20. A GLOBAL PHENOMENON
Since UFO sightings began to proliferate in the Second World War, for decades practically no information was available from the country with the largest population in the world – the People’s Republic of China. But in the late 1970s articles started appearing in newspapers and magazines describing sightings going back to the war. It is important to note that the majority of Chinese, living as they did at that time in an isolated society, were unlikely to have been influenced by Western reports about such things, thus making their testimony more compelling.
In 1980 what became the China UFO Research Organization (CURO) was founded, with branches in Beijing, Shanghai and in many provinces. As mentioned in the introduction, CURO is affiliated to the China Association for Science and Technology, and by 1992 had 3,600 full members as well as 40,000 research associates. Even allowing proportionately for its huge population, no other country in the world has matched China in this respect. Moreover, these figures do not take into account the number of Chinese Secret Service personnel engaged in monitoring the phenomenon worldwide. Most of China’s UFO researchers are scientists and engineers, and many UFO groups require both a college degree and published research for membership.
In January 1964 many citizens in Shanghai observed a huge cigar- shaped aerial object flying slowly towards the south-west. MiG jet fighters of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force were scrambled in pursuit, but failed to force the UFO down. The object was officially explained as an ‘American missile’.1 In early 1968, four artillerymen of the Navy garrison at Luda, in China’s northern province of Liaoning, observed a luminous gold, oval-shaped object flying at a low altitude, leaving a thin trail. As it began to climb steeply before disappearing, all communications and radar systems failed, almost causing an accident in the fleet. The naval patrol went on alert, and the fleet commander ordered his men to prepare for combat. Half an hour later communications and radar returned to normal. A two-man coastguard patrol reportedly saw the UFO land on the south coast and fired at it with automatic rifles and machine guns, but soldiers sent to investigate found no trace of the object.2
In mid-April 1968, at a construction site in the north Gobi Desert, a battalion of soldiers witnessed the landing of a luminous red-orange disc with a diameter of about 10 feet. A team of motorcycle troops was dispatched from the regiment’s headquarters to approach the object, at which point it took off vertically and disappeared. Most witnesses dismissed the object as some kind of Soviet reconnaissance device, since the northern frontier with the USSR passed through the region.3
ALGERIA
In 2000, together with my principal associate, the late Graham Sheppard, a retired British Airways captain (who had had two radar/visual-confirmed sightings of UFOs while flying in 1967),4 I interviewed several important new witnesses in Paris, including Jean-Pierre Morin, a former deputy manager of security for the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES, France’s equivalent of NASA).
Hammaguir, a military base on a high plateau to the south of Colomb-Béchar in Algeria’s Sahara Desert, was used as a French missile testing and development site from the mid-1950s until France was required to evacuate the base in 1967, following Algerian independence. One night in January that year, Morin was with a group of six people, three of them well-known astrophysicists, preparing a rocket for launch the following morning.
‘I was driving three members of the team to the launch tower in a Citröen 2CV,’ Morin told us. ‘When we arrived at a row of buildings, the man next to me pointed out a light in the sky, which at first we took to be a plane. But all the lights of the airfield were out. The light started to come right towards us, though not very rapidly. And then something happened to my engine – it started running “rough”, and stopped by itself. Immediately we got out of the car.’
There was no Moon that night, only millions of stars clearly visible in the desert air. We watched as the light slowly came closer, without making any sound. We got the impression of a very heavy, a very stable object. It seemed to come to within about 500 metres from us, and remained stationary at an elevation of 45 degrees. To me, it was a black object, by contrast with the stars, and it had a cylindrical shape, along the length of which I saw ‘flames’ of different colours – it was probably the air that was ionized.
We were completely stunned. It seemed to us that it was a very large object, 300 to 400 metres [984 to 1,312 feet] in length. And then I remember a ‘tinkling’ sound in my ears, like I get when I dive 10 to 12 metres in the sea. I don’t know if it was because we were paralysed, but we couldn’t communicate. We tried to understand why this object was so silent. Its speed was very slow. What we saw was incredible. After this, it moved on at the same speed, very low.
Then the car with the astrophysicists arrived: they had seen us standing in the road and thought we’d broken down. Astonished, they watched the object with us for about 20 or 30 minutes, as it continued on the same trajectory. Then it angled upwards, heading in the direction of the Orion constellation, and vanished.
Morin’s sketch of the object shows a perfect cylinder with sharp ends, the ratio of the measurements approximately 10:1. Thus, assuming a length of 1,000 feet, it would have been 100 feet in diameter.
‘I was a young engineer at the time,’ Morin explained to us, ‘and not all that experienced in the space business. But now, looking back after forty years in the business, I’m certain that that craft was of a technology which we certainly haven’t reached today …’5
MADAGASCAR
During a daylight reconnaissance exercise in May 1967, a detachment of officers serving with the French Foreign Legion in Madagascar observed the landing – in ‘falling leaf’ motion – of an unknown flying machine. It shone very brightly and was surrounded by ‘an intense, dazzling glow’ that dissipated when it touched down, on tripod legs. Seven to eight metres in height, the egg-shaped craft had no visible markings, apart from several openings on the base, from which ‘flames’ emitted. Just as described by the French witnesses to the Algerian event in January that year, the ‘flames’ were described as ‘not normal flames [and] must surely have been something else’.
‘There were twenty-three of us Legionnaires, with one officer and four non-commissioned officers,’ reported a witness. ‘And we were all paralysed. All of us saw the machine land and take off again, but none of us perceived the lapse of time … when the machine had departed, we all recovered the use of our limbs … But when we checked up on the time, it was now 15:15. Two and three-quarter hours had passed without our perceiving it.
‘Headquarters ordered us not to approach the landing site, and not to discuss the matter among ourselves. Some specialists arrived from Paris to interrogate us. We were made to swear on oath that we would keep it secret. We were visited by the doctors, and we were made to undergo tests. For two days after the event we all had violent headaches, with a buzzing in the ears and a powerful beating in the area of the temples. We were not told the results of the tests …’6
CUBA
Shortly after midnight on 14 June 1968, several bursts of machine-gun fire were heard coming from a location in the vicinity of Cabañas, where Cuban soldier Isidro Puentes Ventura was on guard duty. At dawn, Puentes was found unconscious by an Army patrol. He was taken to a hospital in Pinar del Río, where he remained in shock for six days, unable to speak. He was then taken to the Naval hospital in Havana, where he was diagnosed to be suffering from emotional trauma. He remained in shock for a second week.
At the site where Puentes had been posted, Cuban and Soviet intelligence specialists found forty-eight spent cartridges and fourteen bullets apparently flattened by impact with something solid, as well as equally spaced indentations on the ground indicating that a heavy device had landed. Tests revealed that the soil had been exposed to a high temperature. On recovering, Puentes explained that he had come to within 50 metres of a brilliant round object on the ground, with a dome and several ‘antennas’ on top. Convinced that the device was American, he fired about forty rounds at it. The craft turned orange and emitted a strong whistling sound – Puentes’ last recollection before losing consciousness. Soviet intelligence specialists subjected Puentes to a fifty-hour interrogation, after which he was put through fifteen hypnosis sessions. No contradictions were found in his story.7
SAUDI ARABIA
On an undisclosed date around 1970, the crew of a US Air Force C-5A Galaxy transport, flying at 500 mph at 37,000 feet, encountered an unknown craft over Maula Idris, Saudi Arabia. Nicholas Crossland recounted for me the testimony of a friend of his, an RAF officer on detachment (name on file) who was flying the plane. The object was described by the pilot as ‘semi- spherical, like two saucers joined together, surrounded by the colours red, green, and yellow’, and it was estimated to be at about 75,000 feet altitude. At the debriefing, USAF personnel were particularly interested in the colours displayed by the object.8
TURKEY
During my participation in an international UFO congress in Istanbul in December 2001, organized by the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Centre, I spoke to two retired Turkish Air Force fighter pilots who had encountered UFOs. One was Süleyman Tekyildirim, who told me and Graham Sheppard, also participating in the conference, that on 17 June 1969 his base was alerted to the presence of an unidentified flying object. He was ordered to intercept it in a US-built F-5A Freedom Fighter.
‘It was grey, and like an upside-down light bulb,’ he told us. ‘I flew above it and reported that it was probably a meteorological balloon. As I continued describing it, it moved to my left and moved off at a fantastic speed. Obviously it wasn’t a balloon! I did everything I could to try and catch it, but just couldn’t keep up. I suggested to the base that F-104 Starfighters would stand a better chance. I also proposed firing at the object – but they forbade that. Eventually it disappeared.’9
The other pilot we spoke to was Sefik Ayanoğlu, who said in a newspaper interview that only 25 per cent of Turkish pilots dare to speak publicly about their encounters, but that all UFO reports are collected and studied at Eskisehir Control Centre.10
Between 24 and 27 October 1969, sightings of a UFO over Turkey’s capital, Ankara, excited much interest. The Turkish Air Force was inundated with reports, and jet fighters were scrambled from Murtad Air Base. The jets closed to within 12,000 metres, but the UFO always maintained a distance by climbing higher. The game of cat and mouse continued over several days. Eventually the base commander himself, Ercüment Gökaydin, flew with the interceptors. ‘Our planes reached a height of 35,000 feet,’ he wrote in his report, ‘but the object was at a height of at least 50,000 feet. It was oval in shape, and a silvery colour. There was no other countries’ traffic in the area at the time, or prototypes under test.’
The jets took gun-camera film, which has not been released. One pilot who managed to get closer said the object had three round windows like portholes.11
In 1974 a revealing letter was published in the British Flying Saucer Review from Sergeant Terry W. Colvin, an officer stationed with a Royal Thai Air Force unit on the Laos border. Colvin had included a report of the sighting of an unknown, structured craft seen in a suburb of Bangkok in the late summer of that year, which he translated in the letter. He continued:
I am unable to gather more details as I am currently assigned to an isolated signal relay site in N.E. Thailand near the amphur (district) town of Mukdahan. But I have hearsay accounts from US Air Force personnel that several of the F-111s lost during combat in S.E. Asia disappeared just as inexplicably as the two which disappeared in the state of Nevada, USA, in 1972.
Also, an F-4 Phantom jet fighter-bomber vanished from radar screens simultaneously, as visual contact was lost by the wingman. No debris was recovered, and enemy fire was not suspected as the incident occurred over Thailand, just a few miles from Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base.12
KOREA
At 10:00 one morning in the autumn of 1974, radar at an Air Defence Artillery site at Binn, South Korea, picked up a fast-moving target. At 700 yards, visual contact was made with a massive, oval-shaped, glowing metallic craft, estimated to be 300 feet in diameter and 30 feet in depth, with red and green pulsating lights moving anti-clockwise around the rim. Suddenly the huge craft came to a halt, at less than 700 yards range, its lights blinking rapidly.
‘The Captain of D Battery gave orders to fire the first Hawk missile,’ reports Leonard Stringfield. ‘Ignited, it started off the pad. In clear view of the men waiting anxiously from a remote-control zone, the missile, according to my informant at the scene, “never made it”. It was hit by a beam of intense white light and destroyed. So was the launcher. Both were melted down “like lead toys”. In a matter of minutes, the unidentified craft, making a noise like a swarm of bees, departed from Binn at extraordinary speed, and disappeared from the radarscope.
‘My informant relates that the captain of D Battery was dumb-founded,’ Stringfield continues. ‘In everyone’s view was a melted mass representing millions of dollars of highly sophisticated equipment. Fortunately, because of the missile base’s remote-control mechanism, there were no casualties. The next day, all members of the battalion on duty were summoned to a secret meeting and told by the commanding officer that the disaster was absolutely hush-hush. But, regardless of UFO secrecy, the men on the base never felt secure again …’13
MEXICO
On 3 May 1975, a young Mexican pilot, Carlos Antonio de los Santos Montiel, was harassed by three 10-to-12-foot discs while flying a Piper PA- 24 Comanche (XB-XAU). Two of the discs positioned themselves at each wingtip while the third went underneath and bumped the plane, causing damage. The controls were temporarily frozen and the pilot was unable to lower the landing gear. He declared a Mayday. Eventually the discs left, and he was able to fix the landing gear after adjustments to the control lever with a screwdriver. He made a successful emergency landing at Mexico City International Airport.14
GERMANY
At about 17:00 on 13 August 1976, D.W., a thirty-three-year-old private pilot, was flying a Piper Arrow PA-28 (R-200) on a heading between Diepholz and Petershagen, Germany, when he noticed a strange light approaching at his 9 o’clock position. ‘Initially the UFO seemed to be a great distance away,’ reports investigator Dr Richard F. Haines, ‘but over a 3–5 minute period, it came closer and closer, taking a fixed position off his left wing for several more minutes at an unknown but apparently near distance.’ The very bright object appeared to be oval-shaped, with a yellowish centre and flame-orange boundary.
Suddenly the Piper went into two rapid 360-degree clockwise rolls, from which the pilot recovered manually, losing 500 feet altitude. The magnetic compass was spinning in a clockwise direction so fast that he couldn’t read the numbers. The UFO remained alongside. D.W. reported the event to Hannover Airport. A controller confirmed that they were tracking both his plane and another nearby object, and that aircraft would be sent to investigate.
Four minutes later, two US Air Force F-4 Phantom jets flew by, one on either side of the Piper, at an estimated 400–500 mph. Just as the jets arrived, the UFO accelerated forward, and then upward at about a 30- degree angle, and turned right, passing in front of the Piper. It quickly outdistanced the pursuing Phantoms, and was out of sight in seconds.
D.W. was directed to land at Hannover, some 45 miles east-south-east of his position, and ordered to taxi to a special area. Within minutes, a military van without licence plates pulled up to his plane, and five men in suits got out. They would not identify who they worked for. The pilot was taken to an underground room at the airport where a man sat behind a desk. Two of the original men left the room. The others began asking D.W. detailed questions in German about the sighting: he had the impression that one of the men was American.
The questioning went on for about three hours. At one point D.W. was politely asked to read and sign a form printed in German. It stated that he agreed never to disclose the details of his UFO sighting. He declined to sign the form, despite the fact that it was firmly suggested that his licence might be suspended. After this, he was released. ‘As would be expected under the circumstances, he was emotionally upset by these events,’15 writes Dr Haines, a former NASA-contracted research scientist, who is currently scientific director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).16
IRAN
In two previous books I described in detail the sensational case of the interception of a UFO by F-4 Phantom jets of the Imperial Iranian Air Force over Tehran in the small hours of 19 September 1976. The essential details are contained in a previously secret US Air Force Security Service article (reproduced on pp. 315–17), which references the communications and instrumentation failures experienced by the crew of the first jet, which was forced to return to base. Another F-4 was ordered to intercept. At one point, a second UFO detached from the main one and headed straight for the jet. The pilots attempted to fire a guided missile at it, but a sudden loss of power in the weapons control system prevented them from doing so. Communications were simultaneously lost.
Important additional information not included in that article appeared in a 1994 Sightings television documentary, which featured interviews with some of the military personnel involved. It was revealed, for example, that following the abortive attempt by the crew of the second F-4 (commanded by Iran’s then ‘top-gun’ pilot, Major Hussan Jafori) to fire an AIM-9 Sidewinder guided missile at the second object, they feared for their lives and tried to eject from the plane, but the eject circuit malfunctioned. As the F-4 approached for landing at Mehrabad Air Force Base, the larger UFO followed it and then described a low-altitude fly-by over the runway, causing an electrical power failure for several seconds. Twenty-five minutes after the UFO disappeared, it was observed by the pilot of an Egyptian Air Force jet over the Mediterranean Sea, and then later by the crew and passengers of KLM Flight 241 in the Lisbon area. Furthermore, Ron Regehr, an analyst with the US Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite system, revealed that a DSP (nuclear-event monitoring) satellite picked up signals from an ‘unidentifiable technology’ over Iran on the night in question.
Finally, General Mahmoud Sabahat, former Vice-Commander of the 2nd Tactical Fighter Base, disclosed in the documentary that on the day after the incident he attended a top-secret meeting between the head of the Iranian Air Force and Major General Richard Secord, chief of the US Air Force section in Iran, and other personnel. ‘When they heard our report and the report of the pilots,’ said Hossein Pirouzi, air-traffic supervisor at Mehrabad, ‘they concluded that no country is able to have such a technology, and all of them believed it [must] be [an] object from outer space.’17
INDIA
In India, as in China, sightings of UFOs were seldom reported for many years: when I was there in 1964, I learned that it was a ‘taboo’ subject. But in the 1970s a spate of sightings led to a resurgence of public interest, according to Robert F. Dorr, a retired senior diplomat and leading aviation author. Here follows a brief summary of three events he investigated:
– 11 July 1976 – Two Indian Air Force MiG-21 jets were scrambled near the Pakistani border to intercept what was initially thought to be a Pakistani jet, but the object was doing 2,600 mph, and the two pilots reported an amber, saucer-shaped craft which pulled away before they could catch up with it.
– 11 January 1977 – Near Varanasi (Benares), a UFO ‘flap’ lasting 45 minutes was observed by thousands. The crew of an Indian Air Force jet transport, 42 miles to the west of the city, encountered three luminescent disc-shaped objects which ‘flew past, circled once as if inspecting my airplane, then continued eastward toward Varanasi’, the pilot stated.
– 16 July 1977 – As an Air India Boeing 747 (Flight 9) made its final approach to Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport at 23:15, air traffic controllers noticed a second flying object, closing on the 747. No other aircraft had been given clearance for an approach. Witnesses on the ground reported a saucer-shaped object, about the same size as a 747, rushing toward the airliner. Suddenly, the UFO, dangerously close, was visible to most passengers, and to the crew. It departed two miles from touch-down. To Captain Dhingra, the object was a ‘strange-looking apparition … but a thing of real substance’.18
FRANCE
France’s Deterrent Force, known officially as ‘la Force de Frappe’, included the Dassault Mirage IVA supersonic bomber, which was capable of carrying a 60-kiloton nuclear weapon. On 7 March 1977, during a training exercise for night-time bombing, a Mirage IVA based with the 4th Wing at the French Air Force (l’Armée de l’Air) base at Luxeuil, encountered unknown traffic. At 20:34, Colonel Rene Giraud and his navigator, Capitaine Jean- Paul Abraham, flying over Chaumont at 30,000 feet, en route to Bordeaux, were surprised by the sudden presence of a bright light.
‘I thought it was the landing light of a Mirage III interceptor jet,’ Giraud told me, when I met him at the Dassault chalet at the Paris Air Show in 2003. ‘But we had not been warned about any other traffic. The light continued to approach. I contacted the control center at Contrexéville, but they said that nothing showed up on their radar. “What are you doing? Are you sleeping?” they said. “Check your oxygen!”
‘The light was at our 3 o’clock position. We were flying at about Mach 0.95. I made a hard right-hand turn – but the light always stayed inside the turn. It was about 1,500 metres away, making a faster speed than our plane. I turned on a reciprocal, and the light shot off at incredible speed. After about ten seconds, I said to my navigator, “Look out! It’s coming back!” What struck me particularly, when I said this, was a strong feeling that we were being observed. It was the first time in my life I had experienced something like that. But there was no feeling of fear.
‘We had the feeling that there was a heavy mass behind the light – something at least as big as a Boeing 747. I made another hard right-hand turn, almost to the 6 o’clock position, then a reversal. Again, the light shot off at tremendous speed – I think at least 6,000 to 7,000 km/h – which is not possible for a plane. And there was no supersonic bang and no shockwave. Neither did we experience any effects on the radio or instruments during the encounter.
‘When we landed, we didn’t say anything for a week. But the radar staff was intrigued – and they wanted explanations, since they had been following our aircraft’s manoeuvres! As a Mirage IV pilot, I wasn’t permitted to have a “dog-fight” with another plane – even though we weren’t carrying a nuclear weapon at the time.
‘I couldn’t sleep for a week, because I was so emotionally upset. I was very anxious: had there been another such occasion, I would have resigned from the Air Force. Whatever it was, it wasn’t an earthly thing. I believe that their space–time is different from ours, so I don’t expect to understand everything. From my point of view, its intention was curiosity. They don’t want to harm us. If they’re coming from another solar system, I think they’re of goodwill…’19
BAY OF BISCAY
In January 2005, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) released numerous hitherto classified files on UFOs, anticipating a large volume of requests under provisions of the new Freedom of Information laws, enacted that year. Among them was a case involving a Vulcan B.2 bomber. Originally part of the RAF high-altitude nuclear deterrent force, the Vulcan was later used at low altitude in tactical nuclear/conventional roles.
Before the encounter, at 22:20 on 21 May 1977, three airmen stationed at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire – where a Vulcan squadron was based – observed a triangular-shaped light moving erratically in the sky. Within minutes the light was tracked as an ‘unidentified contact’, moving in a zigzag manner, at RAF Patrington, some 50 miles north-east of Waddington. The unknown radar contact registered for four minutes on the radarscopes when suddenly the screens were ‘partially obliterated by high-powered interference’, which returned to normal once the target had disappeared.20
Five days later, on 26 May 1977, at 01:15 local time over the Bay of Biscay, the crew of a Vulcan (XL321), based at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, flying at 43,000 feet at a speed of Mach 0.86, observed bright lights approaching their track from the west. As in the Mirage IV case, all five crewmen of the Vulcan (piloted by Flight Lieutenant David Edwards) initially thought the lights were ‘similar to aircraft landing lights’, though they are described in this case as ‘with long pencil beam ahead of lights’. Extracts (verbatim) from the official signal, sent from RAF Scampton to the MoD, follow:
… HEADLIGHT EFFECT THEN DISAPPEARED AS IF THEY HAD BEEN TURNED OFF OR RETRACTED OR OBJECT TURNED ONTO RECIPROCAL TRACK. HOWEVER LARGE ORANGE GLOW REMAINED IN SKY. GLOW WAS LARGE BUT CREW UNABLE TO ESTIMATE SIZE. GLOW ALSO HAD BRIGHT GREEN FLUORESCENT SPOT IN BOTTOM RIGHT HAND CORNER. CAPT AND CO-PLT THEN OBSERVED OBJECT LEAVING FROM MIDDLE OF THE GLOW ON WESTERLY TRACK AND CLIMBING AT VERY HIGH SPEED AT ANGLE OF 45 DEGREES. OBJECT LEFT VERY THIN TRAIL SIMILAR TO CONTRAIL …
NAV RADAR … OBSERVED INTERFERENCE ON H2S RADAR SCREEN FROM SAME DIRECTION AND TOOK R88 CAMERA FILM … DISTANCE ESTIMATED 40NM BUT DIFFICULT TO QUANTIFY DUE LACK OF COMPARISON AND GLOW EFFECT … GLOW REMAINED STATIC AND VISIBLE FOR SEVERAL MINUTES. RADAR INTERFERENCE SIMILAR TO NARROW SPOKE AND IN VARIOUS OTHER JAMMING LIKE FORMS CONTINUED FROM APPARENT POSITION OF AFTER GLOW FOR 45 MINUTES AFTER VULCAN HAD TURNED AWAY …
RADAR PHOTOGRAPHY SHOWS MINOR ELECTRONIC INTERFERENCE FROM GENERAL DIRECTION OF SIGHTING … BOTH SHOTS OF SUBJECT RESPONSE SHOW ELONGATED SHADOW OF NO SHOW AREA DOWN RANGE THUS INDICATING LARGE SIZE. NOTE THAT NAV RADAR CLAIMS THAT OPERATION OF TILT CONROL DOWNWARDS CAUSED THESE RESPONSES TO DISAPPEAR THUS INDICATING A LARGE OBJECT ABOVE SURFACE AGAIN POSSIBLY AT SIMILAR HEIGHT …
A handwritten note on the first page of the signal reveals that the MoD’s Civil Service central UFO desk – then known as S4f (Air) – would not be privy to the results of inquiries by a branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff and RAF Ground Environment (Radar) Operations. It reads: ‘Spoke to Mr Thompson DI55b and to Sqn Ldr Nicholas – Ops(GE)2(RAF) – and asked them to look out for this signal particularly. I asked them to forward the report to anyone else who should have it if they thought it to be necessary. S4f(Air) will not know the outcome of their enquiries.’21
Moreover, the minutes of a meeting between staff of S4f (Air) and DI55 held at Whitehall in May the previous year (1976) state that, ‘since investigations into the defence implications of alleged UFO sightings might involve highly classified material it was agreed that S4f(Air) has no “need to know” about enquiries made by any specialist branch … It followed that detailed reports on such investigations could not be included in the files which would ultimately be disclosed when UFO reports were opened to the public.’22
Was S4f (Air) ‘out of the loop’? No, says Nick Pope, who headed the MoD’s UFO research effort from 1991 to 1994. ‘Had the civil servants really been out of the loop,’ he told me, ‘they would not have received the signals at all – let alone been designated as the lead division. The comments reflect the fact that Defence Intelligence Staff methods and sources were not shared.’23
PORTUGAL
On 17 June 1977, Jose Francisco Rodriguez, a young pilot based with the 31st Squadron of the Portuguese Air Force (Força Aérea Portuguesa) at Tancos, was flying over the Castelo de Bode dam in a Dornier 27 light aircraft in poor weather, when suddenly an unknown, dark object emerged from the clouds slightly to his right. He banked to the left and radioed to ask if there was any traffic in the area. A reply came back in the negative.
Suddenly the object appeared at the pilot’s 11 o’clock position ‘no more than six metres away’. It was about 13 to 15 metres in diameter, with a lower section on which could be seen four or five ‘panels’. The Dornier’s electric directional gyroscope rotated wildly, and then the plane began to vibrate violently and went into an uncontrolled dive. Rodriguez struggled to regain control by pushing the control column forward. Airspeed increased to 140 knots, and then to 180 knots, as the ground loomed nearer. Control was regained when almost ‘touching the tree tops’, and the plane was landed safely. Such was Rodriguez’s state of shock that he had difficulty speaking.24
No explanation for the incident was forthcoming, though I did receive an official report that includes this and some other incidents from the Portuguese Embassy in London.
SOUTH AFRICA
Back in 1955, the Air Chief of Staff, South African Air Force (SAAF), admitted that the Department of Defence classified official information on the UFO subject as ‘Top Secret – Not to be Divulged’. In 1981, during a visit to Cape Town, I learned from a defence source about a tragic case which involved the disappearance of two SAAF pilots and their aircraft. The incident occurred on the day after the Portuguese Air Force Dornier pilot was harassed.
On 18 June 1977, the two pilots, both with fifteen years and 7,000 hours of flying experience, disappeared over the South Atlantic Ocean 40 miles north-west of Lüderitz Bay (Namibia), together with their Mirage F1- CZ jets. The last radio contact was at 10:48. At about 11:15 the planes simply vanished from the radar screens. It was evident that the pilots were frantically trying to communicate with base: the radio call button was being pressed but no transmission could be heard.
A simple accident – perhaps a collision? Both planes were equipped with standard life-saving gear. A Navy ship was in the area within an hour, and a helicopter within two hours. Weather conditions were good; 3/8ths altocumulus at 25,000 feet and high cirrus at 45–50,000 feet – the altitude at which the Mirages were flying. No trace was ever found of either the pilots or the aircraft.25
CHILE
In an interview in 2002, retired General Hernán Gabrielli Rojas described his encounter with a UFO during a training flight over the deserts of northern Chile in 1978 (date not given). He was flying one of a pair of F-5F Tiger II jets of the Fuerza Aérea de Chile (FACh). Not far from Antofagasta, the jets’ radar alerted the pilots to the presence of an enormous intruder.
‘It was noon, and I was flying with Captain Danilo Catalán – we were both flight instructors,’ Gabrielli told journalist Cristián Riffo. ‘Accompanying us were avionics technician Fernando Gómez and another trainee. The F-5 is radar-equipped, and a line appeared from side to side; in other words, a trace throughout the bottom side of the screen. A trace for a surface ship, a cruiser, is approximately one centimetre long, but this line went from one side of the screen to the other. I assumed the radarscope had failed, and said as much to Catalán, but his radar also failed. I then advised the ground radar at Antofagasta – and they also picked up the line.
‘We were occupied with these details when we looked towards the east – we were flying from north to south in the vicinity of Mejillones – and saw a deformed cigar-shaped object, like a plantain banana. It was swathed in smoke.’ The general estimated the size of the object as being comparable to that of a dozen aircraft carriers.
It was large, and must have been some 15 to 20 miles away. It moved in the same direction as us. We were heading back from Attack One, which is a combat tactic involving gun cameras – no cannon, missiles, or anything else, so as you can imagine, we were considerably alarmed. We could see a huge thing surrounded in smoke, and from which vapour issued. All of this must have lasted some five minutes. We approached the UFO but it was motionless. It neither approached nor retreated – it merely moved parallel to us. It was quite impressive, and something could be seen concealed behind the smoke.
Although the F-5Fs were equipped with cameras, General Gabrielli did not say if any footage had been obtained. ‘The object then disappeared towards Easter Island at an impressive rate of speed,’ he recalled. ‘The sky cleared, and the lines on the radar vanished. However, there definitely was a physical flying object there.’
In February 2001, a newswire from Agence France Presse reported that the FACh had turned over classified information regarding UFO sightings in Chile – including the Chilean Antarctic – to the US Defense Intelligence Agency.26
CHINA
On the evening of 23 October 1978, hundreds of Chinese Air Force pilots and other officers at Lintiao Air Base in Gansu province were watching the beginning of an open-air film, which had started at 20:00, when there was a flurry of disturbance in the audience. ‘Several minutes after the show had begun,’ reported pilot Zhou Quintong, ‘I saw a huge object flying from east to west which flew over our heads.
‘It was an immense, oblong object but was not clearly visible. It had two large lamps, like searchlights, in front, shooting out white light forward, and a luminous trail issued from the rear … The speed was not very great, and it flew in a straight line. It was of a huge size, occupying about 20 to 35 degrees of arc, not very high above the ground and was in sight for two or three minutes.’27
Chinese researchers speculated that there could be a connection with the disappearance of the young Australian pilot Frederick Valentich, who two days earlier had vanished with his Cessna 182 (VH-DSJ) shortly after reporting being harassed by a large metallic object over the notorious Bass Strait, en route from Melbourne to Tasmania. According to the transcript of the transmissions between Valentich and Melbourne Flight Service Unit, the pilot’s last words were: ‘… ah Melbourne that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again – it is hovering and it’s not an aircraft.’28 (See p. 318.)
KOREA
It was about 09:00 on a day in March 1979. Two F-4D Phantom jets of the Republic of Korea Air Force (RoKAF) were returning from the annual South Korea/US military exercise, Team Spirit, to Taeku Air Force Base. Lieutenant Colonel Seungbae Lee was piloting one plane and Colonel Byungsun Lim the other, at an altitude of 15,000 feet. On reaching Palkong Mountain, a star-like, apparently stationary object appeared in the distance, which grew in size as the jets approached. It did not register on radar, so the pilots radioed the base – they too were unable to see it on radar. As the pilots approached to within 15 miles of the object, it shot away to the east, and then hovered again.
‘The pilots had a close view of the UFO, from about 1,000 feet away,’ Sunglyul Maeng, one of Korea’s leading UFO researchers, informed me. ‘It was radiating bright golden light, like a blast furnace, from the top to the bottom of its disc-shaped body. From its rim, red and blue lights sparkled. It was as big as a jumbo jet. After the F-4s had circled twice above the UFO, it shot away in the direction of the eastern Korean peninsula.’29
Maeng gave me this report in 1996, when he was studying engineering at the University of Cambridge. Like other cases from Korea he presented me with, the report was new to me, and as far as I am aware it is published here for the first time outside Korea.
SPAIN
On 11 November 1979, a near miss with an unknown craft, ‘approximately the size of a jumbo jet’ – as in the Korean case – over Ibiza, Spain, was reported by the crew of a Spanish Air Transport (TAE) Super-Caravelle. Within minutes, a Spanish Air Force (Ejército del Aire) Mirage F1-CE jet from Los Llanos Air Force Base (Albacete) was scrambled to intercept unknown targets in the vicinity of Valencia. It was now 02:20 on 12 November.
Captain-Pilot Fernando Cámara was ordered to identify the lights and prepare his weaponry, but he was unable to locate any targets, and none showed on his radar. However, as the Mirage passed over Valencia at 7,500 metres, a powerful noise of unknown origin, ‘like a siren’, broke in on all the radio channels. Cámara then caught sight of a strange light, and set off in pursuit. The light would not let him get near it, and still nothing showed on his radar. This happened several times. On the second attempt, the light suddenly accelerated to the same speed as the Mirage (1,110 km/h), maintaining a constant distance from the jet. Cámara attempted to film the object, but his on-board camera jammed. Other instruments seemed to be affected too.
Pegaso Operations Centre ordered Cámara to head for Sagunto (Valencia), where another light appeared. The game of ‘cat and mouse’ ensued twice more. Finally, running low on fuel, the Mirage returned to base, the object continuing to track the plane and jamming its electronic equipment.30
At 17:20 on 17 November, Pegaso Operations Centre detected an unknown track some 40 kilometres south of Morril (Granada), and a Mirage F1 took off from Los Llanos AFB. By the time the jet arrived in the vicinity, the object had disappeared from radar. At 18:16 the pilot was heading back to base when he saw three powerful red-yellow lights in the shape of a triangle about 19 kilometres away. They did not register on radar. In spite of chasing the lights at 1,160 km/h, the Mirage could not close the gap. During his descent into Los Llanos, some childish, laughing voices broke in on the UHF-11 channel that linked the pilot to the Pegaso Operations Centre. ‘Hello, how are you? Hello, hello,’ they said in Spanish. The interference lasted for thirty seconds, but was not heard at the Centre.31
PERU
Two sightings by Peruvian Air Force – Fuerza Aérea Peruana (FAP) – personnel in May 1980, including the interception and attempted destruction of a UFO, are cited in a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document (p. 320). The source of the information was a Peruvian Air Force (FAP) officer. Extracts follow:
… Unidentified flying object in the vicinity of Mariano Melgar Air Base, La Joya (Peru 16805S, 0715306W) … vehicle was spotted on two different occasions. The first was during the morning hours of 9 May 80, and the second during the early evening hours of 10 May 80 …
On 9 May, while a group of FAP officers were [flying] in formation at Mariano Melgar, they spotted a UFO that was round in shape, hovering near the airfield. The air commander scrambled a [Sukhoi] Su-22 aircraft to intercept. The pilot, according to a third party, intercepted the vehicle and fired upon it at very close range without any apparent damage. The pilot tried to make a second pass on the vehicle, but the UFO out-ran the aircraft.32
PUERTO RICO
Puerto Rico lies within an apex of the legendary Bermuda Triangle, where many mysterious events have occurred, such as those described earlier. On 28 June 1980, two young civilian pilots, Jose L. Maldonado Torres and Jose A. Pagán Santos, flying at 1,500 feet in an Ercoupe 415-D (N3808H) on the return leg to San Juan from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, disappeared shortly after transmitting a Mayday distress call. Here follow salient extracts from the transcript contained in the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident report (see p. 320):
‘Mayday Mayday … We are lost … we found, ah, a weird object in our course that made us change course about three different times. We got it right now in front of us at one o’clock … Right now we supposed to be at about 35 miles from the coast of Puerto Rico … We are right again in the same stuff sir …’
And that final sentence was the last response heard. An air-sea rescue search failed to locate any wreckage or bodies. Concluded the NTSB: ‘The aircraft is presumed ditched at sea and both occupants deceased …’33
TURKEY
On 14 January 1983 a very bright object appeared in the sky above Adana, southern Turkey, at 19:53, and many people stopped their cars to observe it. Soon the UFO was joined by two US Air Force jets from the NATO base at Incirlik. One of the jets flew in tight circles around the UFO, which dwarfed the fighter in comparison and was described as disc-shaped with a dome underneath. The object accelerated and then disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea, with the jets in pursuit. Witnesses claim that only one jet returned to base. Investigator Eric Saunders learned that: ‘Turkish forces were involved in a search-and-rescue mission over the Mediterranean on that date, at the request of the USAF.’ Although officials admitted to locals that a plane had been lost, they refused to discuss the circumstances.34
And no wonder. Such incidents lie at the core of official secrecy on the subject. How on Earth could our military leaders possibly acknowledge that an ongoing conflict existed with certain implacable alien species, particularly since we lacked effective countermeasures?
REFERENCES
1. Stevens, Wendelle C. and Dong, Paul, UFOs over Modern China, UFO Photo Archives, PO Box 17206, Tucson, AZ 85710, 1983, p. 45. See also the chapter on Chinese reports in Above Top Secret and Beyond Top Secret.
2. Ibid., pp. 48–9.
3. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
4. See Beyond Top Secret and Unearthly Disclosure.
5. Personal interview, Paris, 12 December 2000.
6. Julien, H., ‘A 1967 Landing in Madagascar’, Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, January–February 1977, pp. 29–30. A detailed account of this event appears in Alien Base by Timothy Good.
7. Vallée, Jacques, with Costello, Martine, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat, Ballantine Books, New York, 1992, pp. 82–5.
8. Letters, 5/15 December 1995.
9. Personal interview, Istanbul, 15 December 2001.
10. Posta, Istanbul, 17 December 2001. Translated by Esen Sekerkarar.
11. Saunders, Eric, UFO Cases from Turkey. (Privately published.)
12. Letter from Sergeant Terry W. Colvin, Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, Supplement No. 18, February 1974, p. 17. Published by FSR Publications Ltd, PO Box 585, Rickmansworth, WD3 1YJ, UK. www.fsr.org.uk
13. Stringfield, Leonard H., Situation Red, The UFO Siege!, Doubleday, New York, 1977, pp. 135–6.
14. Good, Timothy, Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters with Extraterrestrials, Century, London, 1998; Avon Books, New York, 1999.
15. Haines, Richard F., ‘An Aircraft/UFO Encounter over Germany in 1976’, International UFO Reporter, Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter 1999, pp. 3–6.
16. National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, PO Box 1535, Vallejo, CA 94590. www.narcap.org
17. Sightings, Paramount Pictures, 5555 Melrose Avenue, Mae West 146, Hollywood, CA 90038-3197.
18. Drucker, Ronald, (Robert F. Dorr) ‘UFO Crisis in India’, UFO Report, Vol. 6, No. 4, October 1978, pp. 25–7, 45, 65–8.
19. Personal interview, Paris Air Show, Le Bourget, 19 June 2003.
20. The National Archives, DEFE 71/34.
21. The National Archives, DEFE 71/35.
22. The National Archives, DEFE 24/977–979.
23. Note, 18 January 2006.
24. Smith, Dr Willy, ‘Unknown Intruder over Portugal’, International UFO Reporter, Vol. 10, No. 6, November–December 1985, pp. 6–8.
25. Good, Timothy, Beyond Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Security Threat, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1996, pp. 276–7.
26. Corrales, Scott, ‘Military Implications of UFOs in Latin America and Spain’, Inexplicata, The Journal of Hispanic Ufology, Issue #12, Winter 2003.
27. Stevens and Dong, op. cit., pp. 119–20.
28. Haines, Richard F., Melbourne Episode: Case Study of a Missing Pilot, LDA Press, Los Altos, California, 1987. See also Above Top Secret and Beyond Top Secret.
29. Letter, 4 June 1996.
30. Crivillén, J. Plana, ‘Encounters in Spanish Air-Space between Aircraft and UFOs’, Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, 1989, p. 22.
31. Ballester Olmos, Vicente-Juan, ‘UFO Declassification in Spain – Military UFO Files Available to the Public: A Balance’; a paper presented at the Eighth BUFORA International UFO Congress, Sheffield Hallam University, 19–20 August 1995.
32. Department of Defense Intelligence Information Report No. 6-876-0146-80, received by the Joint Chiefs of Staff Message Center, 3 June 1980.
33. National Transportation Safety Board Accident File No. MIA-80-D-A079. See also Good, Timothy, Unearthly Disclosure: Conflicting Interests in the Control of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Century, London, 2000, pp. 34–9.
34. Saunders, op. cit.
An article from the US Air Force Security Service MIJI Quarterly (MQ 3-78) about the UFOs encountered over the Tehran area by F-4 Phantom pilots of the Imperial Iranian Air Force on 19 September 1976. (Air Force Electronic Warfare Center via William L. Moore Publications & Research)
The last page of the official transcript of communications between the 20-year-old Australian pilot, Frederick Valentich, flying a Cessna 182L (VH-DSJ) over the Bass Strait, and Melbourne Flight Service Unit (FS), prior to his disappearance on 21 October 1978. (Australian Department of Transport)
The UFO subject confirmed by the Spanish Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1979 as a ‘classified matter’. (Ministerio de Defensa/Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos)
A US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report on interceptions of a UFO by Sukhoi Su-22 jets of the Peruvian Air Force in May 1980. (Defense Intelligence Agency)
An excerpt from the National Transportation Safety Board Accident File on the disappearance of two pilots, José L. Maldonado Torres and José A. Pagán Santos, together with their Ercoupe 415-D (N3808H), as they were returning to Puerto Rico after a flight from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, on 28 June 1980. The pilots’ communications with San Juan International Airport were relayed via Iberia Airlines flight 976. (National Transportation Safety Board, Washington)
