get completely surreal. The berry trick Before eating a berry, Sam apparently performed what the children interpreted as a sort of conjuring trick. It placed the berry into its ear. It moved its head forward. The berry disappeared. Then it apparently reappeared near one of its strange eyes. The process happened again, and the berry eventually appeared at its mouth, where it ate it. The original BUFORA editor actually speculated in parentheses that perhaps the children were seeing some kind of protective mask or apparatus that analyzed the berry for toxicity. But that's speculation. The children's story was simply that the berry somehow traveled from ear → eye → mouth. The encounter lasted a surprisingly long time This wasn't supposedly a five-second glimpse. The children claimed to have spent half an hour or more talking with the being. Eventually they simply said goodbye. There was apparently no abduction, threat, chase or dramatic disappearance. They ran back across the golf links, found the first adult they encountered and announced that they had seen a ghost. The man laughed at them. Interestingly, the children themselves apparently weren't insisting at this stage that they had met an alien. They thought either: a ghost or someone dressed up. Fay tells her father Fay apparently did not give her father the full story until June 2, about three weeks later. Mr Y initially thought it was unbelievable. According to his account, however, Fay became genuinely upset when he suggested that she had invented it. What impressed him was the amount of detail and her insistence that it had actually happened. He then questioned the boy. The boy was apparently difficult to communicate with, but Mr Y said he obtained a statement from him confirming that he too had seen the entity. This is significant, but there's an evidentiary limitation: we do not have the boy's independent testimony reproduced in full. What survives is Mr Y's statement that the second child corroborated it. And then there's the part about the workmen Fay said that while this entire thing was happening, two workmen were nearby repairing a post. They showed no reaction whatsoever. According to Mr Y, it was as though they simply couldn't see what was happening. This led him to use an extraordinary phrase. He wondered whether his daughter had somehow entered: “a bubble of alien reality” created by the strange being. That's Mr Y's interpretation—not evidence that some literal reality bubble existed—but it is where the case begins sounding much more like folklore, apparitions or Jacques Vallée-style high strangeness than a conventional extraterrestrial encounter. The hut was gone Mr Y later visited the location. There was no metallic hut. And, according to the published report, he found no indication that one had been there. That is simultaneously one of the strangest and weakest portions of the case. If the children really spent half an hour inside a two-story metal structure sitting in marshy terrain, you would expect something to remain. Instead: nothing. No Sam. No hut. No physical artifact. No photograph. No berry mechanism. Nothing. Now the father's previous experiences And here's a part that's frequently left out. Fay's father already had an interest in the subject because he himself claimed two highly anomalous encounters before his daughter's experience. In October 1970, Mr Y said he encountered an enormous, low-flying object near Brading/St Helens on the Isle of Wight. It supposedly carried a broad ring of red lights interspersed with turquoise and white lights and made no sound. He watched it for an extended period and said it moved parallel to his vehicle. At his destination, a friend reportedly also saw the lights, which gives this portion at least a claimed second witness. Then on March 1, 1972, at Compton Bay, he claimed to hear or perceive some sort of droning underwater craft while trapped by an unusual tidal surge. He then saw two yellow lights just beneath the water about forty feet away, which he described as looking like the eyes of a sea monster or a periscope. They eventually disappeared. He insisted that he never told Fay about these incidents before her encounter. Whether that's true obviously can't now be demonstrated. But it explains why he eventually took her story seriously and why the account ended up with UFO researchers. What evidence do we actually have? This is where I'd divide the strangeness of the story from the strength of the case. The core evidence is thin. We have Fay's reported testimony, a second child's claimed corroboration, the father's detailed dossier, and Norman Oliver's 1978 condensation of that material. We have no photograph, physical trace, surviving hut, independent adult observation of Sam, or contemporaneous 1973 investigation. And the publication delay matters. The primary published source doesn't appear until 1978. So I would not put Sandown in the evidential category of a multiple-adult/radar/physical-trace UFO case. But as an entity report? It is absolutely extraordinary. The part I find most interesting What makes Sandown interesting isn't merely that the creature looked ridiculous. It's that the story contains the same dreamlike incompatibilities that appear again and again in high-strangeness reports: A being that looks simultaneously artificial and organic. A “microphone” whose voice doesn't seem to originate from it. A mouth that doesn't move. Writing that contains intelligible English but is arranged in the wrong order. A creature that says it isn't human, isn't exactly a ghost, has no name, but somehow answers “You know” when asked what it is. An apparently physical building that later cannot be found. Nearby people who seemingly don't perceive the event. An encounter that lasts half an hour and then simply... ends. And perhaps strangest of all, “Sam” does not behave remotely like an extraterrestrial visitor in the popular conception. It lives in a hut. It collects berries. It is afraid of people. It cleans river water. Its clothes are ripped because it only owns one set. All the colors are all the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation: the different wavelengths or frequency of electromagnetic waves.