Jodrell Bank then consisted of two fields converted to botanical, growing various things, two old wooden huts in which there were two gardeners, Aif and Frank. And so I joined up with Aif and Frank, and they had a coke stove and we ate sandwich lunches together and they knew... and I tried to start, the army again set the gear going and then left, so that once more I was left with this equipment about which I didn't know very much, I didn't know how to switch it on. But I had the problem of... there was no electricity anywhere near Jodrell Bank or anywhere in this district then and Aif and Frank were very friendly with the local farmer, called Moston and he had a diesel tractor, so he knew all about diesels. And he was summoned and discovered that the reason my diesel would not work was that it was that the diesel feed pipe was blocked with ice, so he dismantled it, got rid of the ice, we started up the diesel. So every time I wanted to work at Jodrell, I had to... and for a long time thereafter, we had to... this rather heavy business of winding the diesel.

I switched on, I suppose, in mid-December in a most extraordinary coincidence. So the... I anxiously looked at the cathode ray tube. It was free of this interference, but full of transient echoes, and I thought, marvellous. These must be the radar echoes from huge cosmic ray air showers. Then I had a few moments of doubt and I thought: no, it can't be, there can't be as many huge air showers as that. So I reported this to Blackett and he advised me to consult Hey, which I did, and then the truth was revealed. Hey had used the equipment first of all to detect aircraft and then when the V2 rockets began to fall on London, he was asked to alter the direction of his yagi aerials, to see if he could detect the incoming V2. Now, he did this and began to give warnings of approaching V2s, when it was discovered that no V2 had been launched and no V2 fell on London, so Hey had been... on the other hand, he did eventually detect the V2 rockets with this equipment.

Now, Hey then studied the literature and he came across the papers of Schafer and Goodall in America who had apparently with equipment had found a similar phenomenon and they had carried out a minor investigation, and had suggested that the echoes they were obtaining were from the ionisation caused by meteors, shooting stars, burning up in the 80-100 km region of the atmosphere. And Hey sent me the paper, which was then highly confidential and that seemed to be the situation that what I'd been observing were the radio reflections of meteor showers and the reason that there were so many of them was it transpired later on that I was switched on in the very middle of a famous meteor shower, the Geminid or Geminid meteors which come to a maximum every mid December, and provide visible meteors at about 60 an hour.