10. FIGHTER COMMAND
The fact that they can hover and accelerate away from the Earth’s gravity again and even revolve around a V-2 in America (as reported by their head scientist) shows they are far ahead of us. If they really come over in a big way that might settle the capitalist-communist war. If the human race wishes to survive they may have to band together.
Thus, in 1950, wrote Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia, during the Second World War, and later Chief of the Defence Staff.1 Mountbatten showed a keen interest in the subject, having had a sighting in the Pacific during the war, as I learned from Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley. Moreover, as reported in Above Top Secret, an unknown flying machine complete with occupant is said to have landed at his estate near Romsey in Hampshire in February 1955, witnessed by one of his workmen. After investigating the landing site and interrogating the witness, Mountbatten wrote in a signed statement that the workman ‘did not give me the impression of being the sort of man who would be subject to hallucinations, or would in any way invent such a story’.2
Mountbatten is also believed to have disclosed some fascinating information to the respected American journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. ‘I can report today on a story which is positively spooky, not to mention chilling,’ she cabled from London in May 1955. ‘British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet.’ Her syndicated report continues:
The source of my information is a British official of Cabinet rank who prefers to remain anonymous. ‘We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men – probably less than four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.’
This official quoted scientists as saying a flying ship of this type could not possibly have been constructed on Earth. The British Government, I learned, is withholding an official report on the ‘flying saucer’ examination at this time, possibly because it does not wish to frighten the public …3
The late Gordon Creighton, former diplomat, intelligence officer and long-time editor of Flying Saucer Review, told me that the crash was alleged to have occurred during the Second World War, and that the story was related to Kilgallen during a cocktail party given by Lord Mountbatten. No further details are available to me. The crash may relate to one of the several that are reported to have occurred during the war, as discussed in Chapter 1.
THE FLYING SAUCER WORKING PARTY
In June 1950 a report on what was described as ‘Britain’s first flying saucer’ appeared in national newspapers. During an exercise from the Royal Air Force (RAF) station at Tangmere, Sussex, the pilot of a Gloster Meteor twin-jet fighter had reported an encounter with a ‘shining, revolving disclike’ object that shot past the jet at high altitude. Intelligence officers debriefed the pilot and a report was sent to Fighter Command.4
One paper asserted that the disc had been tracked on radar, but an Air Ministry spokesman said this could not be confirmed, adding that there was no evidence that what was seen ‘was anything more than natural or meteorological phenomena’. The paper claimed that ‘a curtain of secrecy’ had been drawn over the subject.5
That summer, 1950, a top-secret meeting was held at the Air Ministry’s Metropole Building in London to discuss the ‘flying saucers’. Chaired by the Deputy Director of Intelligence, Hugh Young, attendees included representatives of MI10 (a military intelligence branch which had been involved in the ‘ghost rocket’ investigations four years earlier) and various scientific and technical intelligence specialists, such as Wing Commander Myles Formby. The chairman explained that Sir Henry Tizard, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence, ‘felt that reports of flying saucers should not be dismissed without some investigation’ and he had agreed that a small Directorate of Scientific Intelligence/Joint Technical Intelligence Committee ‘working party’ should be set up to investigate future reports. It was agreed that the membership of the working party should comprise representatives of various technical and scientific intelligence branches of the Air Ministry, the Admiralty (Royal Navy) and the War Office.6
RAF Fighter Command was advised that all future reports of aerial phenomena were to be directed to the Flying Saucer Working Party (FSWP). Over an eight-month period, the FSWP studied numerous reports and liaised with its counterparts in the US and other countries. The US Air Force’s Project Grudge team, as well as the CIA, were consulted.7 Grudge’s negative conclusions undoubtedly contributed to the scepticism evinced by some FSWP members: the astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek, a consultant to the CIA and the US Air Force, had concluded that 70 per cent of sightings could be explained, the remainder either lacking sufficient evidence ‘or the evidence offered suggested no explanation, though some of these might conceivably be astronomical’.8
In my opinion, the FSWP team would not have been granted access to the US Government’s most sensitive secrets relating to the subject. Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, who had been given carte blanche to study any UFO reports and interview pilots when serving as equerry to HRH Prince Philip and HM the Queen in the 1950s, learned from Air Marshal Sir Thomas Pike, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Fighter Command, that the Americans were ‘extremely sensitive’ about the subject. Sir Peter was also informed by Group Captain Bird-Wilson of the British Defence Staff in Washington that the American authorities were not prepared to ‘give information about any conclusions which they might have reached’.9
Sir Peter, whose later posts included Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Operations) and Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Strike Command, told me that although he held very high security clearances – including those relating to nuclear weaponry – when he liaised with the Americans, his requests for more information were always politely turned down.10
In its final report, classified Secret/Discreet, the FSWP reviewed its investigations, including reports by RAF pilots. The most interesting of these took place at the experimental aircraft test centre at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, Hampshire, in August 1950, reported by Flight Lieutenant (later Wing Commander) Stan Hubbard and others:
F/Lt. Hubbard, an experienced pilot, said that at 1127 on 14th August, 1950, he and two other officers on the airfield heard a subdued humming noise, like a model Diesel motor, which caused them to search the sky overhead … The other two officers saw nothing, but F/Lt. Hubbard, who alone was wearing sun-glasses, states that he saw, almost directly overhead at first sighting, an object which he describes as a flat disc, light pearl grey in colour, about 50 feet in diameter at an estimated height of 5,000 feet. He stated that he kept it under observation for 30 seconds, during which period it travelled, at a speed esitmated at 800–1,000 mph, on a heading of 100°, executing a series of S-turns, oscillating so that light reflection came from different segments as it moved.
The second incident occurred during preparations for the annual Farnborough Air Display:
F/Lt. Hubbard was also concerned in the other incident, when, at 1609 on 5th September, 1950, he was standing on the watch-tower with five other officers, looking south in anticipation of the display by the Hawker 1081. The sky was about 3/8 obscured, with a strato-cumulus cloud base at 4,000 feet. At about the same moment, they all saw, at an estimated range of 10–15 miles, an object which they described as being a flat disc, light pearl grey in colour, and ‘about the size of a shirt button.’ They all observed it to follow a rectangular flight path, consisting in succession of a ‘falling leaf,’ horizontal flight ‘very fast,’ an upward ‘falling leaf,’ another horizontal stretch, and so on; finally it dived to the horizon at great speed. The pattern was estimated to be executed somewhere over the Guildford-Farnham area.
F/Lt. Hubbard was satisfied that the objects he saw on the two occasions were identical; the other observers agreed that the second object fitted the description they had been given of the first.
‘We have no doubt that all these officers did in fact see a flying object of some sort,’ concluded the FSWP. ‘We cannot, however, regard the evidence of identification of this object, which was only seen at very long range, with the earlier one as of any value whatever [and] find it impossible to believe that an unconventional aircraft, manoeuvring for some time over a populous area, could have failed to attract the attention of other observers. We conclude that the officers in fact saw some quite normal aircraft, manoeuvring at extreme visual range, and were led by the previous report to believe it to be something abnormal …’11
Hubbard remained unaware of these conclusions until he read the report after its declassification fifty years later. His comments on the report and amendments to it are significant. The following is abbreviated from his communications in 2001 with investigators David Clarke and Andy Roberts:
… The sound emanating from this strange object [14 August 1950] increased markedly as it got closer, to a heavy, dominant humming with an associated subdued crackling/hissing sound, which reminded me strongly of the ambient noise inside a large active electrical power generating station … The exterior was almost entirely featureless except that the periphery was edged by a band of a darker colour with indistinct markings of some sort, which kept changing appearance, but from which emanated strange bluish flickering points of light … I also got the impression that either the main body or the peripheral rim was rotating … and most remarkably there was a concurrent smell of ozone, that normally is associated with heavy electrical discharges …
Whereas the FSWP stated that Hubbard had estimated the craft’s altitude at 5,000 feet, Hubbard recalled that it was probably between 700 and 1,000 feet, and he guessed its diameter at about 100 feet – not 50 feet as officially reported. As the saucer disappeared into the distance, he recalls hearing screaming and shouting coming from the nearby flight dispatch office, and that a terrified dispatcher came out and asked him if he had seen ‘that awful thing’. During an interrogation by RAF scientific intelligence personnel shortly afterwards, Hubbard asked whether they had spoken to the dispatcher. They refused to answer. Asked what he thought about the craft and its origin, Hubbard replied that in his opinion ‘it was not something that had been designed and built on this Earth’. From the effect it had on the team, this was clearly the wrong answer.12
Regarding the second event on 5 September 1950, Hubbard added that pandemonium prevailed, with people shouting for cameras and binoculars (none were forthcoming). Among the other five witnesses was Wing Commander Frank Jolliffe, who was interviewed in ‘mufti’ (plain clothes) by Wing Commander Myles Formby, who had come down to Farnborough with other scientific intelligence officers. Formby told Jolliffe that the department ‘had never had a more reliable and authentic sighting’. So much for the official conclusions, which were dismissed by Jolliffe as ‘ludicrous’, leading him to believe that ‘the Working Party was following a high-level coverup directive’. Indeed they were – and one instigated by the Americans.
Hubbard’s interview on this occasion was shorter as, interestingly, the team had to catch a plane to Brazil to conduct other investigations. ‘We were not given their names and we were strictly warned not to ask questions of them, nor make enquiries elsewhere in the Ministry,’ he told Clarke and Roberts. ‘We were also warned not to discuss the subject later, even amongst ourselves in private … I find it quite strange that so much information that we thought critically relevant at the time was not only not included but misrepresented and taken completely out of context, resulting in flawed conclusions.’13
Significantly, when the FSWP presented their final report to the Air Ministry, Dr H. Marshall Chadwell of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) was in attendance. In the Top Secret minutes of the last meeting, G. Turney (of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence) stated that ‘following the lead given by the Americans on this subject, the Report should, he thought, have as little publicity as possible and outside circulation should be confined to one copy to Sir Henry Tizard’.14
The Working Party was disbanded in June 1951. ‘This is the report on “Flying Saucers” for which you asked,’ wrote Dr Bertie Blount in a letter to Sir Henry accompanying a copy of the report. ‘I hope that it will serve its purpose …’15
EXERCISE MAINBRACE
During a major NATO operation (Exercise Mainbrace) in September 1952, sightings were reported by observers from several countries, including those from the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy. At the height of the Mainbrace operations, unknown aerial targets were tracked by radar at a number of RAF stations, including Langton, Lincolnshire (reported by Frank Redfern, father of author Nick), Neatishead, Norfolk, and Ventnor, Isle of Wight.
At a secret underground radar station located near RAF Sandwich (possibly RAF Ash) in Kent, Senior Aircraftman William Maguire reported to Nick Redfern that a huge, unidentified object had been tracked on radar high over the English Channel. ‘This thing just sat there and I recall that I logged it on my sheets of paper for eighteen minutes,’ Maguire told Redfern. ‘Eventually it split into three and zoomed off at some phenomenal speed. One went north, one headed over to France and the other disappeared in the Eastern Balkans region … I wasn’t on the height finder but I remember the mechanics said that it was higher than anything we knew about … afterwards we were told not to talk about it.’16
On 19 September 1952, at RAF Topcliffe, Yorkshire, two RAF officers and three aircrew observed a silver flying disc as it followed a Meteor jet at about 10,000 feet. ‘As the Meteor turned to start its landing run the object appeared to be following it,’ said Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn. ‘But after a few seconds it stopped its descent and hung in the air, rotating as if on its own axis. Then it accelerated at an incredible speed to the west, turned south-east and then disappeared.’ Witnesses all agreed that the object was solid, appearing to be the size of a Vampire jet at a similar height.17
Captain Ruppelt relates that the Topcliffe incident was one of a number in 1952 (including another report by an RAF pilot during Mainbrace) ‘that caused the RAF to officially recognize the UFO’.18 During his tenure at Blue Book, he says, ‘two RAF intelligence officers who were in the US on a classified mission brought six single-spaced typed pages of questions they and their friends wanted answered.’19 And no wonder. By this time, the Royal Air Force must have begun to realize that they had been sold short on the ‘facts’ provided to them by the Americans in 1950–51.
On the afternoon of 21 October 1952, Flight Lieutenant Michael Swiney and his student pilot, Royal Navy Lieutenant David Crofts, had taken off from RAF Little Rissington, Gloucestershire, in a Meteor T.7 twin-jet trainer for a high-level navigation exercise at 35,000 feet. Not long after they broke out of cloud in the climb at around 13,000 to 14,000 feet, Swiney got a shock. ‘I was rather horrified to see, framed in the front windscreen of the Meteor, three circular white objects.’
Crofts, in the back seat, had not seen the objects. ‘Is your oxygen connected?’ asked Swiney. ‘Mick,’ replied Crofts, ‘we’ve just done the 30,000-foot check, and you checked that your oxygen was alright, and I told you that mine was OK. What’s the problem?’
‘Well, take a look straight ahead.’ Crofts did so, and spotted three very bright dots.
‘My immediate reaction,’ said Swiney, ‘was three people coming down in parachutes – and they’re right in front of the aircraft. So I took the controls to turn the aeroplane away from what I perceived to be a dangerous situation.’
‘As we went towards them,’ Crofts continued, ‘they of course got closer, in that instead of being all in the small direct-vision window, they were now above the windshield and either side of the windshield.’
‘They moved across us,’ explained Swiney. ‘They were perfectly circular, but looking up at them as we continued on in the climb, they lost their circular shape and took on more or less a flat plate shape.’
Crofts suggested going after the objects to find out what they were.
‘No,’ retorted Swiney. ‘Something like that happened [in] America and the pilots were never seen again, and the aeroplane was, I believe, vaporized.’
Swiney called the base, reported ‘three unidentified objects’ and requested assistance. ‘I have to admit – and I don’t mind admitting it – that I was somewhat frightened by what I was witnessing. These objects were then to the starboard side and had remained there. During the period of looking at them and looking away, to see if by chance there was some other explanation, when one looked back, they were nowhere to be seen – as quickly as that.’
On returning to Little Rissington, the pilots were immediately separated. ‘I was told to go to my room and that I was not to go to the Mess for tea, and that all my meals would be brought to me in my cabin,’ reported Crofts. ‘I wasn’t to talk to anyone at all until I had gone back to the Wing Commander’s office the following morning at nine o’clock.’ The pilots were interviewed separately by intelligence officers from the Air Ministry. ‘The man that interviewed me was in plain clothes – he told me that the objects had been picked up on radar …’20
Two Meteor F.8 fighters on twenty-four-hour Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) at RAF Tangmere, Sussex, had apparently been scrambled to chase the unknown targets, but were unable to make a contact. According to Terry Barefoot, who had worked as a switchboard operator in the underground nerve centre of RAF Southern Sector at Rudloe Manor, Wiltshire (known then as RAF Box), ‘three objects had entered our airspace going at a fantastic speed, approximately 3,000 mph’, which led to an order to scramble an entire squadron in an unsuccessful attempt to intercept them.21
Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) centre based at Cheltenham, is the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency (NSA). Investigator Robin Cole learned from a source that radio communications between the Meteor T.7 and Little Rissington had been intercepted by GCHQ, and it thus became the first UFO case to be linked with the top-secret listening base.22 From my own sources, I have learned that GCHQ continues to this day to share communications on the UFO problem with the NSA.
On 3 November 1953 at 10:00, Flight Lieutenant Terry S. Johnson and his navigator, Flying Officer Geoffrey Smythe, based at RAF West Malling, were flying a Vampire NF.10 night-fighter jet at 30,000 feet when Johnson suddenly spotted a bright circular object dead ahead, about a mile away, ‘glowing with greater intensity around its periphery than at the centre. After about 10 seconds it moved to our right, at very high speed. It did not appear on Geoff’s radar screen at any time.’
On landing at West Malling, the men were questioned by Squadron Commander Furze, who reported the sighting to the station commander, Group Captain P. Hamley – who took a special interest, having sighted ‘foo-fighters’ in the Second World War. ‘We were called up to the Air Ministry to give a full account to the Duke of Edinburgh’s equerry [Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley]. We were told that Prince Philip [a qualified pilot] was interested in flying saucers.’23
An incident similar to that reported by Swiney and Crofts occurred on the afternoon of 14 October 1954. Flight Lieutenant James Salandin of No. 604 County of Middlesex Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force, was flying at 16,000 feet in a Meteor F.8 from RAF North Weald, Essex, when three discs headed towards him on a collision course.
‘When they got to within a certain distance,’ he told me, ‘two of them went off to my port side and the third object came straight towards me and closed to within a few hundred yards, almost filling the windscreen, then it went off towards my port side. I tried to turn round to follow, but it had gone. It was saucer-shaped with a bun on top and a bun underneath, and was silvery and metallic. There were no portholes, flames, or anything.’
‘Jimmy’ Salandin’s one regret is that there was insufficient time for him to trigger the gun-camera button.24
British author Harold T. Wilkins was among the first to associate UFOs with the proliferation of aircraft disasters in the 1950s. He cites a number of these in one of his books, and quotes a statement by the British Under-Secretary of State for Air that as many as 507 RAF jets crashed in 1952–4, with great loss of life (112).25 Most of these accidents were probably subsequently explained in conventional terms, though unexplained accidents were not uncommon during this period. On 5 February 1952, for instance, Lieutenant-Commander Malcolm Orr-Ewing, a test pilot, was killed when his Supermarine Attacker FB.1 suddenly pitched rapidly nose-down at low altitude and crashed vertically in the Test Valley, Hampshire. No cause could be determined from the wreckage. Bizarrely, the accident happened exactly a year (almost to the minute) after another fatal Attacker crash.26
Compared with the US, there seem to have been far fewer aircraft accidents and disappearances associated with UFOs in the UK. The most I have gleaned thus far, from a former Ministry of Defence scientist, is that during the 1950s a Meteor night-fighter sent to intercept a UFO simply ‘disappeared’. I doubt that it was an isolated incident.
We tend to ascribe to alien visitors either benevolent or hostile motives – seldom both. In this regard, I can do no better than to quote Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Commander-in-Chief, RAF Fighter Command, during the Battle of Britain:
I think that we must resist the tendency to assume that they all come from the same planet, or that they are actuated by similar motives. It might be that visitors from one planet wished to help us in our evolution from the basis of a higher level to which they had attained. Another planet might send an expedition to ascertain what have been these terrible explosions which they have observed, and to prevent us from discommoding other people beside ourselves by the new toys with which we are so light-heartedly playing.
Other visitors might have come bent solely on scientific discovery and might regard us with the dispassionate aloofness with which we might regard insects found beneath an upturned stone …27
REFERENCES
1. Ziegler, Philip, Mountbatten: The Official Biography, Collins, London, 1985, p. 494.
2. Good, Timothy, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1987; Morrow, New York, 1988. See also Beyond Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Security Threat, Sidgwick & Jackson/Pan Macmillan, London, 1996/1997.
3. Los Angeles Examiner, 23 May 1955.
4. Daily Herald, London, 7 June 1950.
5. Daily Mail, 7 June 1950.
6. The National Archives, DEFE 41/74, Minutes, DSI/JTIC, 1950–51 (Secret/Top Secret).
7. Clarke, David and Roberts, Andy, Out of the Shadows: UFOs, The Establishment and The Official Cover Up, Piatkus, London, 2002, pp. 77–80.
8. ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’, Directorate of Scientific Intelligence and Joint Technical Intelligence Committee, Report No. 7, June 1951 (Secret/Discreet), The National Archives, DEFE 44/119.
9. Horsley, Peter, Sounds From Another Room, Leo Cooper, London, 1997, pp. 173–4.
10. Personal interview, Broughton, Hampshire, 16 May 2000.
11. ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’.
12. Clarke and Roberts, op. cit., pp. 87–9.
13. Ibid., pp. 90–3.
14. The National Archives, DEFE 41/75, Minutes, DSI/JTIC 11th Joint Meeting, 19 June 1951 (Top Secret).
15. The National Archives, DEFE 44/1, letter from B.K. Blount to Sir Henry Tizard, 26 June 1951.
16. Redfern, Nick, ‘UFOs on Radar – Remarkable New Data!’, UFO Magazine (UK), January/February 2000, pp. 9–12.
17. Sunday Dispatch, London, 21 September 1952.
18. Ruppelt, Edward J., The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Doubleday, New York, 1956, p. 196.
19. Ibid., p. 130.
20. The British UFO Files, a documentary by David Howard and Madoc Roberts, produced by Rik Hall. A Barkingmad Production for Channel Five, 2004.
21. Clarke, David and Roberts, Andy, ‘The Little Rissington Incident’, UFO Magazine (UK), February 2003, pp. 6–7.
22. Cole, Robin D., GCHQ and the UFO Cover-up, privately published, 1997. Available from the author at The Flat, Sheldon, Battledown Approach, Cheltenham, GL52 6RA, UK.
23. Williams, Justin, ‘The West Malling Incident’, Kent Messenger, 19 April 1996.
24. Personal interview, London, 10 October 1985.
25. Wilkins, Harold T., Flying Saucers Uncensored, Arco, London, 1956, p. 137.
26. Burnet, Charles, ‘Supermarine Superpriority’, Aeroplane, Vol. 27, No. 4, March 1999, p. 77.
27. Sunday Dispatch, London, 11 July 1954.
Minutes from meetings of Britain’s ‘Flying Saucer Working Party’, from 1950 (above) and 1951. (The National Archives, London)
