The completion of the MoD’s Condign project was a watershed moment for the British government’s involvement in the UFO controversy. It brought to an end 50 years of intelligence interest in UFOs that began in 1950 when Sir Henry Tizard asked the MoD to establish a ‘Flying Saucer Working Party’ (see Chapter 2). Half a century passed and thousands of reports accumulated in the official files, but until 1996 no one was prepared to commit public funds to any serious study of the data. As far as the Defence Intelligence Staff were concerned, the Condign report allowed them to finally remove themselves from what they saw as their ‘UFO problem’. Nevertheless, the report’s conclusions remained hidden from the public until 2006 when I obtained the release of the 460-page study using the Freedom of Information Act.
As the new Millennium dawned, the MoD continued to claim they remained open-minded about the possibility that UFOs existed. But as there was no longer any formal intelligence interest in the subject, officials began looking for a way out of what they increasingly saw as a public relations headache. For the time being at least, the UFO desk continued to receive and examine UFO sighting reports for any evidence of a defence threat. So what was really going on behind the scenes? The last remaining MoD UFO files released by The National Archives in 2012 provide us with an unprecedented insight into what have become known as ‘the real X-files’.
On 27 April 1998 a tabloid headline proclaimed: ‘24,000 mph UFO buzzes Britain.’ The story, attributed to an unnamed ‘senior RAF source’, claimed a UFO had been tracked moving in a zig-zag pattern above the North Sea by RAF Fylingdales, the early warning station on the North York Moors. Dutch F-16 fighters were sent to investigate, but the craft disappeared from radar at fantastic speeds. ‘It was definitely under control, judging by the various manoeuvres executed,’ the anonymous source told the Daily Mail. ‘It appeared to be triangular and was around the size of a battleship.’ He added the RAF held ‘a second series of tapes, reported to show 12 UFOs changing shape in mid-flight’.
For once it appeared that solid evidence for UFO reality was within grasp. But was the story fact or fiction? When the tabloid headlines reached the Under Secretary of State for Defence, John Spellar MP, he scribbled ‘What is all this about?’ on the file and demanded immediate answers. The head of the MoD branch responsible for UFOs contacted the Commanding Officer at RAF Fylingdales who responded: ‘… the newspaper articles are pure fantasy and contain no element of truth. Over 35 years of operations at RAF Fylingdales, no UFOs have been tracked [by this station].’1
RAF Fylingdales said the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System – a chain of powerful radars that circles the North Atlantic – was configured only to detect and track objects in orbit around the Earth, such as satellites, decaying rockets and missiles. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the operating system should have known BMEWS was not capable of detecting flying objects at lower altitudes, as the tabloid story claimed. The officer added: ‘… interestingly enough, as is always the case with these reports, the military source remains unnamed, lending weight to the fact that the reports are a fabrication.’
Once again, the media had published a fantastic UFO story that confirmed what some people already believed, namely that aliens existed and were visiting Earth on a regular basis. The implication was that not only did the governments of the world know about this but were actively conspiring to hide this knowledge from the public. In fact the whole story was a fabrication, but the far less sensational truth remained hidden beneath layers of official secrecy for a further 14 years. During the Cold War, the reason for such secrecy was obvious. No responsible government would release details of the capabilities of its air defence radars as they rightly feared this information might prove useful to earthly enemies.
Today, accounts of UFOs seen from the ground and simultaneously detected by military radars are rare. In contrast, during the early part of the UFO era they were more common as radar systems were constantly developing their capacity and accuracy. Military reports reached a peak in 1956 at the time of the Suez crisis (see Chapter 3). This was a period that coincided with the tense nuclear stand-off between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. Before the end of the Cold War, RAF aircraft were frequently scrambled to identify – and where necessary, intercept – unidentified aircraft tracked on radar approaching the British Isles. Sensational claims are frequently made by some UFOlogists who believe that since 1947 a secret war has been fought between military forces and alien intelligences. Experiences such as those recalled by USAF fighter pilot Milton Torres, who was ordered to fire upon a UFO detected above East Anglia in 1956 (see Chapter 3), are often cited as evidence for this ‘Cosmic Watergate’. Enticing though the claims may be, newly released RAF documents paint a very different picture. Files opened by The National Archives in 2010 reveal that at the height of the Cold War, RAF aircraft were scrambled on average 200 times every year to investigate ‘unidentified aircraft’. But according to RAF Fighter Command there remains: ‘… no evidence to suggest that any [interceptions] have taken place against anything other than man-made aircraft.’ A confidential briefing prepared by the RAF for the UFO desk in 2000, states categorically that: ‘… there is no record of any air defence aircraft employed on any defence mission ever having intercepted, identified or photographed an object of extra-terrestrial nature.’2
The truth is that suspicious radar tracks were detected frequently but usually these were identified, on investigation, as either ‘friendly’ civilian aircraft that had strayed from their flight plans, or Soviet military aircraft. On other occasions, stray balloons and possibly even black project aircraft sparked UFO flaps such as the West Malling incident of 1953 (see Chapter 3). But during the Cold War, the files show the vast majority of air defence alerts were in response to the constant probing of Eastern bloc reconnaissance aircraft. Almost daily from the mid-1950s Soviet aircraft from bases in the Arctic circle approached the British Isles. Here they were spotted by radars and interceptor aircraft were scrambled to escort them out of NATO territory.
An example of a typical MoD UFO report form from 1999, complete with a doodle of an ‘alien’, added by the RAF desk officer. DEFE 24/2008/1
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this daily ritual suddenly ended. According to a Parliamentary statement by the MoD in 1996 there had been no occasions ‘when aircraft have either been scrambled or diverted from task to investigate [UFOs] picked up on radar’ since 1991.3 During this same period almost 1,200 UFO sighting reports were received by the MoD. The vast majority of these originated from ordinary members of the public. Few, if any, were corroborated by radar and just a handful were followed up in any depth. Of those that were, the momentum for action came not from the MoD itself, but as a result of external pressure often from the media, MPs and peers of the realm, such as Lord Hill-Norton, whom they regarded as a key advocate of the ‘UFO lobby’. In a formerly secret memo hidden in the files, one intelligence officer dismissed these people as ‘enthusiastic cranks’.4 Others within the MoD were more open-minded. The retired intelligence officer who produced the Condign study for DI55 was convinced that real UFO phenomena existed but even he found it difficult to reconcile the large number of sightings with the ‘significant absence of radar plots/tracks’ in Britain’s X-files.
There was, however, one highly evidential radar/visual UFO ‘flap’ lurking in the MoD’s records. This complex incident would become the last to be subjected to a detailed military investigation. The drama began in the early hours of Saturday 5 October 1996 when police officers in Lincolnshire spotted strange coloured lights in the autumn sky. One of the first sightings was made by PC David Leyland from the police control room in Skegness. Shortly after 2.00 am police phoned the coastguard at Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast, reporting that officers ‘… can see a strange red and green rotating light in the sky southeast from Skegness. Looks to be high in the sky directly over The Wash. Many people here are observing it… looks strange as it’s stationary. No [aircraft] in the area… ’.5
Alerted by the radio chatter, police patrols in nearby Boston were on the lookout. They too could see what looked like a single bright white light stationary in the southeastern sky. Thunderstorms had been reported in the East Anglia region and, fearing an aircraft could be in trouble out at sea, the coastguard phoned the RAF’s air rescue centre at Kinloss in Scotland. Kinloss had no record of any military activity in the area and had not received any distress calls, but the incident was escalating. The number of authorities drawn in now included the police, the coastguard, RAF air-sea rescue and air traffic controllers. At around 3.00 am the coastguard received a call from the crew of a tanker, the MV Conocoast, that was taking fuel to dredgers in The Wash. Alerted by the commotion on shore, the crew of four began watching two separate sets of rotating coloured lights in the sky. The lights were red, blue, green and white and remained stationary in the sky for up to five hours until daybreak, when they faded in the dawn. Viewed through binoculars, one group appeared to be high above the horizon in the south. The second group were visible in the opposite direction, high above the North Sea.
With the lights still visible, Kinloss asked RAF Neatishead, on the Norfolk Broads, to check their defence radars for evidence of unusual activity. This was the same station from which, 40 years earlier, chief controller Freddie Wimbledon scrambled the battle flight to intercept a UFO over RAF Lakenheath (see Chapter 3). Would this new flap trigger a repeat of that dramatic incident?
RAF Neatishead produces a 24-hour real-time display of what was known in 1996 as ‘the UK Air Defence Region’ (UKADR). This display is constructed from electronic data collected by a patchwork of overlapping military and air traffic radars spread across the east coast of Britain. One of the stations supplying data is the air traffic control radar at Claxby, near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, close to the UFO flap zone. Shortly after the UFO alert began, staff at London Air Traffic Control noticed an unidentified ‘blip’ on the Claxby radar. The same target was also visible on the air defence radar at RAF Neatishead, but air defence staff there ignored it, as their attention was focussed upon the North Sea region for approaching threats. From Claxby, the radar ‘UFO’ appeared to be stationary over Boston where, at the same time, police were reporting lights in the sky. Although it was not possible to calculate its height, control room staff in London knew this was not a civilian aircraft because these would normally transmit a transponder signal to ground control.
For a few hours, the impossible appeared possible. For the first time in living memory here was a UFO sighting, reported by credible witnesses (police officers), corroborated by air defence radars. This fact alone was sufficient to spark off a full-scale UFO flap. Later in the night a second airfield radar, at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, detected an unidentified target in another position. And as the events unfolded, air traffic controllers asked the crews of civil aircraft passing through the area to keep a lookout for anything unusual. None reported seeing any other suspicious airborne objects.
The excitement did not last long. As dawn approached it became apparent the UFOs on radar were nothing remarkable. Suspiciously, the blip over Boston had not moved for nine hours and was still visible on radar as dawn broke. The solution to the mystery was obvious to experienced air defence staff. The mysterious blip over Boston was ‘a permanent echo’ created not by a spaceship but by a tall building. The market town of Boston had an excellent contender: the 273 ft spire of St Botolph’s church, visible for miles across the flat fenland landscape and known locally as the Boston Stump. In normal circumstances this type of echo would have been ignored, but these were not normal circumstances. The presence of the church spire on radar only became significant because of the simultaneous sightings of lights in the sky.
Like the magic trick that loses its mystery once the magician reveals his sleight of hand, the Lincolnshire UFO scare ended as quickly as it began. Nevertheless, few UFO incidents can ever be fully resolved even when key elements, such as radar detections, have been adequately explained. In this case, although the RAF were satisfied they had discovered the source of the radar UFOs, they remained puzzled by the lights spotted by the police and the tanker crew. They suspected some kind of natural phenomenon could have caused these, but a far more obvious culprit was identified by the police themselves. In his own testimony, one of the Skegness officers said he watched a twinkling light in the sky periodically for two hours until ‘… the star… was fairly high in the sky looking very similar to the rest’.
Just before daybreak, at the request of the Yarmouth coastguard, PC Leyland used his camcorder to capture footage of the light that remained visible from the third floor roof of the police control room in Skegness. This footage depicts a single, stationary white light above a block of flats. The RAF sent a copy of his video to the Royal Greenwich Observatory and asked if they could ‘nail down the culprit’. Their report identified the planet Venus as the most likely source. The Queen of UFOs had fooled many sincere skywatchers in the past, including the former US President Jimmy Carter (see Chapter 5) and early in October 1996, the planet was ‘exceptionally bright in the early morning sky… and stood out from all around it’.
Reviewing the contents of the RAF’s file on the Lincolnshire sightings in 2007, astronomer Ian Ridpath identified the other lights in the sky that had puzzled the RAF. The colourful flashing light seen from Skegness in the early hours was likely to have been the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, that was low on the horizon to the southeast at the time. Another bright star, Vega, could explain the lights seen in a northerly direction by the tanker crew. Ridpath suggests the crews’ description of rotating, flashing coloured lights in the sky was actually caused by air currents in the atmosphere which makes stars twinkle particularly when close to the horizon.6
These mundane explanations came far too late to kill the excitement the UFO flap had generated. News that sightings by police officers had been ‘confirmed by RAF radars’ spread quickly to the local media and the UFOlogical grapevine. A partial transcript of the conversation between the coastguard, police and RAF was published by the East Anglian media and the news headlines were read by a Labour MP, Martin Redmond, who represented the Don Valley region. He had read Nick Pope’s book, Open Skies, Closed Minds (see Chapter 6) and his growing fascination with UFOs prompted him to fire off a furious letter to Michael Portillo, the Defence Minister in John Major’s government.
A page from the RAF Air Defence report on the Lincolnshire UFO flap, completed in November 1996. The diagram shows the positions and timings of ‘radar plots’ identified by air defence staff as created by a permanent echo, the Boston Stump. DEFE 24/2032/1
‘I am very concerned about an incident that occurred off the East Anglian coast recently, involving a visual unidentified flying craft sighting which was correlated by various different military radar systems,’ his letter stated. ‘What strikes me as incredible is that no aircraft were scrambled when an uncorrelated target was picked up so close to the [UK] coast… The RAF are supposed, or so I believed, to be responsible for keeping a watchful eye on activity in the UK air defence region but seem to have no idea as to what is going on.’7
Stung by Redmond’s criticism, for the first time since the 1960s, the MoD ordered a full investigation of a UFO incident by the RAF’s Air Defence staff. Unlike the civil servants who ran the UFO desk, Wing Commander Norman Hutchinson had an in-depth knowledge of the workings of Britain’s air defence system. ‘Most of the UFO reports that crossed my desk were easily explained but the one exception was this case,’ he explained. ‘I was told to take as long as I wanted to investigate it. I spoke to the coastguards, the dredger crew, the police and even UFO societies. It was all very “Mulder and Scully.”’8
Wing Commander Hutchinson’s 23-page report on ‘alleged “unidentified flying craft” sightings’ was completed on 13 November 1996. It answered Martin Redmond’s criticisms point by point and said as there was no evidence for the presence of a ‘flying craft’ at any stage in the events, there was no justification to scramble RAF Tornado interceptors. His conclusion was scathing: ‘This report is the result of almost full time, painstaking investigation over a period of eight working days and, although all the light phenomena have not been conclusively explained, research has not revealed evidence or admissions that alarming or extraordinary events were being witnessed. It is likely that similar detailed investigation into light phenomena would produce equally less than conclusive but unastonishing results.’9
The idea that the Boston Stump, along with assorted stars and planets, could have been responsible for the UFO scare that involved the police, coastguard and RAF was dismissed as absurd by many who saw the debunking of incidents such as this as more evidence of a government cover-up. Inevitably, some turned to conspiracy theories to account for the continuing lack of the proof they were convinced was being concealed. Others drew parallels with the Rendlesham Forest UFOs, which had also been ‘explained’ by some as a fireball, a lighthouse and bright stars (see Chapter 5). One East Anglian resident, in a letter to his local newspaper, said: ‘… It seems that “The [Boston] Stump” is not on dry land after all. In fact, it is situated somewhere in the North Sea, or The Wash, or the North Norfolk coast, or at Yarmouth, or even floating in the sky miraculously above the A47 in Norfolk.’10
Easily the weirdest report to emerge from the UFO files released by The National Archives in 2009 was made by two frightened young men who claimed they had narrowly escaped abduction by a UFO.
According to a report compiled by Staffordshire Police, late on the night of 4 May 1995 the youths ran into Chasetown police station in a state of excitement, calling on officers to come outside and ‘see a UFO’ that was visible in the sky. A police constable and sergeant went outside and saw red and white lights, but they dismissed these as aircraft landing lights. In their report, the police said both youths ‘appeared upset and shocked’ so they asked them to go home and write an account of their experience. They returned the next day with hand-written statements and these were forwarded to the Ministry of Defence.
In their own words, the youths said they were walking along Rugeley Road in Burntwood, shortly before 11.00 pm when they felt an ‘intense burst of heat’. Their skin glowed red and both were left gasping for air as sweat poured from their bodies. Then they saw the source of the heat – a dark, silver disc-shaped object hovering about 40 ft away from them, above a farmer’s field. The underside of this ‘object’ appeared to be glowing red. As the two youths watched in amazement, a lemon-shaped disembodied head appeared in the field, between them and the ‘object’. Then a voice called out ‘We want you, come with us’. On hearing this chilling invitation, both ran for their lives.
A page extracted from a hand-written account of an attempted ‘UFO abduction’ reported to Staffordshire police in 1995 and passed to the MoD’s UFO desk. DEFE 24/1961/1
The aftermath of this extraordinary experience was equally strange. Evidently convinced by the youth’s honesty, police officers returned with them to the scene . They pointed out the field where the UFO appeared and officers went to speak to the farmer. He revealed he was spraying his crops at the time of the ‘alien encounter’. According to the police report, preserved in the MoD files, ‘… he did not see any persons in the field, speak to anyone or see anything unusual’.11
Like most UFO experiences the ‘explanation’ is never straightforward. I have no doubt the two young men saw something that appeared extraordinary to them at the time. But was it really a spaceship from another world, containing a sinister alien intent on abducting earthlings? Or was this UFO present only in the eye of the beholders? However sincere the youths were, their description of the UFO with its heat ray and alien voice reads like a scene from a science fiction film such as Mars Attacks! or The War of the Worlds.
A UFO with a heat ray also features in another strange story, reported to the MoD by Cheshire police 14 months later. Their account describes how a young man saw a ‘very bright light’ hovering near a footbridge on his route home near Widnes in the early hours of a July morning in 1996. The youth backed away, but the light appeared to follow him and he broke into a run. As he looked back, he noticed the light had moved above a cemetery. Then he heard ‘a high pitched sound’ that resembled wailing cats and saw ‘beams of light come down from [the UFO] striking the ground’. Later, he persuaded his father to return with him to the scene where they found ‘four railway sleepers smouldering with a large hole four inches in diameter burnt through one of the sleepers’. Police were called and they confirmed the railway sleeper was still smouldering five hours after the boy’s experience. In their report to the MoD they described the young witness as ‘a sensible sort of lad but genuine’.12 Again, what could the MoD’s UFO desk officer do with a strange report like this? Why would any potential enemy (foreign or alien) travel to Britain under cover of night simply to fire a laser beam at a cemetery in Cheshire?
The list of bizarre UFO-related experiences received by desk officer Kerry Philpott during the flap of 1996–97 includes an account from a Welsh man who suffered an unexplained illness after being struck by a beam of light from the sky. Whilst driving near Ebbw Vale on the evening of 27 January 1997 he saw ‘a massive star’ approaching his car from the east. Alarmed, he stopped and switched off his lights, but ‘the light encircled the car, remaining for perhaps five minutes’. With the beam now surrounding him, he emerged from his car and walked through the brilliant light, noting the total lack of sound. Frightened and alone in the darkness, he began to feel ill and noticed his car was covered in a film of dirt or dust. Even more alarming, neither his car radio or mobile phone worked until the light disappeared. The following morning he called his local RAF base to report the sighting. At that time he was still feeling unwell and he later developed a skin condition that required medical treatment.13
It is frustrating that the standard two-page MoD UFO report form on which this man’s story was recorded tells us nothing further about this extraordinary experience. On the surface, it included physical evidence that, if collected quickly enough could have been analysed by a laboratory. Either there was a mundane explanation or there was evidence for the presence of something of potential value to science. But with a lack of enthusiasm and resources, field investigations of UFO reports by MoD personnel were by now a thing of the past and the culture of secrecy that prevailed at the Ministry of Defence continued to prevent the sharing of information on incidents of this type with anyone else. From 1997 even those reports from credible sources such as pilots and police were filed away with minimal follow-up checks. This policy was justified because of a lack of time, a dwindling defence budget and the absence of any clear evidence to suggest UFOs constituted a direct threat to the realm.
Early in 1997 Martin Fuller, head of Secretariat (Air Staff), the branch that acted as the ‘focal point’ for UFO reports reaching Whitehall, initiated a root and branch review of MoD UFO policy. This revealed how time devoted to the subject by Philpott, who had replaced Nick Pope as UFO desk officer in the summer of 1994, had increased by 50 per cent in just one year. In 1996 the department had logged 609 separate UFO sightings and responded to 343 letters from the public and 22 inquiries from Members of Parliament.14 The figure for the number of sightings alone was the second highest on record and the review noted the MoD had logged more reports during 1996 than for all the three previous years added together.
Fuller blamed the increased workload on ‘the media obsession’ with UFOs that accompanied the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell incident. 1997 saw the release of many new books, films and TV documentaries on UFOs, alien life, crop circles and conspiracy theories. From 1994 The X-Files TV series, shown on BBC 2, was followed regularly by up to six million viewers in the UK alone. In 1996 the release of the Hollywood blockbuster Independence Day, with its themes of hostile alien invasion, giant flying saucers and references to Area 51 and Roswell increased public speculation that an imminent government disclosure of ‘the truth’ about alien visits to Earth was imminent.
By April that year Fuller revealed, in an MoD briefing, that his staff were struggling to answer a steady stream of letters and phone calls from members of the public ‘seeking information about the existence of alien life forms, or seeking a detailed investigation/ explanation for allegations of abductions by aliens, out of body experiences, animal mutilations, crop circles etc… [and] as a consequence, staff effort [had become] increasingly diverted from core tasks.’15 He felt some of the additional work could be directly attributed to the media activities of Nick Pope, who was now pursuing a parallel career as ‘government UFO expert’ whilst continuing to work in another branch of the Ministry (he eventually resigned in 2006). Pope’s second book, The Uninvited, was published in the spring of 1997. The blurb described it as ‘an expose of the alien abduction phenomenon’.
Earlier that year a 24-hour UFO hotline answerphone service and e-mail address was launched by the UFO desk to cope with the increasing workload. Publicly, officials said this was necessary to make it easier for people to report their sightings in a timely fashion; at face value, it appeared to suggest the government really were interested in the stories of people who saw UFOs. In secret, the UFO desk was negotiating a special arrangement to reduce its UFO workload. From April it was agreed that only reports made by ‘credible witnesses’ such as police, armed services or civilian aircrew, or those with photographs or video footage would be forwarded to ‘specialist staff’ for further checks. Reports that fell into two other categories would also be scrutinised more closely. These were sightings that were corroborated by independent witnesses and those that were detected in ‘real time’ by radar, which would allow interceptor aircraft to investigate.
The secret policy shake-up was a clever move because Fuller knew that reports in these three categories were few. Accounts of sightings from ordinary people were received in their hundreds. Unfortunately, these turned up in the MoD in-tray days, weeks or months after they occurred and consequently the scent was cold. The change in policy effectively meant this type of sighting report would continue to be received, but they would be filed away with no meaningful checks or follow-ups. The files show that in reality the MoD had no interest in receiving what Fuller described as ‘singleton reports from the public which tell us nothing’. But at the same time officials recognised that, because of the high level of public and Parliamentary interest, they could not be seen to completely ignore the UFO issue. Faced by vocal public critics like Lord Hill-Norton they had no choice but to continue receiving them, at least for the time being. Anything less would, according to one internal briefing released in 2011 ‘reveal our [true] policy and there would be a risk that would be divulged to the UFO fraternity’.16
One of the most impressive UFO sightings in the first decade of the new century came to light when Captain Ray Bowyer landed his Trislander passenger aircraft at the small airport on Alderney, in the Channel Islands, on the afternoon of 23 April 2007. On arrival from Southampton he immediately filed a report with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and news quickly reached the local newspaper.
Before Freedom of Information, details of this sighting could have remained secret for at least 30 years. But using the FOIA, UFOlogists were able to gain access to the MoD’s file on the case within weeks. This revealed how the Trislander was approaching Alderney at 40,000 ft shortly after 2.00 pm when Bowyer spotted ‘a bright light ahead which [he] thought was the reflection from the sun off glass in Guernsey’. As he scrutinised the light carefully through binoculars, Bowyer was amazed to see a ‘sparkling yellow’ object shaped like a long thin cigar suspended horizontally on the horizon. The object had ‘very sharply defined’ edges and one third from the left end was a narrow patch, dark grey in colour.17 Bowyer’s initial impression was that the object was the size of a 737 airliner or even larger. It hovered above the sea at around 4,000 ft, alarmingly just 15 miles away from his small aircraft.
Thanks to the co-operation of Jersey Airport, I obtained a tape recording of Bowyer’s conversation with air traffic controller Paul Kelly. On the recording, three minutes after his initial sighting, Bowyer asks:
‘Do you have any traffic, can’t really say how far, about my 12 o’clock, level?’
Kelly replied: ‘No, no known traffic at all in your 12 o’clock.’
Bowyer responded: ‘I’ve got a very bright object… extremely bright yellow, orange object, straight ahead… Looking at it through binoculars as we speak.’
At this point Kelly says he can see ‘a very faint primary contact’ on his radar, four miles from the aircraft, but he dismissed this as a weather anomaly.
As Bowyer continued his landing approach to Alderney he spotted a second UFO, ‘exactly the same but [it] looked smaller because it was further away’. By now, passengers on the Trislander were also watching the lights through the cabin windows. A number of people who were seated immediately behind Bowyer also saw the UFOs. One of these was Kate Russell, who was travelling with her husband John four rows back. She told me: ‘At first I thought it was the sun reflecting off glass but what I was looking at was a very bright light over the sea below us.’ She added: ‘I don’t believe in little green men but this was something quite extraordinary, something we don’t have an explanation for at the present time. Ray Bowyer is a sound, rational man but he was quite shaken.’18
With the objects still visible, Paul Kelly put out a call to the crews of other aircraft overflying the English Channel. On radio he asked if they could see anything unusual. Immediately, the captain of a Jetstream aircraft en route to Jersey from the Isle of Man, reported he could ‘see something fitting the description, yellow/beige in colour, in my eight o’clock position, slightly to the north-west of Alderney at what I estimated to be 2,000 feet below.’ Visibility was fairly poor but the object was in sight for about one minute. Captain Patrick Patterson later told me he believed this was some kind of ‘atmospheric phenomenon’.19
Meanwhile, Captain Bowyer was preparing his aircraft for landing. As he descended he saw the two UFOs change their positions so they appeared to line up, one directly above the other. When he reached a layer of haze at 2,000 ft, they had vanished. In total they were visible for 12 minutes during which his sighting had been corroborated by his passengers and the captain of the Jetstream aircraft.
Despite good evidence that something unusual had been seen, the file on the case reveals the MoD decided that because the sighting occurred in French airspace the phenomena posed no threat to the UK. In other words, because it had ‘no defence significance’ they were no longer interested – even if the sighting remained unexplained. As a result, it was left to me and a group of scientists who shared an interest in this subject to investigate further. After a year’s work we were able to eliminate many of the usual explanations for UFO sightings such as sundogs, mirages, reflections and other unusual natural phenomena. Our investigations revealed that media stories describing enormous UFOs up to a mile wide, and claims that radar had confirmed the sightings were not true. With no obvious rational explanation available, we concluded this was a genuine example of an ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (UAP) and one that deserved further scientific study. But it was clear this type of study was of no interest to the Ministry of Defence or any other government body.20
Pilot Ray Bowyer’s final word on his sighting was refreshingly open-minded: ‘I can’t explain it. I’m not saying it was from another world. All I’m saying is I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years flying.’
A graph from the DI55 Condign report illustrating the yearly frequency of UFO sighting reports logged by MoD between 1959 and 1997.
The Channel Islands UFOs were just one of 135 sightings logged by a new MoD UFO desk officer, Paul Webb, during 2007. From the high point of media interest surrounding the Roswell anniversary in 1996–97, the numbers of reports had fallen off dramatically. By 2001 the numbers reaching the ‘UFO hotline’ averaged around 130 per year but none of the few referred to the RAF during the years that followed was found to have any ‘defence significance’. In addition, after the events of 9/11 the intelligence services were keen to avoid any distractions caused by ‘spurious reports’ of unusual things seen in the sky reported by well-meaning members of the public. Although the US Department of Defence had washed its hands of its UFO problem in 1969 when it closed Project Blue Book (see Chapter 3), other Western countries, including France and the UK, continued to maintain official UFO reporting procedures for the time being.
From 2001 the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq placed enormous demands upon the UK defence budget at a time when Tony Blair’s government faced a new challenge. Ministry of Defence officials had predicted that the arrival of the Freedom of Information Act in 2005 would immediately be followed by a corresponding increase in requests for access to its UFO files. By the turn of the millennium a large number of the earlier files, including those containing Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s famous memo (see Chapter 2) had been transferred to the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) under the existing 30-year rule, but more recent records remained firmly in closed MoD archives (see Chapter 5). Under the old Public Records Act they would have remained locked away until the middle of the twenty-first century.
But pressure for full disclosure continued to grow and in 2000 I launched my own campaign to persuade the Ministry of Defence that opening their files to the public was their only realistic option. In that year Welsh UFOlogist Colin Ridyard used the Code of Practice for Access to Government Information to apply for copies of UFO reports filed by air traffic controllers and aircrew during the previous two years. Initially, the MoD rejected his request on the grounds that the task ‘would require unreasonable diversion of resources.’ Undeterred, and with help from his MP, Ridyard took the case to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, whose intervention led the MoD to release the information as a ‘one-off exercise’. In his judgement, Ombdusman Michael Buckley welcomed the MoD’s openness but accepted that the Code ‘recognises there are limits to the resources that a body can reasonably devote to answering requests’.21
Meanwhile Lord Hill-Norton was pressing the MoD in parliament for the release of its closed UFO files ahead of the standard 30 years. Again in 1999 officials turned down this request, arguing that the cost of removing personal information from the files would be too expensive to justify the work involved.22 But they knew this argument would not survive the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. All central government departments were preparing to implement FOI by January 2005 and a visitor from the US Department of Defense warned MoD officials to expect a ‘full postbag’ on UFOs for many years to come. True to his word, in the first six months following the arrival of the FOIA, the ministry received 200 applications for information on UFOs which had become one of its three most popular subjects for requests.
In May 2006 a FOI request I made to the Defence Intelligence Staff in the previous year led to the declassification of the Condign project report and its release to the public. Soon afterwards (at my request) DI55 agreed to review all their surviving UFO files for release. By this point the momentum had built into a full-scale campaign for disclosure. On 27 February 2007 an intelligence officer emailed a colleague to say ‘that this campaign is being led by one man and the cumulative resource implications of what he has been asking for has been considerable’. He admitted: ‘… we cannot sustain the current level of FOI requests [and] I wonder whether we have come to the stage when we need to take a fresh look at the matter and say enough is enough.’ The email went on to suggest that DIS should: ‘consider (in connection with [the UFO desk]) wholesale release of papers on the subject.’23
By September 2006 the ministry had decided enough was enough. During that month the Secretary State for Defence, Des Browne, approved a proposal from the Directorate of Air Staff (as the former Sec(AS) was now called) to transfer the remaining UFO files to The National Archives. Funds were found to scan approximately 160 files and remove sensitive personal information, such as the names and addresses of those who had reported sightings to the authorities. This was described as ‘the largest release of documents younger than 30 years in the MoD’s entire history’.
Browne was told that: ‘… since the end of World War Two, MoD has been tasked with recording and, from time to time, investigating UFO sightings. Contrary to what many members of the public may believe, MoD has no interest in the subject of extra-terrestrial life forms visiting the UK, only ensuring the integrity and security of UK airspace.’ The minister was told most of the surviving files were held by the department that ran the UFO desk, but a few surviving intelligence files were also included in the proposed release. The earliest dated from the late 1970s and all were ‘of low security classification’. Their contents did, however: ‘include references to air defence matters, defence technology, relations with foreign powers and occasional uncomplimentary comments by staff or police officers about members of the public, which will need to be withheld… but there is no reason, in principle, why they cannot be released.’ The briefing ended with these words: ‘The MoD is aware of no clear evidence to prove or disprove the existence of aliens and consequently the files are considerably less exciting than the ‘industry’ surrounding the UFO phenomena would like to believe.’24
By slowly extricating themselves from public association with the UFO phenomenon the MoD were consigning the subject to history, much as the US Air Force had done when they deposited the Project Blue Book files at the US National Archives three decades earlier. The British MoD realised their long-term plan would take some time to implement, but reading between the lines it was clear to me that the decision to release all the remaining files was the beginning of the end.
From the earliest days, establishment figures, including politicians, scientists and celebrities have defied the disapproval of their peers to express their opinions on the existence, or otherwise, of UFOs.
One of the first to publicly commit himself was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding (1882–1970), the RAF mastermind credited with victory in the Battle of Britain. Dowding was also a spiritualist who believed he had received messages in the séance room from airmen killed in action. He saw flying saucers and the claims of George Adamski as entirely consistent with the teachings of the theosophists; he announced his conversion to believer in the spiritualist newspaper The Two Worlds during May 1954. Dowding said: ‘I believe that the occupants come from outer space… but I do not know why they persist in buzzing about in our atmosphere and make so little attempt to contact the many people who would receive them properly.’1
Others in military and government circles were less easily convinced. Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s famous memo on ‘flying saucers’ to his Air Minister in 1952 is often quoted (see Chapter 2). But less well known is an anecdote from 1954 when artist Bernard Hailstone was painting Churchill’s portrait in the grounds of his Westerham home. When the subject turned to space travel and UFOs, the Prime Minister’s response was: ‘I think that we should treat other planets with the contempt they deserve.’2
A 1947 speech by wartime Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden, Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, warned that ‘it seems to be an unfortunate fact that the nations of the world were only really united when they were facing a common menace’. Post-war, he felt the superpowers could only be brought together ‘when they find someone in Mars to get mad against’. His speech provided the inspiration for a novel by former spy Bernard Newman, The Flying Saucer, published in 1948. The plot revolved around the faked crash of alien spacecraft in various parts of the world, including the New Mexico desert, organised by scientists working to prevent a Third World War.3
The theme of an alien threat forcing world leaders to work together continued to resonate with politicians during the Cold War. In 1985 US President Ronald Reagan startled his aides at a meeting with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva by suggesting the two superpowers would cooperate if the Earth was ever threatened with alien invasion. According to his biographer Lou Cannon, Reagan’s advisers were frequently embarrassed whenever the president raised what became known as his ‘little green men’ obsession. Gen Colin Powell was convinced that his proposal to the Soviet leader had been inspired by the 1951 science-fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.4 In 1982, following a special screening of the movie E. T. at the White House, the former actor famously turned to director Steven Spielberg and joked, ‘we really enjoyed your movie… and there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true’.
Reagan’s fascination with UFOs was shared with an unlikely Cold War adversary, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who was Soviet leader 15 months from late 1982. The memoirs of his former Politburo aide Igor Sinitsin revealed that Andropov set up two committees to investigate the phenomenon in 1977 and issued orders that all military personnel were to file detailed reports on sightings over Russian territory.5
The MoD files contain hundreds of letters addressed to politicians requesting confirmation of every conceivable UFO and conspiracy rumour. Believers in UFOs petitioned each new Prime Minister with requests to open files, launch investigations or confirm that aliens really had landed on Earth. In 1997 one ‘persistent correspondent’ asked Labour leader Tony Blair if he could verify that films and TV shows like The X-Files and Independence Day were part of ‘a strategy by Western governments to prepare the population for the admission that there has indeed been contact from aliens, extraterrestrials, trans-dimensionals and/or time travellers’.6 All such letters were passed to the Ministry of Defence who responded with the standard ‘no defence significance’ line that simply confirmed the writers’ belief that a cover-up was underway.
Whilst on the campaign trail in January 2009, David Cameron was asked to comment on pro-UFO comments made by Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell (see Afterword). Cameron’s response was: ‘I’m convinced we have been visited by alien lifeforms – and one of them is the Trade Secretary, Peter Mandelson.’ Less flippant was Margaret Thatcher’s comment, when quizzed by author Georgina Bruni about UFOs and alien technology at a cocktail party in May 1997. Her response: ‘UFOs? You must get your facts right, and you can’t tell the people’ was interpreted by Bruni to mean Baroness Thatcher was not only aware of the phenomenon but regarded aliens as a potential threat to national security. You Can’t Tell the People became the title of her book on the Rendlesham Forest mystery, published in 2000. But the former Prime Minister’s personal assistant, Mary Wakeley, has insisted that the comment ‘you must get your facts right’ was one ‘that Lady Thatcher regularly uses in almost all circumstances [and] I do not think one should read too much into it – as the author obviously has done’.7
Perhaps Baroness Thatcher really had been briefed on the subject by her scientific advisers, as we know Churchill and other senior figures, such as Admiral of the Fleet, Earl Mountbatten, had been in the past. If that was the case, the briefing was unlikely to have confirmed the existence of a UFO threat to the realm. Early in the flying saucer age, Mountbatten was a committed believer who encouraged friends in the media to publish UFO stories (see Chapter 2). Adverse publicity obliged him to keep his views private during his term as Chief of Defence Staff (1959–65), but in 1962 he privately sought the counsel of his friend, the MoD’s chief scientific adviser, Lord Solly Zuckerman. His response compared the evidence for UFOs with that for ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster, a phenomenon that he described as ‘a submarine saucer’. In a personal note, Zuckerman said that despite the fact that all the resources of modern science had failed to produce evidence of the monster’s existence, ‘those people who wish to go on believing will be able to do so on no more solid a foundation than disbelief in modern methods of observation. So it is with flying saucers.’ Soon afterwards, Mountbatten told a correspondent he had ‘gradually lost interest’ in the subject since his briefing from the Chief Scientist.8
Zuckerman’s views echoed those of his contemporaries in the scientific staffs of the British government. Wartime chief scientist Lord Cherwell famously dismissed flying saucers as ‘an American psychosis’, whilst his protégé, wartime intelligence expert R. V. Jones was more nuanced but no less sceptical. In a reflective paper written during the UFO flap of 1967, he wrote: ‘In coming to a conclusion about the existence of flying saucers, there is a strong temptation to be overcautious, because if you turn out to be wrong in denying their existence the error will be blazoned in the history of science; but if you merely turn out to be right, there will be little credit in proving a negative case.’9
Jones’s scepticism was shared by the German-born rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the moon. Responding to questions on UFOs in his 1958 book First Men to the Moon, Von Braun said his experience testing guided missiles led him to be highly sceptical about ‘any sighting report of a fleeting, mysterious object in the sky’. Addressing those ‘who, either through personal observation or through hearsay based on other people’s accounts, still insist that objects of extra-terrestrial origin are roaming through our atmosphere, I can only say that I have never seen such an object and cannot believe in their existence until I do.’10
Astronomers and cosmologists tend to share von Braun’s views. During the 1960s, when he was a student in the Department of Physics, University of London, Paul Davies wrote to R. V. Jones challenging his sceptical attitude towards the ‘evidence for UFOs’.11 Today Professor Davies is an internationally acclaimed cosmologist and astrobiologist who, as chair of SETI’s Post-Detection Task Group, would become Earth’s ambassador if contact was ever made with an extraterrestrial civilisation in the future. Davies says he is one of the few scientists who has actually examined the UFO evidence assembled in the University of Colorado report that was based on Project Blue Book’s files. Significantly, his views have changed radically since his days as a young UFOlogist 40 years ago. In a 2008 interview he said: ‘Obviously people see things in the sky all the time and the vast majority are just misperceptions or atmospheric phenomena of various sorts… then there’s the tougher residue that’s harder to explain and I would say two things about those. One is that these are real experience – I don’t think anyone is lying. The second thing is that to me, they don’t have the hallmark of extraterrestrial visitation and it is not what I would expect from ET. So whatever lies behind this, and there may be different explanations for different things, I don’t think extraterrestrial visitation will be one of them.’12
The release by The National Archives of the first tranch of UFO files during May 2008 was accompanied by a new wave of sightings across the British Isles. In June The Sun newspaper reported how the crew of a police helicopter had a near-miss with a UFO as they returned to their base at St Athan near Cardiff. Later that month the newspaper devoted its front page to a story headlined ‘Army Spot UFOs over Shropshire’. This told how three soldiers from the 1st Battalion Irish Regiment observed a fleet of 13 lights in the sky moving above Tern Hill barracks near Market Drayton at 11.00 pm on 7 June. One of the soldiers, Cpl Mark Proctor, told the paper: ‘They were zig-zagging, but I filmed two [on my mobile phone] before they disappeared. They were like rotating cubes with multiple colours… The other lads were as amazed by it as I was.’
The Sun quoted ‘UFO expert’ Nick Pope calling for an inquiry into the new sightings by the MoD and Civil Aviation Authority. He said: ‘They need to interview witnesses, analyse the film and check both civil and military radar to see if any unusual activity was logged.’ Pope argued this was important because ‘this was a military base and the military tend to make good witnesses’.25 By 2008 the MoD’s UFO desk had moved from Whitehall to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire where it now formed part of the RAF’s Air Command. After the flurry of press interest in the Tern Hill sighting, UFO desk officer Paul Webb promptly obtained a copy of Cpl Proctor’s footage from Army HQ and, after viewing it, reported back to his superiors: ‘It shows a number of lights in the sky. As reported in the [press], the lights change colour and appear square, but this looks like the pixels showing up as the photographer zoomed in. They do not appear to be moving quickly.’ Webb’s report said a MoD inquiry of the kind suggested by Nick Pope was not needed because the BBC had discovered that at the same time as the soldier’s sightings, a local hotel had launched a number of Chinese lanterns. He concluded: ‘I do not intend to investigate any further as I think we have our answer.’26
The Tern Hill sighting was taken more seriously than others received by the MoD in 2008 because, as Nick Pope said, members of the armed forces are, like police officers, often regarded as ‘credible witnesses’. Common sense suggests that soldiers would be able, for example, to distinguish a flying saucer (or enemy aircraft) from a Chinese lantern. Yet according to Webb’s report the UFOs filmed by Cpl Proctor appeared to be merely tiny hot air balloons and we know that lanterns of this kind were released by a hotel in the same area at the relevant time. This example illustrates the uncomfortable fact that there is no such thing as a trained observer when it comes to identifying unfamiliar phenomena in the night sky, no matter how ‘credible’ they might be in their own field of expertise.
By 2008 so many Chinese lanterns were being reported as UFOs that the numbers of sightings logged by the MoD doubled in the space of one year. In 2009 the upsurge was so dramatic that by November a record-breaking 634 sightings had poured in. Hundreds, if not thousands, of puzzled skywatchers across the British Isles and in parts of Europe watched small orange rotating lights moving in loose formations across the night sky. Those unfamiliar with the appearance of Chinese lanterns reported being startled and transfixed by what they had seen. Some became convinced the lights were being intelligently manoeuvred, or were aware of the presence of the observer. And however mundane the explanations for these sightings actually were, those who saw the lanterns were reporting a real UFO experience because at the time they were unable to identify what they saw. Meanwhile tabloid newspapers continued to push the idea these lights in the sky were ‘alien fleets’ rather than tiny hot air balloons.
The Ministry of Defence notice issued to all RAF units in December 2009. This announced the closure of the UFO desk and the termination of all further interest in UFO reports.
Small paper lanterns were first used in third-century China as military signals, but more recently people have released them to celebrate special occasions such as weddings. The craze spread to Britain in 2002, when they were released as a tribute to the 182 people killed in the Bali bombings. In June the following year they made an appearance at Glastonbury when festival-goers reported seeing mysterious lights moving 300 ft above the Pyramid Stage during a performance by rock group Radiohead. By 2006 the MoD’s files were bulging with accounts of lanterns reported as UFOs. For example, in the summer of 2006 a report from Herne Bay, Kent, described eight yellow/orange spheres ‘that looked like they had flames coming out of the back of them’. Another account from a man in London described formations of orange ‘fireballs’ in the night sky. He said they were ‘an amazing sight’.27 Many similar accounts, often accompanied by grainy footage captured on mobile phones, entertained readers of tabloid newspapers. During 2009 dozens more reached the UFO desk officer at the MoD.
By then Gordon Brown’s Labour government was struggling to deal with the fallout from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. The recession that followed led to severe cutbacks in public spending. The MoD was not immune and, committed to a long and expensive ground war in Afghanistan, the UFO task figured very low on the list of its core priorities. The end came on 11 November when Defence Minister Bob Ainsworth was briefed by Carl Mantell of the RAF’s Air Command on the outcome of a final review of their UFO policy. Mantell recommended that ‘… we should seek to reduce very significantly the UFO task which is consuming increasing resource, but produces no valuable defence output’. Ainsworth was told that ‘in more than fifty years no UFO sighting reported to [MoD] has indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK’ and furthermore ‘there is no defence benefit in [MoD] recording, collating, analysing or investigating UFO sightings’.28
Even so, the files reveal officials were so worried about accusations of cover-up they had deliberately avoided making any ‘formal approaches to other Governments’ in reaching their decision. This was because these ‘would become public when the relevant UFO files are released and would be viewed by “ufologists” as evidence of international collaboration and conspiracy’. The MoD could not, however, deny that it was following the lead taken by the US government following the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969. The MoD was also mindful of the fact that early in 2007 the French Space Agency’s UFO unit had published its files on a public website. The defence forces of other countries, including Denmark, New Zealand and Brazil, would soon follow this example.
In December 2009, one month after Carl Mantell’s report was delivered, Ainsworth approved the closure of the MoD’s UFO hotline answerphone service and the email address that was set up on the anniversary of the Roswell incident, 12 years earlier. The hotline, MoD decided: ‘serves no defence purpose and merely encourages the generation of correspondence of no defence value.’ The MoD predicted the closure: ‘will attract negative comment from “ufologists” [who] may, individually or as a group, mount a vociferous, but short-lived campaign to reinstate the UFO Hotline suggesting that, by not investigating UFOs, MoD is failing its Defence commitment.’
During the same month the last UFO desk officer, Paul Webb, was moved to another post and the remaining departmental files were added to the list for release by The National Archives. The closure of the desk was the end of an era that had begun in the mid-1950s when the Air Ministry agreed to take on responsibility for answering public and Parliamentary questions on UFOs (see Chapter 3). Almost fifty years later, Carl Mantell said MoD had decided that: ‘investigations into UFO sightings, even from more reliable sources, serve no useful purpose and merely divert air defence specialists from their primary tasks. Accordingly, no further investigations should be carried out into UFO reports received from any source.’29
A page from the 1979 edition of the Civil Aviation Authority manual for air traffic controllers, setting out procedure for the reporting of UFO incidents by pilots and ATC staff. DEFE 24/1552
In January 2010 the RAF asked the Home Office to cancel standing instructions to police forces who had, in the past, routinely forwarded UFO sightings reported by officers and members of the public to the MoD. Another letter was sent to the Head of the Aviation Directorate, requesting that ‘any reports received by the Department of Transport or air control centres are not forwarded to MoD and that members of the public who make such reports are not encouraged to believe an investigation will take place’. Despite the finality of this decision, in March that year members of the Civil Aviation Authority decided there was ‘still a requirement for controllers either observing a UFO or receiving a report from aircrew to consider if the sighting has any flight safety value’.30
So was this really the end of official interest in UFOs? Have Britain’s X-files really been closed?
The answer to this vexed question has to be a qualified ‘no’. Buried in the MoD’s final statement was an admission that British skies would not be left undefended against potential future airborne threats. For all practical purposes, the closure of the UFO desk made no difference to the unceasing, round-the-clock radar watch that has existed since before the days of the Battle of Britain. The most significant change was that, after years of deliberation, both the MoD and the CAA had publicly admitted they had no further interest in receiving UFO reports from members of the public, no matter how ‘credible’ these might be.
The reasons for the decision were simple from the military point of view. Future threats, they believe, will come from earthly enemies and our first line of defence would not be the eyes and ears of the public, but the protective curtain provided by the UK’s tried and tested air defence system that is primarily dependent upon the radar shield. Throughout the Cold War the British government remained sceptical about UFOs, but felt they could not be ignored as there remained a small risk that at least some could be enemy aircraft or even missiles. As that danger ebbed away with the collapse of the Soviet empire, new ones emerged in the aftermath of the events of 9 September 2001. The use by Al Qaeda terrorists of hijacked aircraft to launch devastating attacks on New York and Washington highlighted the real and present threat posed by ‘unidentified aircraft’ that were, for all intents and purposes, UFOs until the point of identification. But the problem facing Western governments post-9/11 is more complex than the Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction that provided the backdrop for the post-Second World War UFO flaps. Today, sophisticated early warning radar systems can detect objects the size of a pencil in orbit around the Earth. They can be relied upon to detect missiles and conventional military aircraft, but since 2001 they have been unable to provide advanced warning of hijacked aircraft piloted by fanatics who are not afraid to die to complete their missions.
Even during the Cold War the defensive shield was far from infallible. For example, in October 1960 a formation of UFOs was detected by the new Ballistic Missile Warning system at Thule in Greenland. The objects appeared to be heading directly towards North America from the direction of the Soviet Union. Within seconds Strategic Air Command HQ in Omaha, Nebraska, scrambled the crews of B52 bombers armed with nuclear warheads to prepare a retaliatory strike again the Eastern Bloc. But at the last moment checks revealed the ‘missiles’ were spurious echoes on the radar. Unusual atmospheric conditions had created phantoms on the BMEWS that could not be seen by other radars. A Third World War was narrowly averted. After the Thule incident Labour MPs asked the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, how close the West came to war and how easy it was for the system to be fooled. In Parliament, the Prime Minister assured them that he was satisfied ‘that our precautions are amply sufficient to prevent nuclear war starting as a result of an accident on the part of the West’ and said the arrangements for ‘co-operation and co-ordination of radar warning systems between ourselves and the United States are excellent’.31
But the risk remains that the unexpected appearance of ‘UFOs’– whatever their source – could trigger off an apocalyptic international confrontation. In 1980 the US National Security Agency (NSA), released a number of classified UFO-related documents following a lawsuit by a UFO pressure group. Among them was a undated seven page draft of a monograph titled ‘UFOs and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data.’ This document highlighted what the author considered to be ‘a serious shortcoming’ in the eavesdropping agency’s communications intelligence (COMINT) interception and reporting procedures. This was: ‘the inability to respond correctly to surprising information or deliberately deceptive data’ such as the appearance of UFOs. The author recommended that ‘the weakness ought to be remedied and quickly if the United States is to be able to respond swiftly and appropriately to surprise attack.’32
We do not know how seriously the NSA and its British equivalent, GCHQ, have treated UFOs. The material released by the super-secret NSA provides few clues and GCHQ, along with British’s security and intelligence services, are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. However, on at least two occasions since 9/11 unidentified objects have triggered security alerts on the US mainland. In April 2005 the US President George W. Bush was bundled from his office to an underground bunker and Vice President Dick Cheney was driven to an ‘undisclosed location’ near the White House after an ‘unidentified aircraft’ was tracked on radar approaching Washington DC. Black Hawk aircraft were scrambled, armed secret service agents surrounded the White House and anti-aircraft batteries were raised to the ‘fire’ position. The scare began when an unusual target was detected on radar 20 miles (32 km) inside restricted airspace south of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The blip vanished and then reappeared several minutes later just seven miles (11 km) from the airport, moving around the speed of a helicopter. But interceptor crews sent to the area could see nothing except clouds. On this occasion these UFOs were identified as ‘a weather anomaly’ created by unusual atmospheric conditions similar to those that triggered the Washington DC UFO flap of 1952 (see Chapter 2). A similar scare happened in November 2003 when F-16 fighters were scrambled to intercept a blip, thought to be a plane, that had entered restricted airspace around the White House. Following this false alarm, Federal Aviation spokesman William Shuman was reported to have said: ‘It’s one of those electronic gremlins that pop up, but there was no aircraft there.’ Subsequently the North Atlantic Aerospace Command (NORAD) revealed it had responded to 1,600 similar ‘false alarms’ across the USA since 9/11. On this occasion it could not explain what caused the alarm, but aircraft were scrambled as a ‘precaution’.33
No information has emerged so far to suggest similar UFO scares have occurred in Britain since 9/11, but in March 2010 the MoD admitted that RAF jets had been scrambled twice in response to terrorist alerts on passenger aircraft. Both turned out to be false alarms. On all these occasions decisions on action were taken ‘at the highest levels of government’, by the Prime Minister or his deputy.34 The historian Peter Hennessy noticed there is ‘a chilling symmetry’ between the 9/11 attacks and Cold War fears that an enemy could evade Britain’s air defences to launch a devastating attack on London, either by sea or from the air.35 In 1950 as the Flying Saucer Working Party held their first meeting, members of another secret government cabal – hidden by the obscure title of the Imports Research Committee – gathered elsewhere at Whitehall. Both were concerned about the threat posed by unidentified flying objects. One decided flying saucers piloted by aliens was a threat the MoD really did not need to lose any sleep over. But down the corridor, the IRC were convinced the Soviet Union had the capability to launch a suicide attack on London using a low-flying civilian aircraft to deliver an atomic bomb. The committee concluded that: ‘short of firing on every strange civil aircraft that appears over our shores we know of no way of preventing an aircraft that sets out on such a mission from succeeding.’36
Today there can be no doubt that UFOs – whatever their source and intentions – will remain a real and present danger to the governments and military forces of the world.
