In June 1969 Norfolk police sent the Ministry of Defence details of two strange experiences that had occurred within 24 hours of each other. The first of these came from an electrical engineer, Robin Peck, whom they described as ‘a very level-headed person who has been genuinely frightened by [his] experience’. Peck made the statement concerning his sighting at 12.25 am on 19 June 1969:
‘I was passing through Bircham when the lights on my vehicle started to dim. Within a few moments they had dimmed to such an extent that I was unable to see, and pulled up on my nearside. As I did this the engine also cut out and I could get no ignition light. Suspecting a fault with the battery, I got out and went to the bonnet. It was then that I experienced a feeling that the air was full of static, and my hair felt to be standing on end. I then saw an object in the sky about 100 feet from the ground. This object appeared to be like an inverted mushroom, approximately the size of a row of several cottages. It was of a very pale blue colour, surrounded by a golden glow. The object emitted no sound whatsoever and remained in this position for a least a minute. It then moved off towards King’s Lynn, still without a sound. When it moved off the blue colour appeared to leave a haze trail following the object. I went back and sat in my vehicle for some minutes rather shaken, then by reflex rather than anything else I tried to start the engine and found that everything worked perfectly again.’1
Police linked Peck’s experience with a report from 17-year-old Arthur Hendry, a trainee carpenter, who lived nearby. Before midnight on the next day, 20 June, he was getting ready to cycle home when he heard a strange whistling noise above him, but could see nothing. In a statement to police he said the noise then became louder and intensified to a powerful throbbing. ‘I suddenly felt as if every muscle in my body locked, and I was unable to release my grip on my cycle,’ he said in a police statement. ‘After a few seconds the noise disappeared and I felt almost normal again… it had felt as if I was receiving a severe electric shock and electricity was passing through my body from my head to my feet.’2
MoD scientists suspected the two men may have experienced a type of rare atmospheric phenomena similar to ball lightning (see p. 13). Checks by the Meteorological Office, however, found the skies over East Anglia were clear, with no thunderstorms at the relevant time. Unable to explain the strange electromagnetic effects reported, a desk officer concluded ‘[this] sounds like a genuine UFO’ and closed the file.
When the MoD received UFO reports from ‘credible witnesses’ such as police officers, it would sometimes send intelligence officers to interview them. It is possible some of these visits were responsible for the legend of the ‘Men In Black’. The MIB are mysterious and sinister figures who visit UFO witnesses to collect evidence and sometimes attempt to persuade them not to talk about their experiences. Their immaculate black suits and cars have led some UFOlogists to believe the MIB are employed by a secret government agency. The MoD always claimed their ‘UFO desk’ dealt with all UFO matters and its civilian staff were not authorised to personally visit or interview witnesses. However, according to files released in 1998 another secret MoD branch, DI55, sometimes made ‘extensive inquiries’ of its own, details of which the ‘UFO desk’ had no ‘need to know’.
Of particular interest to DI55 were UFO reports filed by police officers because of their perceived credibility and observation skills. Possibly the best documented investigation happened in 1966 when an intelligence officer travelled to Cheshire to interview a police constable, Colin Perks, who had reported sighting a ‘flying saucer’ (see Chapter 4). The officer also examined the scene and checked radar logs. Another visit occurred two years later following a ‘flap’ of UFO sightings in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Off-duty PC Martyn Johnson, then 25, was walking with his girlfriend near midnight on 22 July 1968 when they both saw two lights in the sky approaching them from a nearby park. Recalling the incident in 2011 he said: ‘The colours that were coming off were all the colours of the rainbow… but they were very, very soft and didn’t throw beams like a torch. They were moving slowly, following the contours of the park.’ As the lights hovered above a nearby house the couple’s poodle became agitated, broke its lead and ran off. The two lights then became four, arranged in an oblong formation, but then ‘with no warning whatsoever, it was just like someone switched them off and it vanished at terrific speed, following the railway towards Rotherham’.
Police constable Martyn Johnson, in uniform circa 1966. PC Johnson was questioned by the officers from the MoD’s Defence Intelligence Staff after he observed a UFO over High Hazels Park in Sheffield one night in July 1968.
Just a few hours later, PC Johnson was woken by his landlady and told to report to a senior officer at Sheffield police HQ. On arrival in the superintendent’s office, he ‘noticed two men sitting to his left… they stuck in my mind because they were dressed just like the spies on TV, in trench-coats and Trilby hats’. He was told the men were ‘members of a Government investigation department in London’ who wanted to quiz him about his experience. He was asked about other witnesses and whether he read books about space travel. ‘There was no concern or pressure, it was all very relaxed, but the whole thing was so peculiar,’ he recalls. ‘They were desperately trying to convince me that it was an aircraft or possibly a helicopter. But I wasn’t having any of it.’ At the end of the interview he was reminded he was ‘under oath and was sworn to secrecy for 25 years.’ PC Johnson was baffled by the excessive secrecy because his story had made headlines in the local press. Then, just before the two men were due to return to London, he asked them what he had seen. ‘They looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders,’ he recalled. ‘And one smiled and said to me – and his words are indelibly stamped on my memory all these years later – “What you have seen is an unidentified flying object or UFO. Some people call them spaceships, and if the people of the world knew how many genuine sightings there were like yours, there would be total panic.”’1
A standard one-page MoD report form, containing brief details of PC Johnson’s sighting, can be found in the UFO desk files, marked with one word in explanation: ‘aircraft’.2 The file notes that his report was referred to DI55, but there is no surviving written record of the visit from the two mysterious men from ‘the government’.
The last three years of the 1960s were a remarkable time for UFOlogists, as those who studied UFOs had become known. Hardly a day seemed to pass without a newspaper story about a new sighting somewhere in the country. Even that bastion of Britishness, the BBC, got in on the act with the documentary Flying Saucers and the People Who See Them, inspired by the 1967 UFO ‘flap’, as such panics had become known. Then in 1969, with UFOs already firmly embedded in popular culture, NASA’s Apollo programme reached its apogee with the moon landings. Many people who had previously scoffed at the idea of visitors from space began to reconsider. If we could visit the moon and possibly other planets why couldn’t intelligent extraterrestrials, if they existed, visit us?
Heightened public awareness of UFOs posed an ongoing problem for the MoD, who were still struggling to talk down calls for a government-sponsored scientific study. In November 1967 the UFO desk head, James Carruthers, summarised their policy in a briefing for ministers. He said the MoD had kept a statistical analysis of reports received since 1959 but ‘has found no evidence to suggest [UFOs] have other than mundane explanations.’ He added that the MoD ‘does not consider that a separate study by [UK] Government departments or by a university or other independent organisation would produce results to justify the expenditure, time and money involved’.3
Meanwhile in the United States the study conducted by scientists at the University of Colorado, led by the physicist Dr Edward Condon, reached a series of conclusions and recommendations. What became known as the ‘Condon report’ was based upon the analysis of 12,618 reports investigated by Project Blue Book between 1947 and 1969. Of this total, around 6 per cent (701 sighting reports) remained ‘unidentified’. Nevertheless, the study’s conclusions stated that:
About 90 per cent of all UFO reports prove to be plausibly related to ordinary phenomena, both natural and man-made.
No UFO report had ever given any indication of a threat to national security.
There was no evidence that sightings categorised as ‘unexplained’ were extraterrestrial spaceships.
Little, if anything, had come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that had added to scientific knowledge, and further extensive study of UFO sightings was not justified.
These findings were later endorsed by a panel of the American National Academy of Sciences and following publication of the university’s final report, The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, in 1969, the United States Air Force – which had commissioned the study – took the opportunity to close Blue Book and draw a line under their official interest in UFOs.
Britain followed the US’s lead and few further reports, apart from those reported by members of the armed forces, were subject to the type of field investigations undertaken by the MoD in 1967–8. The Condon report’s conclusions were presented to the MoD in a briefing paper prepared by Michael Hobkirk, Carruther’s successor as head of S4 (Air), early in 1970. This stated that although ‘no evidence had been found to suggest that reports represent a threat, either terrestrial or extra terrestrial to the United Kingdom’, the MoD should continue to scrutinise UFO reports. Hobkirk explained this was necessary not because the MoD were concerned about a potential threat from UFOs, but because ‘of the need to answer questions from the public which might arise from a real anxiety about national security’.4
‘A delightful hand-coloured painting’ of a UFO sighted over Harborne, Birmingham, in January 1975, which prompted an exchange of letters with UFO desk personel. AIR 2/18961
Two years later, in January 1972, Hobkirk’s successor, Air Commodore Anthony Davis, became the first head of the ‘UFO desk’ to appear on TV to explain how the ministry investigated sightings. The programme was part of the BBC’s Man Alive series and included ‘the man from the ministry’ engaging in debate with a panel of experts and taking questions from the audience. The programme was filmed in Banbury town hall following a flap of UFO sightings in Oxfordshire. Initially the MoD were reluctant to allow Davis to take part as they worried he could become a target for those ‘who profess to believe in little green men’ but he was keen to participate. His appearance set an early precedent for officials such as Ralph Noyes and Nick Pope who would, decades later, speak publicly about the MoD’s UFO policy. During the 1972 TV debate Davis said all reports received by the MoD were ‘examined with an open mind and without prejudice’ but their interest in them was ‘limited to possible defence implications alone’. He denied the MoD possessed any evidence that could prove the existence of extraterrestrial visitors and said he had studied the US Condon report in ‘great detail… and their conclusions are very similar to our own’. Although Davis was careful not to mention his own UFO experiences, two intriguing incidents are revealed in his briefing notes preserved at The National Archives. The first occurred when his RAF Spitfire was ‘attacked head-on’ by a mysterious flying object during an intruder mission over occupied Europe in 1944. He said this experience taught him a lesson as this wartime ‘UFO’ turned out to be a high altitude meteorological balloon. His second encounter occurred during the Cold War when his Venom night-fighter was ordered to intercept a UFO tracked on radar over RAF Lakenheath (see p. 67–9). By 1972 he had become a sceptic and told the BBC audience that ‘beauty and UFOs, I often think, are in the eye of the beholder’.5
By the mid 1970s most reports sent to the MoD received a standard letter in reply. AIR 2/18961
Davis left the UFO desk in 1973 and in December of that year cuts in defence expenditure led the MoD to discontinue annual statistical analysis of UFO reports. Since the 1950s they had been allocating sightings, often in a haphazard fashion, to various explained categories, providing those who had contacted them with a brief summary of the MoD’s assessment. With the subject categorised as a low priority, members of the public who reported sightings to the MoD would from now on receive a polite acknowledgement in the form of a standard letter outlining probable causes. These included aircraft, satellites and meteors, balloons, bright stars and planets, aside from the 10 per cent that would continue to be listed as ‘unexplained’.
Despite the reduction in official interest, ordinary members of the public continued to report puzzling and sometimes frightening close encounters with UFOs to the authorities. In a letter sent to the MoD, Mrs Anne Taylor from Romford, Essex, described the strange experience that happened around 9.00 pm on 17 September 1973. She was returning to her farm after walking her three dogs when:
‘I noticed a green light very near the cowshed. My first reaction was that this was one of the many light aircraft from nearby Stapleford Aerodrome, and that he was a bit low. I continued walking and watching this light, which started to move very slowly towards me. I then thought it was possibly a helicopter but suddenly realised there was no noise. By this time I had reached a line of trees with a thin wire fence dividing one field from another. The two terriers, who don’t normally wander very far, were against my legs, whining and cringing.’
Mrs Taylor stopped, standing by one of the trees, and watched as the light kept coming slowly towards her until it was only a few feet from her, suspended some 12 ft from the ground. At this point ‘I could then make out a ball-shaped outline, but no noise whatsoever. I whistled [for the Doberman] who came up to me, looked at the green light and started to howl. I looked at my watch and found it had stopped. Suddenly my spine started to tingle. I can’t say that I was terrified; I think it was slight apprehension and certainly a great deal of curiosity. Next there was the sound of a jet plane in the distance; the green light went out and there was a sound which I can only describe as an electric whirring, and the ball went straight up until I could see it no more. As soon as the light went out, the dogs returned to normal. I walked home, looked at my watch and it was going again.’6
Mrs Taylor guessed her sighting had taken place in the space of three minutes, adding: ‘Let me assure you that I had not been drinking anything stronger than coffee and that I am not a reader of science fiction which this sounds rather like!’. On receiving her letter, a scientist at the Meteorological Office reached the same conclusions as one of his colleagues had in the cases of Peck and Hendry four years earlier (see p. 81); a belt of heavy thundery rain had passed over eastern England shortly before the sighting and there was, he believed, ‘a possibility that Mrs Taylor witnessed an example of ball lightning… a rare and transient phenomenon which is not properly understood’. Several features of the experience were not, however, consistent with the theory: ‘For example, ball lightning is usually described as white, red, yellow and uncommonly blue. Green has seldom been noted and the duration of the phenomenon is usually a matter of seconds rather than minutes.’
In other cases MoD scientists could be more confident about explanations for UFO reports sent in by members of the public. One example was reported to RAF St Mawgan by Mrs Good who saw three mysterious objects in the sky over Porthcothan Bay, Cornwall on the evening of 7 July 1973. She was closing the curtains of her house at 10.00 pm. It was still light outside and she was amazed to see two dark semi-cigar shaped objects hovering in the sky over the bay. These were positioned on either side of a glowing, symmetrical ring. After a few seconds, the ring appeared to enter the left object and the two ‘shot off at terrific speed’ upward and into the distance. Shortly afterwards the remaining object also disappeared, following the same path.
A drawing depicting a UFO over Hampstead, north London, in March 1972 sighted by three teenaged boys. The drawing resembles Thunderbird 3 from the children’s TV series Thunderbirds, originally shown in the mid-1960s. In a letter to the family, UFO desk officer G J Jameison said the boys were ‘most likely observing an aircraft flying in circumstances unfamiliar to you… [such as] a climbing VC10, viewed from certain angle’. AIR 20/1205
On checking the date and time, RAF St Mawgan found their duty meteorological officer had seen a rare atmospheric phenomena known as ‘sun dogs’ or parhelia shortly before the sighting. The base commander concluded this offered ‘a very credible explanation to her [UFO] sighting, although [it] was made one to two hours later than that of the Met Officer.’ Mrs Good was far from convinced by this and remained sure of what she had seen. She wrote back, finishing her reply by saying ‘I do realise it is one thing to be told of such things and another to see for yourself. I wonder if you were to see for yourself would anyone believe you?’.7
In 1977 the British Ambassador to Switzerland, A. K. Rothnie, sent a detailed account of his UFO experience near Rolvenden in Kent on 15 October. He was driving at 6.45 pm when: ‘… through my car windscreen I sighted to the north of me, somewhere near the spire of the church, an object in the sky at an inclination of some 18 or 20 percent above the horizon, travelling fast from south to north and shaped somewhat like a flattened avocado pear. The blunt and leading end seemed to be rimmed horizontally by some sort of phosphor or bronze metal which shone quite distinctly. The general body of the object was emitting a pronounced bluish light and from the tapering or trailing end there was a stream of golden sparks. The whole sighting took only a matter of one or one and a half seconds but my impression of what I had seen was so vivid that when a few minutes later I entered the Ewe and Lamb public house for a well-deserved pint of bitter (after a hard day’s work in the garden) I immediately announced to the landlord that I had just seen my first UFO.’8
Mr Rothnie decided to report his sighting to the MoD after his local newspaper carried a story describing how groups of other people had seen ‘a glowing mango-shaped UFO’ at the same time. As this was a detailed report from a distinguished diplomat, the MoD had no option but to investigate further and DI55 scientists used a computer to check a range of possible explanations. In a letter Rothnie was told the MoD did not usually advise observers of the possible identity of the UFOs, but: ‘the incident at Rolvenden has been examined rather more fully than usual and it has been established that debris from a Soviet space satellite entered the earth’s atmosphere on 15th October. We cannot say definitely, but this is possibly the explanation.’9
By the late 1970s the ambassador was unusual in receiving such a detailed response from the MoD. The majority of those who wrote in and whose letters can today be perused in The National Archives reading rooms would only have received a standard letter. Their reports, however sincere, were rarely investigated further. One example was a report submitted by civil servant Alan Lott, who worked at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. In his account he describes how he felt compelled to make an official report of ‘an extraordinary sighting’ made by himself and his wife, Clarice, on the night of 31 January 1975. Mr Lott had left his home in Caversham, near Reading, to walk their dog just before 10.30 pm when he spied a group of bright lights in the sky to the east over a neighbour’s bungalow. He immediately called his wife and they both examined the lights through a pair of binoculars. Mr Lott’s account continued: ‘I discovered that they were moving slowly in a straight line almost exactly east to west and were now directly above my house. It was clear to the naked eye that there were three extremely bright lights of an orange/yellow colour arranged as a large equilateral triangle. There were two other very small lights, one red and one white… all steady with no flashing [and] there were no beams of light as with searchlights, just the steady brilliant glare.’10
The couple were puzzled at the lack of sound and could see no evidence of any outline of a fuselage that would be expected if the object was a low-flying aircraft. ‘The separation of the light suggested a very large body flying very low but the UFO was travelling so slowly that it could not have been any conventional aircraft,’ Mr Lott added. The formation of lights disappeared after five minutes, vanishing silently behind houses and trees further down the road. He ended his account by saying: ‘In observing the UFO[s] one’s first subjective impression was of an immense delta aircraft of the size of say a 747 flying at about 1,000 ft altitude and a speed of, say, 50 knots. However the three brilliant lights and the two small lights are not compatible with any type of aircraft known to me… I am quite unable to account in any way for this ‘aerial circus’. It was quite unlike anything I have seen.’11
A diagram by civil servant Alan Lott showing the UFO that he and his wife saw outside their home in January 1975. AIR 2/18961
An extract from the detailed description of an ‘aerial circus’ observed over a suburb of Reading in January 1975, sent to MoD by a Alan Lott, an employee of the Atomic Weapons research base at Aldermaston. AIR 2/18961
Possibly the most bizarre story among the MoD’s UFO files for the 1970s came from a young couple. They decided at the last moment to remove their names from the letter they sent to the MoD because they did not wish to be identified. The man described how he and his partially-sighted fiancé were returning home from a holiday in Cornwall late on 25 June 1977 to avoid holiday traffic. As they were driving along the deserted A303, near Warminster in Wiltshire, they noticed a triangle of three white lights ahead of them. ‘My first conclusion was that they probably marked an obscured railway crossing or perhaps a low bridge,’ he wrote. ‘As they drew nearer, it became apparent that there was something singularly unusual in the glow that emitted from whatever object it was that I was gazing upon. I muttered to my fiancé, “look at these”, and immediately became aware that she had seen the mysterious objects, which by this time were almost upon us. At this juncture, to my amazement the three objects broke away from their self-disciplined triangle and became three independent bodies. One then drifted away to the side of the road, to finally disappear into the bushes. The remaining two then ranged themselves alongside the car, very much to my fiancé’s disquiet and consternation. Then the most amazing thing of all occurred. The objects, which danced with elf-like impishness alongside us, gently and with a “bubble-blowing like action” changed both their colour and shape. From the centre of the white light an orange/golden like globe emerged… these two globes… dwelt for a short space of time alongside the car and then moved to the rear, where I picked them up in my rear-view mirror as they continued to dance along behind us, before they soon disappeared.’12
The letter-writer added: ‘My reactions were only of surprise – certainly not fear – [and] at no stage was there an atmosphere of anything in the least bit unwelcome or sinister – so that I was able to view that which took place with a large degree of detachment and with considerable fascination.’13
One of the best-known UFO mysteries of the 1970s has become known as ‘the Berwyn Mountains incident’. On the evening of 23 January 1974 many people across England and Wales sighted brilliant coloured lights streaking across the sky. Astronomers at Leicester University recorded sightings of at least three fireball meteors between 7.00 pm and 10.00 pm that night. Fireballs are bright meteors that fly close to the Earth’s atmosphere, forming vivid bursts of colour as they burn up in the atmosphere, leaving a trail of sparks in their wake.
One of these fireballs was seen over North Wales just minutes before a huge explosion shook villages below the northern slopes at the foot of the Berwyn Mountains. For many who saw lights in the sky and experienced the earth tremor, not knowing their source, it appeared that something, perhaps a plane, had crashed. Police switchboards were jammed with calls and, as the Berwyns had been the scene of earlier military jet crashes, police and a mountain rescue team were sent out in case a real disaster had taken place. The team from RAF Valley was sent to Llandrillo at the foot of the range and joined local police to search the mountains the following day. They found no trace of a crash and the operation was called off when they learned the British Geological Survey had identified the source of the ‘explosion’ as an earthquake, measured at between 4 and 5 on the Richter scale, with its epicentre in the Bala area.14
The Berwyn event received a great deal of media coverage but was not directly linked with UFOs at the time. When it became clear the meteor shower and the earth tremor were unrelated, other than by coincidence, the story was quickly forgotten. However, by 1996–97 the popularity of the Roswell incident in books and TV documentaries led some UFO enthusiasts to resurrect the Berwyn event as a possible example of a UFO crash covered up by the authorities – a ‘Welsh Roswell’. In common with the original Roswell (see p. 32), in these later accounts, witnesses, often anonymous, were quoted decades after the actual events. Some claimed roads leading to the Welsh hillsides had been closed off by the army whilst teams searched for the crash site, while others alleged that alien bodies had been retrieved and taken for examination at the secret Porton Down biological weapons plant in Wiltshire.15
Despite numerous claims and counter-claims no evidence has ever emerged of any high level MoD involvement in the Berwyn incident apart from the initial search by the RAF mountain rescue team. Rumours that claimed mysterious officials arrived in Llandrillo and interviewed residents have been traced back to a subsequent field survey by scientists from the British Geological Survey.
The MoD files contain accounts of seven UFOs sighted on the evening of 23 January 1974, but none of these were reported from Wales. The sightings were made in the Home Counties, Lincolnshire and Sussex. Most described a bright greenish light high in the northwest that appeared to fall towards the horizon. One observer in Lincoln said the object appeared to break up, followed by a brilliant flash of green light. According to the files, observers recorded the time as just before 10.00 pm, which coincides with the last and most dramatic of the fireballs recorded by astronomers.16
In May 1974 Welsh MP Dafyd Ellis Thomas asked Defence Minister Brynmor John if any official investigation was made into the Berywn incident. Files released at The National Archives in 2005 show the MoD consulted the Meteorological Office and DI55 who said the meteor display was the most likely explanation for what had been seen in North Wales. The MP was told that ‘no official enquiry’ was made by the MoD other than the initial search by the RAF Valley mountain rescue team, which found nothing.17
Of all UFO sightings, those reported by police officers or military witnesses and corroborated by radar contacts tend to provide the most impressive evidence for the existence of UFOs. One of the most puzzling reports in the MoD files for this period was made by personnel at RAF Boulmer, which is an air defence radar station on the northeast coast near Alnwick, Northumberland. In the early hours of 30 July 1977 airmen on the night shift were alerted by a call from a civilian who could see two bright objects hovering over the North Sea. When the duty controller Flight Lieutenant A. M. Wood and a group of airmen emerged from the control room they realised that they too could see the mysterious objects. In a signal sent to the MoD, Wood described them as being close to the shore and hovering at a height estimated at 4,000–5,000 ft. They appeared to slowly move apart and then back together as they climbed into the clear sky. His report said: ‘No imagination was required to distinguish the shape… westerly object [was] conical with apex at top… [it] seemed to rotate and change shape to become arrowhead in shape. The easterly object was indistinct.’ Wood said the UFO closest to the base was ‘round, luminous, [and] 4 to 5 times larger than a Whirlwind helicopter’.18
Flight Lieutenant Wood’s story was corroborated by two airmen on duty at a picket post on the base perimeter, who were described as ‘reliable and sober’. Incredibly, they said the westerly UFO moved ‘and changed shape to become body shaped with projections like arms and legs’. In his report Wood says that shortly after they disappeared from sight, two unidentified targets were detected on RAF Boulmer’s radars at a range of between 20 and 30 miles out to sea. These slowly moved northeast as they climbed, ‘then parted, one climbing to 9,000 ft [estimated] and moving east, the other holding 5–6,000 ft’. Wood contacted the controller at RAF Patrington, a second radar station some miles to the south near Flamborough in Yorkshire. Personnel there said they could also see two targets on the radar screens.
A senior intelligence officer commented on this incident when I interviewed him in 2005. He said he was left ‘infuriated’ at the lack of an immediate response to Boulmer’s report by the RAF, despite the wealth of evidence. The UFOs were visible for 1 hour 40 minutes and this fact led him to suspect the UFOs might have been drifting balloons or even bright stars, but he felt an opportunity had been missed to resolve the mystery. He added: ‘I sent a rocket to the [Commanding Officer] demanding to know why they hadn’t scrambled an aircraft to see what it was.’19
The RAF Boulmer incident was one of the more intriguing sightings from the 1970s that emerged when the MoD released its files to The National Archives. Perhaps the most amazing of all, however, is that made by the entire crew of a Vulcan bomber based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. According to a restricted signal dated 26 May 1977, the captain and his four crewmen were on a training flight 43,000 ft over the North Atlantic when they saw a strange lighted object some 40 nautical miles distant. The UFO appeared to track them for around 15 minutes whilst turning onto the same course slightly above them. At first the UFO resembled an aircraft’s landing lights, ‘with a long pencil beam of light ahead’, but as it turned towards them the lights appeared to go out leaving a diffuse orange glow with a bright fluorescent green spot in the bottom right-hand corner. Then suddenly, both the captain and co-pilot saw an object ‘leaving from the middle of the glow on a westerly track… climbing at very high speed at an angle of 45 degrees’.20
A signal from RAF Scampton reporting a Vulcan bomber’s extraordinary UFO sighting over the North Atlantic in May 1977. DEFE 71/34
As they continued to scan the sky, the bomber crew detected interference on their radar screen, originating from the same direction the UFO was seen. This continued for 45 minutes as the Vulcan turned back towards the British Isles. On its return to RAF Waddington, the camera film from the aircraft’s radar was examined by experts. This confirmed the Vulcan’s radar had recorded a ‘strong response’ from the direction of the sighting. It appeared to consist of three separate radar returns at varying distances, the third made up of three targets all 200 yds wide. On the film the UFO appeared as ‘an elongated shadow’, indicating an object of ‘large size’ at a similar height to the Vulcan.
An intelligence summary sent to the MoD later the same day said the crew ‘were unable to offer a logical explanation for the sighting’ but noted that foreign shipping was present in the area and the interference evident on the radar suggested an attempt had been made to jam the Vulcan’s instruments. The signal, marked ‘restricted’, said the description resembled ‘surface or sub-surface launched missile firing’ perhaps by American or Soviet forces. When the UFO desk passed the report on to DI55 for further investigation they were informed that it would ‘not know the outcome of their inquiries’ due to the report’s sensitive content.
By now, as the UFO mystery evolved in complexity, the idea was beginning to arise that some places were more prone to visits from UFOs and their occupants than others. In the 1960s, for example, Warminster, a small town on the edge of the Army training grounds at Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, became Britain’s first UFO hotspot or ‘window’. The strange sighting of ‘impish’ moving lights described earlier (see p. 90) was reported in this area of Wiltshire, which would later become a focus for the crop circle mystery (see p. 117).
The Warminster phenomenon actually began when residents reported a rash of strange aerial noises and mysterious lights in the sky during the Christmas holidays of 1965. Within two years the town was overwhelmed at weekends and bank holidays by crowds of UFOlogists who took up positions on surrounding hills to watch for ‘The Thing’, as it was described by the town’s residents. Hundreds of sightings were logged by a local journalist, Arthur Shuttlewood, who claimed to have observed numerous flying objects in and around the town. Enthusiasm for skywatching at Warminster had, however, ebbed away by the late 1970s when media attention moved to a new UFO hotspot on the rugged coastline of West Wales.
The West Wales flap began at lunchtime on 4 February 1977 when 15 children at Broad Haven Primary School announced they had watched a silver cigar-shaped UFO land in fields behind the building. Some of the group, aged 9 to 11 years, claimed they saw a silver man with pointed ears emerge from the craft. These stories were initially put down to a combination of over-active imaginations and too much television, but the children were so adamant they had seen something unusual that their teachers were moved to hand in a petition at the police station. Their school’s headteacher later asked them to draw the UFO and was amazed at how similar their pictures were.
A letter sent to MoD in 1971 by seven-year-old Colin Davis from Leicester describing his sighting of ‘a UFO and a monster’. DEFE 24/1206
Here Welsh UFO enthusiast and veterinary surgeon Randall Jones Pugh was, like Arthur Shuttlewood, instrumental in bringing a local story to the attention of the national media. Journalists and TV crews flocked to the Welsh coast from across the country and flying saucers were soon the main topic of conversation in the principality. By May, straightforward lights in the sky had been replaced by stories of giant humanoid figures in spacesuits, similar to those used by Apollo astronauts, who had been seen prowling around remote parts of the Welsh countryside late at night.
Details of these strange happenings were chronicled in three books, one of which, The Welsh Triangle by Peter Paget, had been partly inspired by a headline in the Sun newspaper, ‘Spaceman Mystery of the Terror Triangle’. The idea of UFO sightings and other strange phenomena being linked up to form a ‘triangle’ when plotted on a map was a direct outcome of popular fascination with the ‘Bermuda Triangle’, made famous by a book of that name published in 1974. Author Charles Berlitz invented the term as shorthand for an area of the western Atlantic between Bermuda and Florida where he claimed ‘over 1,000 people and 100 aeroplanes have vanished without trace’. The disappearance of aircraft and people had become a popular theme in UFO literature since the death of United States Air Force Captain Mantell in 1948 (see p. 36), and the idea of a ‘zone of terror’ appealed to the tabloid media. What exactly constituted the Welsh version of the Bermuda Triangle was never entirely clear, but according to various books and tabloid articles it included most of the southeast corner of St Bride’s Bay along with the towns of Milford Haven and Haverfordwest.
Opinion was divided on what was responsible for the Welsh UFO flap. Could it be as journalist Hugh Turnbull, who worked for the local weekly newspaper, the Western Telegraph, came to suspect, ‘something military’? A more extreme version, favoured by Paget, was that aliens had established an underground base beneath the Stack Rocks in St Bride’s Bay, where UFOs had been seen to hover and disappear. In fact within a 20-mile radius of Broad Haven, where many of the sightings occurred, there actually were a number of sensitive military bases. To the north was the rocket testing station at Aberporth, while RAF Brawdy, near St David’s, trained pilots and housed both a Tactical Weapons Unit and a US Navy research station.
As press coverage continued, demands grew for an official inquiry into the West Wales UFO mystery. Rosa Granville, proprietor of the Haven Fort Hotel at Little Haven, wrote to her MP, Nicholas Edwards, to ask the Ministry of Defence to investigate a UFO experience that left her ‘greatly agitated and disturbed’. According to her letter, in the early hours of 19 April 1977 she was disturbed by a strange humming noise and, on looking out of her window, saw an oval-shaped object ‘like the moon falling down’ land behind her home in St Bride’s Bay. As she watched in amazement two very tall human-like figures appeared in front of the UFO that was about the size of a mini-bus. The figures had blank faces and pointed heads and wore white outfits like boiler suits. They appeared to ‘take measurements or gather things’ and climbed a grassy bank in the field. When she returned to the window after calling members of her family both the object and the ‘humanoid’ figures had vanished.
Within days of the MP’s intervention the MoD asked Squadron Leader J. A. Cowan, who was the Community Relations Officer at RAF Brawdy, to visit the town. According to a report dated 3 June 1977 he examined the area indicated by Mrs Granville ‘which is in a field adjacent to a Royal Observer Corps underground monitoring post but could find no evidence of a landing’. He added: ‘I can offer no explanation of [this] sighting but can confirm that it is not connected with the operations of RAF Brawdy.’ Squadron Leader Cowan also discounted the idea that secret military activities were responsible for what the press called ‘the Broad Haven Triangle’. He thought it was more likely some of the sightings were caused by ‘the high level of flying activity that is generated by the military and civil airfields and to a lesser extent the Royal Aircraft Establishments; the area is also overflown by trans-atlantic aircraft’.21 RAF Brawdy had also received several calls describing ‘men in silver suits’ and an official noted that ‘it is perhaps not irrelevant that a local factory manufactures protective clothing of this type for the oil installation at Milford Haven. One of these “silver suits” is also on display in a shop at Brawdy village.’
Suspecting a prankster was at work, the then head of the UFO desk, John Peduzie, took the unusual step of asking the Provost & Security Service (P&SS) to begin a ‘discreet enquiry’ into events in Wales. The Provost & Security Service are the RAF’s police force and are also responsible for the investigation of complaints about low-flying aircraft. In his letter to them Peduzie wrote: ‘We have not invoked the assistance of P&SS before on UFOs… and the last thing I want to do is involve you in extraneous problems which would divert you from your more immediate work.’ He asked them to assess ‘the volume of local interest and/or alarm and whether there is a readily discernable rational explanation, or whether there is prima facie evidence for a more serious specialist enquiry’. Peduzie went to some length to emphasise his request must be treated in confidence, adding: ‘I have not even told the Minister I am consulting you.’22
Due to the discreet nature of this inquiry, no final report on the Welsh UFO mystery has survived, but in December 1977, in a briefing on UFO policy submitted to the MoD’s Defence Intelligence Staff, Mr Peduzie wrote: ‘There is always a steady public interest in UFOs and from time to time it tends to increase unaccountably… [In the summer] there was some concern in Wales, although the RAF Police thought this could have been the work of a practical joker.’23 In 1996 this suspicion was confirmed when one of the men involved confessed in an interview with the Western Mail newspaper. He said the spaceman outfit ‘had a solid in-built helmet so I would have looked about 7ft tall. Alien sightings were all the rage so I took a stroll around for a bit of fun.’24
One of a number of crayon drawings showing a UFO sighted by children from the playground of Upton Primary Junior School at Macclesfield in Cheshire in 1977. Their teacher sent the drawings to the MoD. DEFE 24/1206
Nevertheless, the sighting by the Broad Haven schoolchildren that triggered the Welsh UFO flap has never been adequately explained and the witnesses, now adults, continued to stick by their stories when interviewed for a TV documentary in 2008. The MoD’s files reveal they were not the only schoolchildren to see UFOs during that year. At 2.45 pm on 4 October 1977 a group of 10 children, aged from 7 to 11 years, spotted something strange hovering between two trees whilst they were in the playground of Upton Primary Junior School in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Their teacher immediately separated them and asked them to draw what they had seen. She, like her counterparts at Broad Haven, was so astonished at the remarkable consistency of the drawings that she passed them to the police. They took the report seriously and checks were made with Manchester Airport who found nothing unusual had been detected by their radar. A letter sent to the children’s teacher by the MoD thanked her for sending the drawings and then reassured her with the standard words that: ‘simple explanations are found for the great majority of UFO reports, the most common single source of sightings being aircraft or the lights of aircraft seen under unusual conditions. Investigations over a number of years have so far produced no evidence that UFOs represent a threat to the air defences of this country.’25
Opinion polls show that 1978 marked the high water mark for belief in UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft. A Gallup survey that year found around half of all Americans believed in some form of extraterrestrial life and 57 per cent thought UFOs were ‘real’, with 9 per cent reporting a personal sighting. These figures reflect high public awareness of the subject created by the release of Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film, with a $19 million budget, opened in UK cinemas during February 1978. The plot involves benevolent aliens who slowly make their presence known to world governments and selected individuals via escalating UFO flaps. This build-up culminates in a final spectacular landing and contact hidden from the public by an ingenious cover-up by the US government. The plot, though fictional, seemed to reflect what many thousands believed was really going on and the overlap between fact and fiction was underlined by the presence of former Project Blue Book consultant astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek as Spielberg’s consultant. Hynek had coined the phrase ‘close encounters’ to describe categories of UFO experience, with the ‘third kind’ involving sightings of alien creatures such as those reported in Wales during 1977.
The effect of the film on UFO reports in Britain was dramatic. Files at The National Archives show the number of sighting reported to the MoD during 1978 reached a record-breaking 750, almost double the figure for 1977 and the highest total on record. When the Daily Express set up a UFO reporting bureau to coincide with the film’s release, hundreds more came forward to describe experiences they had never spoken about publicly before. Others simply ‘saw’ the fantastic craft from the film for themselves. In July, a man from Ealing Common in London rang the MoD to report ‘a gigantic saucer’ lit up with coloured lights, ‘just like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. It seemed, he said, echoing the compulsive feelings experienced by characters in Spielberg’s film, ‘as if I was meant to see this object’.26
Memories of 1978–9 are dominated by the economic crisis and industrial chaos that eventually swept the Labour government from power. During what became known as the ‘winter of discontent’ there was one moment when the gloomy headlines were replaced by exciting news of dramatic UFO sightings across the world. The night of 31 December 1978 was cold and clear, and across the British Isles people were out of doors bringing in the New Year. A few minutes after 7.00 pm many hundreds were amazed to see a bright light with a long trail behind it streaking across the heavens on a northwest to southeast path. In the space of just a couple of hours the MoD received a total of 120 separate sighting reports and civilian UFO groups received hundreds more. The source of this spectacular flap was quickly identified by the RAF’s early warning base at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire as the re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere of a booster rocket that had launched a Russian satellite, Cosmos 1068, into orbit on Boxing Day. The rocket burned up over northern Europe, with pieces falling to the ground in Germany.
Although most observers gave a sound description of the New Year’s Eve UFO, a few provided wildly inaccurate details, particularly of its size and altitude. Exact estimation of the height of an object in the dark sky is extremely difficult, if not impossible. For example, some observers believed the object was as low as 1,000 ft, when in reality it was many miles above the Earth. Others gave a time for their sighting that was one hour or more in error. Several described what they had seen in imaginative terms, for example ‘cigar-shaped, very bright, with lighted windows’ (Manchester), ‘similar to a German V-2 rocket’ (Bradford) and ‘train-shaped, 120 ft long tapering at the front with 40 plus bright lights all along the side’ (Newmarket). A few refused to believe the UFO was a Russian rocket at all. One, who served five years in the RAF, said he was familiar ‘with meteors and re-entry of space debris [and] found it difficult to accept the [MoD’s] explanation for this occurrence’.27
No sooner had this story died away when news broke of a remarkable film that showed UFOs following a freighter aircraft above the east coast of New Zealand. The film was shot by a camera crew from an Australian TV station who joined the flight after hearing news of an earlier sighting by the crew of an Argosy plane flying between south and north islands a week earlier. Dramatic images from the New Year’s Eve footage were shown on TV news across the world the following day and quickly became a media sensation. The pilot of the aircraft involved in the second incident, Bill Startup, had more than 20 years’ flying experience. He said the mysterious lights appeared just before midnight as the Argosy hugged the coast of South Island near Kaikoura, on a flight from Wellington to Christchurch. Startup described the lights as behaving in an intelligent, playful manner similar to the accounts of ‘foo-fighters’ described by wartime pilots in Europe and the Pacific (see p. 16). He was quoted as saying: ‘[The UFO] appeared to stay still until we got within ten miles then it turned with us as I changed course… it then went above us and circled and came down beneath us. It was making definite movements in relation to [the plane].’28 Further evidence in support of the crew’s story was provided by air traffic controllers at Wellington Airport, who reported unusual targets tracking the aircraft on both nights, some of which tallied with the visual sightings.
These developments were welcomed by a prominent UFOlogist, Lord Clancarty (Brinsley le Poer Trench) who was busy writing a speech for what was to become a historic debate in the ornate setting of the British House of Lords. Questions about UFO sightings and government investigations had been tabled in the Commons as early as 1953, but the motion Clancarty intended to present in the Upper Chamber was unique in being the first full debate on UFOs held in the British Parliament. Clancarty had become fascinated by UFOs early in the 1950s and helped to found the magazine Flying Saucer Review, which he edited from 1956–9. With his stock in UFOlogy rising he went on to found his own organisation, Contact International, in 1966 and wrote seven books on UFOs and ‘ancient astronauts’, whom he believed had visited Earth millions of years ago. In a BBC TV interview during 1977, he expanded on this belief by claiming aliens had established bases inside the Earth and their flying saucers entered the atmosphere by flying out from holes in the poles. The ever-so-British eccentricity displayed by Clancarty in his TV appearances is equally evident in the transcript of the UFO debate preserved in Hansard.
Lord Clancarty had succeeded his half brother as 8th Earl in 1976 and immediately used his seat in the Lords to pressurise the government on the issue. His elevation to the Lords added to the problems faced by the Ministry of Defence who anticipated he would use the opportunity to ask the government to make a public statement about UFOs. In December 1977, with assistance from the Foreign Office, the MoD used its influence to talk down a call by another highly placed UFO enthusiast. This was Sir Eric Gairy, who was president of the small Caribbean island republic of Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth.
A copy of the Hansard publication covering the historic House of Lords UFO debate, tabled by Lord Clancarty and held in January 1979 at the height of the Winter of Discontent.
Gairy wanted the United Nations to set up an international agency or department to conduct UFO research, but Britain’s diplomats at the UN refused to sanction such a move. Records show one official described this as ‘a ridiculous proposal that will only bring the United Nations into disrepute’.29 Gairy withdrew his original proposal but continued his campaign for a full debate, calling on the UN General Assembly to make 1978 ‘the year of the UFO’. Gairy was at the UN in New York pressing for further UN action on UFOs early in the following year when he was deposed by a military coup in Grenada.
Meanwhile the dramatic events unfolding in the southern hemisphere led the Royal New Zealand Air Force to launch its own UFO inquiry. To quell public concern, they sent out a squadron of Orion aircraft for a seven-hour UFO hunt three days after the New Year sightings. They investigated 14 separate unidentified radar targets seen by air traffic control radar, but nothing was found. A copy of the air force’s draft report was sent by the British High Commission in Wellington to DI55 officials in London, who were preparing the MoD’s response to Lord Clancarty in the Lords. This said radars at Wellington Airport had been plagued by ‘spurious returns’ for some time and during the New Year period ‘atmospheric conditions [were] conducive to freak propagation of radio and light waves’.
The UFOs seen by the aircrew were, it decided, probably caused by the lights of squid boats distorted by unusual atmospheric conditions or the planet Venus which ‘was rising in the eastern sky at this time of the year and is unusually bright in appearance’ (in fact Venus did not rise above the horizon until 3.15 am, over one hour after the sightings). The report concluded, in lieu of a more detailed scientific study that: ‘almost all the sightings can be explained by natural but unusual phenomena.’30
Lord Clancarty had originally intended his UFO debate to be held in June 1978 but his motion was withdrawn at the last minute because he feared poor attendance before the summer recess. When it was re-tabled later that year, Patrick Stevens of the UFO desk warned colleagues at Whitehall: ‘We do not take this lightly because Lord Clancarty is an acknowledged expert on UFOs, whilst MoD has no experts on UFOs’ adding the sarcastic caveat, ‘for much the same reasons as we have no experts on levitation or black magic.’ With public interest in the subject higher than ever he warned colleagues there was now a real risk the government would be persuaded to conduct the dreaded study of UFOs, ‘or at least to examine the mass of evidence that Lord Clancarty and his fellow UFOlogists have assembled in the last 30 years.’ And he added: ‘Should the Government’s defences break, I need hardly warn you that responsibility for the study could very likely fall on [our] department!’.31
Steven’s research revealed there had never been any British ‘scientific study of UFOs’ and he had to rely upon the combined expertise of military and scientific advisers during his preparation for the debate. One of the most revealing briefings came from Group Captain Neil Colvin, a senior officer overseeing the RAF’s air defences. He told Stevens: ‘Of the [UFO] reports reviewed to date we can find no evidence of extraterrestrial visitation to either earth, its atmosphere or near space,’ but he was reluctant to dismiss the entire phenomenon as nonsense. ‘The almost total lack of primary radar observations of unnatural phenomena leads us to be sceptical of Lord Clancarty’s claims,’ Colvin wrote, ‘although we would not wish to state categorically that “UFOs” do not exist.’
The task of speaking for the government in the Lords debate fell upon Lord Strabolgi (David Kenworthy), who was Labour’s chief whip in the Upper Chamber. After six months of preparation, Stevens recommended the government adopted ‘an unequivocal and uncompromising line’ on UFOs but after much internal debate the MoD agreed to remain open-minded, taking the line ‘that there really are strange phenomena in the sky, but there is no need to introduce the highly questionable hypothesis of alien space craft.’
The debate arrived on 18 January 1979 in the middle of a national strike, but the industrial crisis did nothing to dampen interest in UFOs. It was one of the best attended ever held in the Lords, with 60 peers and hundreds of onlookers, including several famous UFOlogists, present in the public gallery. Lord Clancarty opened the three-hour session at 7.00 pm ‘to call attention to the increasing number of sightings and landings on a world wide scale of UFOs, and to the need for an intra-governmental study of UFOs’. He wound up his speech by calling upon the government to reveal what they knew about the phenomenon and asked the Minister of Defence, Fred Mulley, to give a national TV broadcast on the issue in the same way his French counterpart, Robert Galley, had done in 1974.32
More than a dozen peers, including two eminent retired scientists, made contributions to the debate. Lord Hewlett was briefed by Sir Bernard Lovell, director of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, which had searched the skies 24 hours every day for the past 30 years. Jodrell was the first to detect the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957 and ‘has observed thousands of possible subjects for identification as UFOs, but not a single one has proved other than natural phenomena’. He added: ‘Of the thousands of reports of sightings that have been made, whenever it has been possible to make an investigation they have been found to be natural phenomena or in some instances, I regret to say, pure myth.’
An extract from the House of Lords debate, in which Lord Gainsford describes his sighting of lights in the sky over Loch Fyne on New Year’s Eve 1978.
Several peers reported their own sightings, including Lord Gainford who described seeing the New Year’s Eve rocket re-entry ‘a bright white ball with a touch of red followed by a white cone’ over the Scottish hills. ‘It was heading eastwards and seemed rather low in the sky, passing over the hills between Loch Sweyne and Loch Fyne [and] as the ball disappeared into the distance it seemed to divide into two parts.’
The Earl of Halsbury recalled his own sightings during the First World War when he was an eight-year-old boy: ‘I used to go out after dark into the garden of the house where we lived and come back reporting the number of Zeppelins I had seen. What I had seen… was a large illuminated cigar-shaped object. In fact, what I was looking at was the lenticular shape that the perspective of a searchlight thrown onto a cloud base makes, and I was interpreting it as a Zeppelin and I was telling my parents how many I had seen.’33
Other peers referred to the link between belief in UFOs and religious faith. Lord Davies of Leek compared UFOs with belief in angels: ‘Do my noble Lords believe in angels?’ he asked. ‘The answer from some will be yes and yet they have never seen one… but if I said I had seen a flying saucer they would not believe me. What is the difference?’. In his contribution, the Bishop of Norwich said he was concerned the UFO mystery ‘is in danger of producing a 20th century superstition in our modern and scientific days which is not unlike the superstition of past years’.
The government’s reply to Lord Clancarty’s motion was delivered in elegant language by Lord Strabolgi. Drawing upon the Ministry of Defence’s long experience he did his best to pour cold water on the idea of UFOs as alien spacecraft. He also dismissed claims by Liberal peer Lord Kimberley that the government was involved in ‘conspiracy of silence’ about UFOs, with the comment: ‘there is nothing to have a conspiracy of silence about… the idea belongs, I suggest, to the world of James Bond.’
As Patrick Stevens and his advisers watched from the spectator’s box, Strabolgi declared there were tens of thousands of unusual things to be seen in the sky. ‘It is the custom to call such phenomena “UFOs”, and to transpose this easily into “alien spacecraft”,’ he said. ‘[But] often the appearance is too fleeting and the description too imprecise for a particular cause to be attributed. What we can say is that there is a great variety of plain explanations. There is no need… for the far-fetched hypothesis of alien spacecraft.’
Strabolgi then outlined the colossal distances that would make visits from outer space unlikely. Referring to Clancarty’s claim that evidence existed of thousands of such visits he said ‘there is nothing to convince the Government that there has ever been a single visit by an alien spacecraft.’ And he rounded off his presentation with a direct response to Lord Clancarty’s call for the government to reveal what it knew. ‘As for telling the public the truth about UFOs, the truth is simple,’ he said. ‘There really are many strange phenomena in the sky, and these are invariably reported by rational people. But there is a wide range of natural explanations to account for such phenomena. There is nothing to suggest to Her Majesty’s Government that such phenomena are alien spacecraft.’34
Plainly the MoD hoped the Lords debate would draw a line under their involvement in the subject once and for all, but within a short time they would be drawn back into the debate by one of the most sensational UFO incidents reported on British soil.
