Unreleased classified military documents could hold a key to one of Blackburn’s greatest unsolved mysteries. But this may replace one legendary enigma with an even stranger tale from our past.
As World War II came to an end, German Prisoner of War – Otto Schwarzenbeck – was being transported by train through Blackburn, ironically our English equivalent of his surname. As this train branched off down the old railway line at Cherry Tree, our German POW saw an opportunity and jumped from his train, landing in thick foliage beside the track. His escape wasn’t noticed until this train stopped at Chorley. By then he had rushed across nearby fields and headed for the hills. In this case, those hills were Witton Park and Billinge Woods.
With World War II nearly over, this left a tricky problem for Britain’s War Office. Only two prisoners of war, one from each of these global conflicts, had ever managed to escape from Britain and return home to Germany. Having to admit another had also managed to escape during the latter conflict was not a high priority when there were soon to be victory celebrations.
So a Government ‘D’ Notice was put in place to cover up this incident. Our POW would be quietly welcomed back into society when it was all over and the coast was clear. He could then be repatriated to Germany and his escape would be airbrushed from official internment records.
Meanwhile Schwarzenbeck himself, a survival expert, was quite at home living in Blackburn’s woodlands; they reminded him of his beloved Black Forest retreat. Unfortunately as a fugitive and with little knowledge of English, he didn’t realise World War II ended during his time in hiding, leaving both military and civilian authorities with a problem over how to catch Otto and persuade him to return home.
Their answer was to create a misinformation campaign against him, hoping he would leave under his own auspices. They would publish false rumours of Otto being a crazed flasher thereby dissuading people from approaching him. They even created outrageous rumours of alien abductions across the north side of Blackburn. After all, he was an enemy alien.
It meant we had an opposite situation to what was going on across the pond in Roswell USA. American authorities were blaming their alien problem on everything under the sun, apart from little green men, whereas the Brits were saying their escaped POW could well be a spaceman after all.
Their problem wouldn’t go away and bizarre rumours of strange extra-terrestrial incidents taking place gripped Blackburn’s population during post-war years. Fortunately for everybody, relations between Britain and Germany became very cordial and reports of strange goings on in the woodlands of Blackburn eventually faded away
The remaining mystery is what really happened to Otto Schwarzenbeck? Did he find his way back to Germany? Or did the unthinkable happen and he was abducted by real aliens? Perhaps our answer lies within those Ministry of Defence secret classified files. We could be in for a long wait.