In the late 1980s, reports of less conventionally shaped flying objects – typically triangular – began to increase around the world. In November and December 1988, two dramatic instances of aircraft being ‘absorbed’ into large UFOs occurred, in full view of witnesses, in the US Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the second of which involved a large triangular craft.
At 19:45 on 28 December, numerous people in Cabo Rojo, south-west Puerto Rico, saw a massive, blindingly bright yellow light in the sky. ‘Suddenly, I saw two planes coming, each one at the side of this thing,’ said a witness, Mañuel Mercado. ‘One of the jets came and crossed in front of the UFO to the left, and the other crossed from left to right. The jets seemed to be trying to intercept that thing, to force it to change its course.
‘Then, when they got next to it, we thought they would collide. The object stopped in mid-air – and the jets seemed to go inside it. And that was the last we saw of them. Then that thing veered back, and that’s when we noticed that it looked like a triangle. When it veered and stopped [over the Samán lake], it divided itself [into two triangles], and one of the sections shot away at great speed to the east and the other took off to the north.’
On my first trip to Puerto Rico, in August 1990, Jorge introduced me to most of the witnesses, including Mercado. In my opinion, they were truthful.
The jets involved in both incidents were F-14 Tomcats, probably from an aircraft carrier twenty to twenty-five miles away. A week after the incident, Jorge Martín spoke to a US Navy source. ‘There are radar tapes that show what happened, and they were classified at once and sent to Washington, DC, to be analysed,’ the officer disclosed. ‘We were able to see what happened on the radar systems of the ships that were anchored nearby. We saw when the smaller targets on the radar, which represented the jets, merged with a bigger one. A lid has been placed on the whole incident …’1
Shortly after midnight on 18/19 July 1990, the base perimeter at Fort Allen, a US Army Reserve Base in Juana Díaz on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, was suddenly illuminated by a powerful white light. According to information leaked by an officer to Jorge Martín, all personnel at the base that night were in the barracks, except for those on duty.
An officer gave an order over the intercom for ‘everyone to stay indoors and not to come out of the barracks or any other base facilities under any circumstances’. The light was very bright, but when the order was given the officer was already looking out of a window. ‘In an area towards the coast, just over the base,’ he said, ‘there was a brightly lit object, circular and metallic-looking, as if it was made of aluminium. It had what seemed many windows in its central [rim], with yellowish-white lights revolving in them. At the underside of the object there was a round turbine-like protrusion with many coloured lights around it, and from underneath the object came a very bright beam of pinkish-white light, as if searching for something. That same light was the one illuminating the perimeter.’
Suddenly came the sound of jet engines, and two planes – believed to be F/A-18 Hornets – flew at high speed over the base. ‘As soon as the jets headed in the direction of the UFO,’ continued the officer, ‘the object departed at speed to the west with the sound of rushing wind, followed by the jets. Those planes must have been scrambled from Roosevelt Roads Naval Station [some 60 miles to the east], from an aircraft carrier participating in the UNITAS manoeuvres at Roosevelt Roads and on Vieques Island, because normally there are no F/A-18s Hornets based in Puerto Rico.
‘Something big is happening here,’ the officer revealed. ‘Recently, all the military personnel in Fort Allen were shown several video films which informed us about the reality of UFOs. They showed us an old black-and-white film about a UFO crash that supposedly happened in New Mexico many years ago. We all saw the craft, which was semi-buried in the ground at a 45-degree angle, and there were several bodies of the crew … about five feet tall, thin, very pale, and had large bald heads [and] big round eyes and small nose … They also showed us another video of UFOs filmed by them around the island.’
They wanted us to know that UFOs are real, but they wouldn’t elaborate when asked for more details. You know, it seemed to me that they wanted us to know that UFOs are real and that the beings were not perfect: they are fallible, their craft crash and they also die – they are not invulnerable. Apparently, they wanted to condition us to the idea that they exist, and to accept the possibility of some day having to liaise with them.
The officers wouldn’t say that these were alien craft, or anything like that, just that they were real and that the Government is keeping a close eye on them. Finally, they told us that they are expecting something big: they wouldn’t explain what, but it had to with all this, and if that happened we would have to deal with the situation, and with the people – the public.
This event was later confirmed by two independent military sources who approached Jorge Martín and the investigator John Timmerman in San Juan the following month. ‘Apparently,’ reported Martín, ‘special military groups on the island have been receiving official briefings on the UFO situation since 1988, the year in which the jet fighters were abducted by the huge triangular-shaped UFOs in Cabo Rojo and San Germán.’2
Other military personnel have been exposed to similar films. Lieutenant Colonel Ellison Onizuka was one of the astronauts who perished in the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in January 1986. In conversation with Clark C. McClelland, the aerospace engineer who worked at the Kennedy Space Center (alluded to earlier), Onizuka revealed that while on military training at McClellan Air Force Base, California, about eight or nine years before his astronaut training, he and others were directed to report to a viewing room.
‘As they were seated, the room darkened and a movie began without the usual official introduction by a USAF officer,’ reports McClelland. ‘They were all startled when a view of a facility similar to a medical examination room appeared on the screen, and small bodies were observed lying on slabs … The small, strange-looking creatures were humanoid in shape [with] large heads, large eyes, slight torsos, arms, and legs.’
‘Clark,’ said Ellison, ‘My God, these highly trained officers and I were shocked by what we saw … We were all caught off-guard. Perhaps it was a test of our psyche to determine our overall reaction.’3
5/6 NOVEMBER 1990
One of the most spectacular events during this period involved the multiple sightings reported by military and civilian pilots, as well as by witnesses on the ground, in many European countries, on the night of 5/6 November 1990.
Jean Gabriel Greslé is a former French Air Force and Air France pilot. Having himself seen UFOs on several occasions while flying, as well as being one of Europe’s finest UFO researchers, he is well qualified to differentiate between conventional and unconventional flying objects. At 19:00 on 5 November, he was standing outside a gym with six of his martial-arts pupils in Gretz-Armainvilliers, some 25 kilometres east of Paris, when an astonishing event occurred. Jean took me to the actual site, enabling me to visualize the event more precisely.
‘Suddenly,’ he said, ‘this enormous device came into sight. My first impression was of a huge crane with a lot of lights. It was at a distance of about 800 metres and height of 300 metres. One witness saw it level off and turn. The trajectory was downward, towards us. It projected two huge, divergent beams of light, not quite touching the ground. The light was peculiar: I can only explain it as lumière morte – ‘dead light’. The moisture in the air wasn’t scattering the light. Normal light is scattered by water droplets in the atmosphere.
‘It must have been at least 1,000 feet long, with a thickness of about 200–250 feet, and had triangular substructures and many, many lights. I ran around a tree to watch it as it turned its back on us, and the lights dimmed very quickly, which is surprising, because the beams must have been at least a kilometre in length – then it disappeared in the cloud. Janine, one of my pupils, caught a glimpse of the rear section, which was trapezoidal in shape. It carried with it what I can only describe as a “zone of silence”, because as it flew over us – at never more than 100 mph – we suddenly didn’t hear the nearby traffic. And I had the impression that my mind was blanked out … Other witnesses saw it too, in nearby areas. It was absolutely incredible – like a city floating through the clouds!’4
At the same time, a flight of three Royal Air Force (RAF) Tornado GR.1 jets was transiting from the UK to RAF Laarbruch, Germany, flying through controlled airspace above the North Sea at 18:00 local time, when a large ‘aeroplane-shaped’ object appeared to the right side of the planes.5 The aircraft were travelling at Mach 0.8 (about 600 mph). ‘Out of nowhere, a mysterious craft emerged on their wing tips and overtook the jets,’ reports Nick Pope, who headed the Ministry of Defence (MoD) UFO research effort from 1991 to 1994. ‘The object was massive and covered with blue and white lights. For a brief moment, the craft flew ahead of the Tornados, before accelerating away into the distance at an unimaginable speed … The control centre was unable to help. Nothing had shown up on its radar. Officially, at least, the craft had never existed.’6
The MoD ‘signal’ states that two other Tornados had seen the object and ‘possibly [identified] it as a stealth aircraft’.7 That a stealth aircraft would be so large, and covered with blue and white lights, seems improbable. What is certain is that several sightings were reported by RAF pilots that night. In an informal conversation with a friend of mine shortly after the sightings, a senior RAF officer based in Germany revealed that two terrific explosions were heard in the Rheindalen area on two separate occasions that night.
Following the second explosion (at 22:00), the crew of a Phantom jet reported UFOs heading north in ‘finger’ formation. Separately, said the RAF source, two Tornados over the North Sea encountered two large round objects, each with five blue lights and several other white lights around the rim. As the Tornados closed to investigate, one of the UFOs headed for one of the jets, which was forced to take violent evasive action to avoid a collision. The two unknowns then headed north until they were out of sight. Nothing showed on the Tornados’ radar.
In 1991, following a request for some information which I could use, the senior officer wrote a report in letter form for my friend, and gave me permission to quote from it, ‘providing the source would be protected’.
‘Our version begins at 19:00 hours [local time] on the evening of 5 November with reports at [RAF] Rheindalen of a “sonic boom”,’ he wrote:
We confirmed that, at that time, two of our Phantom aircraft were carrying out practice intercepts at a very high level over Germany, under positive radar control … Simultaneously, the crew of one of the Phantom aircraft reported a UFO sighting, described as a large formation of aircraft all in reheat in finger formation … disappearing to the north. The crews gave chase, but did not establish further visual or radar contact … Subsequently, the NATO Air Defence Organization reported that there were several high-speed contacts during the course of that evening in the same area (Western border of Germany/Southern Belgium) as the sightings. We shall probably never know exactly what our crews saw, or our people on the ground heard …
Among the civil pilots reporting sightings that night was a British Airways captain who told investigator Paul Whitehead that he saw two ‘very bright mystifying lights’ while flying over the North Sea. Later he spoke to a Tornado pilot who, together with another Tornado from the same squadron, had been ‘approached by bright lights’ which ‘formated’ on the Tornados. The accompanying Tornado pilot was so convinced that they were on a collision course with the lights – apparently nine were seen – that he ‘broke away’ and ‘took violent evasive action’ (as confirmed by the senior RAF officer).8
31 MARCH 1993
In his book Open Skies, Closed Minds, Nick Pope reports that he arrived at his desk in Whitehall on the morning of 31 March 1993 to find that there had been a major wave of UFO sightings in Britain the previous night. The reports – involving many police and military witnesses – described triangular-shaped craft uncannily similar to those reported by about 2,000 witnesses exactly three years earlier in Belgium during a wave of sightings in 1989–90.
Most sightings had occurred between 01:00 and 01:30, Nick soon discovered, with a peak at 01:10. ‘By lunchtime,’ he said, ‘it became obvious that I was right at the centre of the biggest wave of UFO sightings ever reported in Britain … Other reports reached me from the Irish Republic, and in the days that followed I heard of sightings in France, and, significantly, Belgium.’
A report came in from a military patrol guarding RAF Cosford, near Wolverhampton, and another from Rugeley, Staffordshire, where five members of the same family observed a huge diamond-shaped object, about 200 metres across, flying slowly above them at an estimated height of less than 300 metres. ‘They also reported a low, humming sound of the frequency you’d experience standing in front of the speakers at a pop concert, feeling the sound waves passing through the body,’ Nick explained. (This effect has been reported on many occasions.)
Perhaps the most interesting report came from RAF Shawbury in Shropshire, to the north of Shrewsbury. The meteorological officer there saw the most astonishing sight of that whole amazing night. An object in the sky, at first stationary, moved erratically towards him at a speed of several hundred miles an hour. At one point it fired a beam of light at the ground, which swept the countryside from left to right, as though it were looking for something in the fields and hedgerows. The sighting … lasted for five minutes, long enough for the witness to estimate the size of the craft to be about that of a Jumbo jet … He heard the same low-frequency hum the family from Rugeley had heard.
What were the Ministry’s answers? There was no unusual civil or military aircraft activity that night that came remotely close to fitting anything that had been seen … So the official findings (mine) read: ‘Type of craft – unknown; origin of craft – unknown; motive of occupants – unknown.’9 (See also pp. 431–2)
ILLEGAL ALIENS
In the small hours of 8 March 1997, Sarah Hall, a journalist for the Folkestone Herald, was driving through the village of Burmarsh, Kent, returning to her home in Hythe. ‘I think it was about three o’clock a.m.,’ she reported to Chris Rolfe of UFO Monitors East Kent (UFOMEK). ‘I was driving back from dropping some friends off, and [as] I was coming down the road, I felt weird. I saw something in front of me, and I thought, “Oh my God, what the hell is that?” and sort of slowed down, because I thought it was coming at me. And it stopped in front of me, probably three to four hundred yards away.’ The object was hovering above a large field, between Burmarsh and Dymchurch, not far from the coast.
It was just this huge triangle thing, which was a lot bigger than an aeroplane … It had lights all around the outside, and this disc attached to its back, and a big light on the front. I pulled up to stop, and as I did, it shot off. Literally … And it stopped again, sort of another five hundred yards away from me, and it did that four times … sort of moved for about five or six seconds, stopped for two seconds, then moved again for another five or six seconds, and so on. The object was moving westwards, and all the time it was making this weird humming sound … like the sound you hear when you stand under overhead power cables.
It was really peculiar; it was, I wouldn’t say shiny, but looked more sort of shimmery. The lights were really bright; a very bright one at the front, and when it shot off, I saw lights in each corner, which were white in colour. The ones around the outside were a sort of yellow-white, and there was also a circle of lights in the middle, of the same colour as the outside ones.
The object was an equilateral triangle, about double the size of an airliner, maybe as big as a football field. It wasn’t very thick, but seemed thin along the edges [with a] sort of mound in the middle. When I first saw it, the point was facing me, but when it shot off, it sort of – I don’t know – it must have swivelled, but I don’t remember it swivelling, because I could see it side-on then, and I could see underneath as it shot off, and there was this circle of white lights. I probably got a good look at it literally for a matter of seconds, and then it flicked off and then stopped for a few seconds, and then it flicked off and so on; I would say twenty-five seconds, if that. I saw it for quite a long time in the distance …
All the time, I had the feeling of the hairs standing up on the back of my neck … I felt really scared, as I drove home. I think I arrived home maybe half-past three, I don’t remember. But I woke everyone up and told them what I’d seen, and had a drink to calm me down. I was really shaken by the whole thing.10
Sarah Hall wrote up her experience for her newspaper under the pseudonym ‘Sophie Wadleigh’. I spoke to her by telephone not long afterwards: she certainly sounded as though she had been quite shocked by the experience. In due course, other witnesses came forward who said they had seen a strange aerial device in the area, between 02:10 and 03:30. The home of Michael Howard, then Conservative Home Secretary, in Lympne, lay a mile and a half from Sarah Hall’s observation point. Chris Rolfe learned that two local firemen had seen the same object directly over Howard’s house, and word spread that a fire appliance had been called out at around the same time. Then, while I was chatting to UFOMEK investigator Jerry Anderson, following a talk I had just given in Canterbury in February the following year, a man approached Jerry and revealed that he was a neighbour of Michael Howard. He told Jerry that he and his wife had been woken up in the early hours by a commotion coming from the Home Secretary’s house.
‘There were a lot of people running around and shouting, and the neighbour believed them to be the armed police guards on duty there to protect Mr Howard,’ wrote Stuart Miller and Chris Rolfe. ‘There was a helicopter hovering above, with a searchlight scanning the area. Tellingly, the neighbour told Jerry that the searchlight was not pointing down but was scanning the skies level with the helicopter, and above it as well.’
Evidence firmly suggests that a security clampdown followed the incident. Jerry Anderson experienced problems with his answering machine, then someone claiming to be from the TV Licensing Department came to the door of his home while he was away, asking his wife if they had a licence. The Licensing Authority confirmed that no checks were being made in that area at the time. And in early 1999, both Jerry and Chris received in the post a tape recording of a telephone conversation on the Burmarsh case which they had had a year before.11
The national press did not latch on to the story until August that year, following the Conservative defeat in the general election. ‘Howard’s tough line on aliens – he deported scores when he was Home Secretary – had evidently upset beings far beyond our planet,’ commented the Sunday Times.12 Another article appeared in the same newspaper early the following year. ‘So there really was something of the night about Michael Howard,’ weighed in Sebastian Hamilton:
Senior Tory spin doctors say they were aware of the story [in] a local newspaper, while Howard’s agent has admitted halting publication of further detailed reports about the incident by complaining to the editor … Eight separate reports were filed with local UFO spotters of a triangular craft, grey in colour, hovering in an area 15 miles around Howard’s home … Neither the local police nor the Ministry of Defence have any record of an incident that evening … A police spokesman, however, said it might have been dealt with by Howard’s own police protection team.13
In a letter to investigator Dr Colin Ridyard, PC Roy O’Connell of the Kent County Constabulary stated, perhaps tellingly: ‘Under normal circumstances, this department would at once be made aware of any such “security incident” … The only incident that we are aware of and to which I am sure you refer, was satisfactorily dealt with and could have no bearing on your investigations into UFO activity.’14
Had the former Home Secretary been aware of the incident?
‘Mr Howard had more important matters to deal with than UFOs,’ one source told the Daily Mail. ‘He knew about the reports, but I doubt whether he was very concerned about them.’15 ‘I am just astonished by all this really,’ Howard told the Kentish Express. ‘While I probably was at my home that night, as I often am, I certainly didn’t see anything. It is all ridiculous …’16
After three requests for a statement from Mr Howard, then leader of the Conservative Party, I eventually succeeded in obtaining the following odd response: ‘I was and remain completely unaware of any such incident.’17
THE PHOENIX LIGHTS
On the evening of 13 March 1997 – a week after the Burmarsh incident – thousands of eyewitnesses across the state of Arizona reported having seen a mile-long, V-shaped formation of lights flying relatively close to the ground. First to report a sighting was a former police officer, who described ‘bright red-orange lights in the shape of a boomerang’, heading south. The lights appeared to be connected, as though belonging to one enormous object. Commercial pilots reported them, and fighter jets at Luke Air Force Base, near Phoenix, took off in pursuit, using afterburners.
‘For several minutes the city stood still as these lights swept overhead on their way to Tucson, where truck drivers called one another on their CB radios, and families on the dark freeway stopped and stared in awe at the passing giant formation,’ writes Dr Lynne Kitei, author of The Phoenix Lights.’18
In fact, people had been reporting sightings of odd lights in the Phoenix area since January. But the air display on the night of 13 March left few doubts that something truly phenomenal was occurring. At 20:30, for example, Mike Fortson observed a massive, black, chevron-shaped object with a translucent surface, estimated to be a mile long, which ‘floated’ along noiselessly at about 30 to 40 mph. Others reported ‘an enormous triangular mass with lights on each of the corners’ appearing to be ‘city blocks’ in width.19
A female operator at Luke Air Force Base volunteered the information to one witness that their switchboard had been deluged with reports: later the base denied having received any calls about the object. According to a report telephoned by witnesses to Peter Davenport, director of the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center,20 Lockheed Martin F-16C jet fighters of the Arizona Air National Guard were scrambled from Luke AFB and intercepted the object over downtown Phoenix, photographed it with gun cameras and returned to base.
‘Davenport states that the sources went on to describe how the base had been “locked down”, how the pilots of the fighters had proceeded in approaching to within one mile of the object, and how their targeting radar had been “neutralized” by the object,’ reports Kitei. ‘Apparently, they provided copious details about the object, citing precise times, the names and ranks of the pilots, contents of radio conversations with the pilots while they were in the air, and many other aspects of the events that night. Unfortunately, Davenport’s staff was unable to corroborate any of the claims, despite the fact that the callers were stationed at Luke AFB. Within a few days, Davenport received another call. This time, one of the sources reported that he was being transferred to Greenland.’21
Another report came from a retired pilot in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, whose background included ratings in Boeing 747 and DC-10 airliners. He told Dr Kitei that he was with several other people when a formation of orange lights came into view. ‘We thought we could see some kind of structure to it as it went by perpendicular to us. One thing we were sure of, it was huge, at least a mile in area, and it was silent.’22 Another witness, Tim Ley, gives a highly detailed report of his observation, with other members of his family, in Sunnyslope, a small mountain valley near Phoenix, shortly after 20:00, as a giant craft slowly approached them.
‘My first impression was that it was about 100 feet up in the air,’ writes Ley. ‘The outline of the structure was so perfectly balanced, sharp-edged and geometrical. What we saw reminded me of a carpenter’s square set at 60 degrees. Each of its two arms had two lights set in them, evenly spaced from the centre front light, with the last two lights on each arm set in the structure just in front of the squared-off ends.’
The object, which appeared to be at least two city blocks long, passed slowly directly above the family. ‘It was ridiculously close, and there was no noise,’ Ley’s report continues.
When it began to pass over, I felt a nervousness in my body, almost like stage-fright [and so did] my family … the kids started jumping up and down and talking about how there was no sound, and mentioning the movie ‘Independence Day’ and exhibiting symptoms of hysteria … We all continued to stand outside and watch the object [as] it finally reached the gap through the mountain peaks … My wife said she saw a dome-shaped bulge in the middle, on top of the craft, which appeared to be picking up some of the city and parkway lights below and reflecting them off its surface [and] we later thought it must be a peculiarity of the visual stealth that at certain angles of view, you can see the light reflect off of it.23
Although the sightings did not register on radar at Sky Harbor International Airport, air-traffic controllers who had been on duty testified publicly that they had seen the object or objects. ‘I have never seen anything like this in my flying or controlling days,’ said Bill Grava.24 Videotapes were taken by members of the public from several different areas, some of which appear to show military high-intensity flares, which a spokesman for the Air National Guard said had been dropped along the Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range by A-10 Thunderbolt IIs from the Maryland Air National Guard that night, as part of a training exercise called Operation Snowbird. This was widely promoted as ‘the explanation’ for the phenomena.25
Perhaps coincidentally, on April Fools Day an item about the Phoenix Lights appeared on CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. ‘He stressed that you didn’t have to be in a cult or spaced-out to believe in UFOs,’ reports Kitei. ‘He declared that millions of Americans do, and believe as well that the government is somehow covering it up. Rather said they had asked the Pentagon, and had been told that it could not substantiate the existence of UFOs, nor did it harbour the remains of UFOs. The Air Force quit investigating UFOs in 1969 …’26
A JOURNALIST ASSAULTED?
It was 30 May 1997. Georgina Howell had finished four days researching a Scottish wildlife story for the Sunday Times in the Orkney Islands, off the north-east coast of Scotland. She was waiting at Kirkwall Airport to board the 11:50 British Airways Flight 8773 to Aberdeen, connecting with a London-bound flight. ‘The weather was brilliantly sunny and clear,’ she wrote in the Sunday Times the following year. ‘When we were called to board the small propeller plane, I was the last one out of the terminal building and walked slowly across the tarmac.’27
‘I was thinking, “I probably won’t see Orkney again, so I’ll just take a last look around,”’ Georgina explained to me. ‘And up to my left, at about 45 degrees above the sea – above a windsock, but I couldn’t tell how near or how far – was this very clear “angle” [chevron] in the sky. It appeared to be silvery metal, and as I walked across the tarmac it sort of flashed in the sun. It was like two sides of a triangle, with space in between. I tried to see if it was a plane, or perhaps two planes superimposed by perspective, and it obviously wasn’t that. I thought it might have been a piece of airport equipment, on a pole, but in fact it wasn’t. So I thought, well, when I get to the plane I’m going to get the air hostess out on the tarmac and ask her what it is.
‘Just at that moment, I hit the tarmac with my face. I felt I couldn’t do anything to protect myself whacking down on the tarmac and wasn’t able to put my hands in front of my face. I was fully conscious as I went down.’28
‘Although I had a cut lip, scraped nose, a black eye and bruising above the eye, my hands and arms, and the tape recorder I was carrying in my left hand, were unscathed,’ wrote Georgina in her article. ‘Several people came to my aid and helped me up. After a minute or so I told them, “I was looking at that!” and pointed to the sky where I had seen the angle, but there was nothing there. Apparently nobody else had seen it.’ Neither had the object been picked up by Air Traffic Control.
Later, Georgina learned about the giant chevron-shaped object seen above Phoenix on 13 March. ‘Whatever happened that day has certainly changed my opinion about UFOs,’ she wrote. ‘The subject used to bore me. Now I think about the incident frequently and I want to know what these things are. I will go on asking questions about them for the rest of my life.’29
POLAND
At 17:00 on 15 March 1997 – two days after the ‘air display’ at Phoenix – an object was seen to explode in the air before crashing to the ground near the town of Wegorzewo, in Poland’s Suwalki province. Reportedly, its remains were immediately taken away by soldiers.
‘The Army denied all knowledge of the incident at the time,’ reports investigator Robert K. Lesniakiewicz, ‘but since then, Army spokesman Colonel Zdzislaw Czekierda of the General Staff has publicly stated that the General Staff of the Polish Army have had a special division which gathered and evaluated all information about UFO sightings and close encounters with aliens since the early 1980s.’ The reports were normally classified secret or top secret, according to another investigator, Robert Bernatowicz.30
DEFENSE AIRBORNE RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE
The Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO) – under the aegis of the National Reconnaissance Office – once handled the US military’s Unmanned (or the more politically correct Uninhabited) Air Vehicle (UAV) programme. While in Washington, DC, in 1998, a friend arranged for me to meet Major General Kenneth R. Israel, US Air Force Director, DARO, to discuss matters of mutual interest.
On the afternoon of 6th May, I was escorted up to the DARO reception area in the Pentagon, before the scheduled half-hour meeting. Two notices caught my attention: ‘No Classified Here’ (meaning no talk about classified information), and the other, ‘DARO Welcomes Mr Good’. At 15:30 precisely, I was ushered into a small conference room. To my surprise, about eight young DARO officers greeted me: I had been expecting a one-to-one with General Israel. Instead, DARO had put on a media presentation (I hold a press card). I was asked to sit at the head of the table.
We all stood up when the general entered. After introducing himself to me, we exchanged pleasantries about England. He then delivered a mini-presentation on the functions of DARO. ‘Right now, Timothy,’ he began, ‘we’re interested in tunnels in North Korea.’ He showed a videotape of the Global Hawk UAV, and afterwards said, ‘Over to you, Timothy.’ The young officers sat with pencils poised above their official notebooks.
I explained that the purpose of the meeting was to seek guidance in my research on ‘the subject’, pointing out that it is evidently of major concern to military and intelligence officials, and that UAVs were of related interest. ‘Timothy,’ he responded, ‘I have never encountered anyone who has seen a UFO, and I know of no individual or organization within this building that takes the subject seriously.’ I began to suspect a charade. He went on to say that he had never read a book on the subject, at which point I took out from my briefcase a signed copy of Beyond Top Secret – which I believe he knew I would be bringing – and presented him with it.
General Israel thanked me and held the book up. ‘Wow, look at this,’ he said to the officers, ‘Beyond Top Secret!’ Then, glancing through the pages, he commented that obviously I had done a lot of careful research, and he didn’t wish to belittle my work. On noticing pictures in the book of frames from the 8mm film of an alien craft taken by George Adamski, in the presence of my friend Madeleine Rodeffer and a few others, at Silver Spring, Maryland, on 26 February 1965 (see plates), he looked impressed. ‘How do they explain these away?’ he said. ‘They look real to me.’
The general asked if I had ever seen a UFO. I mentioned one fleeting sighting, the event of 15 December 1980 in north-west Kent/south-east London, because it related to the events outside the twin RAF/US Air Force bases at Bentwaters and Woodbridge later that month. He expressed vague interest, and mentioned that he had flown Douglas RB-66 Destroyer (reconnaissance) aircraft from Bentwaters and RAF Alconbury.
General Israel then showed another short videotape, of the Dark Star UAV. We discussed its similarity, in side-planform, to flying saucers. I said that the Dark Star was often cited as an explanation for many UFO reports. He laughed. ‘Dark Star has only flown twice, and it crashed on its second flight!’ (The problems were subsequently ironed out.)
Just after the meeting was adjourned, General Israel mentioned to me that if anyone in the Pentagon knew anything about the UFO subject, it would probably be the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), since the phenomenon seemed to him to be more of a policing problem rather than one affecting national security. (AFOSI’s main duties are counter-intelligence and criminal investigations, sometimes including deception, referred to euphemistically as ‘special plans’.) I said I was aware of their long history of involvement, but refrained from telling him that I had learned that, up to 1989 at least, over a hundred AFOSI personnel had knowledge – in varying degrees – about the actual alien presence. As for UFOs being a policing rather than a national security problem, it is evidently both.
‘CAT AND MOUSE’
On 19 October 1998, four different radar stations in China’s northern Hebei province picked up an unknown moving target in airspace directly above a military flight training base near Changzhou city. To observers at the base, the UFO first appeared like ‘a small star’, and then grew larger and larger, presumably as it descended to a lower altitude. The object was described as having a mushroom-shaped dome on top and a flat bottom, covered with bright, continuously rotating lights. At least 140 people on the ground saw the object.
A base commander surnamed Li reported the observation to his superiors, and a Shenyang JJ-6 armed interceptor trainer was scrambled to intercept the object, once checks showed that no other civilian or military aircraft were in the area. The two pilots reported that the object closely resembled something they had seen in foreign science-fiction films. When they flew to within about 4,000 metres (13,200 feet) of the UFO, over Qing county, it abruptly shot upwards. As reported on numerous occasions, the object played ‘cat and mouse’ with the fighter, repeatedly outdistancing it and then reappearing just above it.
The report said that at one point the pilots requested permission to fire at the object with their cannon. Permission was denied by ground control. Eventually the JJ-6, short on fuel at 39,000 feet, was forced to return to base. The UFO then disappeared before two more modern interceptors became airborne.31
Two Turkish Air Force (THK) pilots of 122 Squadron (‘Scorpions’) had taken off at 12:30 on 6 August 2001 from their base at Izmir in a Cessna T-37B Dragonfly jet trainer. While practising manoeuvres over the Gulf of Candarli, Aegean Sea, First Lieutenant Ilker Dinçer and his pupil, Lieutenant Arda Gunyel, were suddenly surprised by an extremely bright object, shaped like something between a disc and a cone, with a kind of pod on the lower part. Ground control and Combat Operations Centre were immediately informed, but nothing was detected on radar.
The UFO approached the T-37 at high speed, on a head-on course. Next, it positioned itself alongside, then behind, and finally above the jet. ‘Object is now over us. It is literally dogfighting with us,’ radioed Dinçer. ‘I repeat, radar negative,’ the pilots were informed. The UFO played ‘cat-and-mouse’ with the jet for a while, before disappearing at high speed.
The report made headline news in Turkish newspapers, forcing the THK to issue a press release. The object had been a weather balloon, they said. However, no weather balloons were in the area at that time, and even if they had been, no balloon is capable of keeping up with the speed of an aircraft, or of performing the types of manoeuvres described.32,33
In June 2003 it was leaked to the press that Turkey’s National Intelligence Service (MIT) had received a top-secret request from the CIA for details of all the latest UFO reports. MIT accordingly asked the Turkish Air Force, Turkish Airlines and other establishments to submit their reports. MIT, which had previously only collected such reports, subsequently recommended that the Air Force should establish an official investigative body, headed by a colonel.34
UFO CHASE NEAR WASHINGTON. DC
At 01:00 on 26 July 2002, two F-16 Fighting Falcon jets from the 113th Air National Guard wing, on ‘strip alert’ at Andrews AFB, were scrambled by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) to investigate a radar track near Washington, DC.35 The unknown traffic was apparently slowly approaching the Temporary Flight Restriction Area designated after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Major Mike Snyder, Command Spokesman for both NORAD and the US Air Force Space Command, commented that the target’s ‘radar signature, speed, and elevation fit the criteria of a small private aircraft’. The radar target then faded from NORAD detection systems, the F-16s found nothing and returned to base, and that was that.36 Or that, at least, was the official version of events.
Gary Dillman, working a late shift about 6 miles south-east of Andrews AFB, heard and saw two pairs of jets take off from the base at 01:00. As he continued to watch them, until 01:30, he became convinced that something unusual was going on. ‘Most of the time he could see only one fighter strobe [light] at a time in the distance, sometimes two, but the aircraft were circling, turning right, turning left, flying back and forth,’ writes Joan Woodward, who has conducted the most extensive investigation into the case. ‘He could not hear them. Occasionally, one pair of fighters returned to the Andrews area, and then flew back to the east-southeast again. When asked whether he thought these fighters landed and were replaced by another fresh pair, Dillman thought they had not, because he would have heard their take-off sounds – with which he is very familiar – but he could not totally rule out the possibility.’
At 01:30, Dillman called WTOP news radio and informed them that something extraordinary was going on. Woodward’s report continues:
Just after his call to WTOP, Dillman looked toward the southwest (toward Waldorf, Maryland) and saw a glowing, round, hard-edged, orange object 25–30 degrees above the horizon coming toward him on a downward path [which] became brighter and larger. When the object was at about 20 degrees elevation, a fighter appeared out of the clouds coming from either north or east of the object. The fighter turned toward the object, which responded with a smooth, curving, banking turn to the south, away from the fighter that was now following it. They both flew south, then curved toward the east …37
‘At 01:40, this entire sequence of events was repeated,’ Joan Woodward informed me. ‘Dillman saw the orange object appear in the south-west sky as above, but this time a fighter was already following it.’38
Meanwhile, in nearby Waldorf, Maryland, at roughly 01:40, Renny Rogers, alerted for the second time by the roaring of what sounded like more than two jets, went outside. ‘He saw a bright, pale-bluish light in the north-northeast moving at what he considered to be a phenomenal rate of speed,’ Woodward reports:
The light was about 35 degrees above the horizon when first seen and its path dropped precipitously an estimated 2,000 feet and came back up slightly, after which it flew in a fast, straight line from north-northeast to east-southeast, where it was [temporarily lost from sight] … It moved in an effortless, floating manner but at very high speed, and it was silent … the light appeared to be just a light source [and] it was constantly brightening and dimming on a 1.5 second cycle. Rogers ran toward the south [and] found the blue light in the southwestern sky …
Rogers saw his neighbour, Mike, who had come outside, and called to him. A fighter came from the north over Rogers’ house in level, straight-line flight in obvious pursuit of the light … The aircraft was dipping its wings from side to side as it flew and continued to do so as it followed the blue light, and Rogers’ impression was that the aircraft was constantly correcting its course. The fighter was not [on this occasion] using its afterburner. The blue light was much faster than the pursuing jet …
‘These events took place beneath the cloud cover at 5,500–6,000 feet, but above the scattered clouds at 3,500 feet,’ says Woodward.
Coincidentally, these events occurred on 26th July, precisely 50 years after the second wave of UFO intrusions over Washington in July 1952. ‘In conclusion,’ adds Joan Woodward, ‘we have military fighters flying at less than 6,000 feet altitude in the middle of the night over residential areas, using afterburners, without apparent concern for the dense civilian population underneath … unknown objects flying near our most sensitive areas, and our modern fighters are no more able to intercept and identify them than were the fighters of 1952.’39
‘There is no question that something was going on that early morning that NORAD/USAF did not want known to the general public,’ Joan wrote to me. ‘And they changed the tower logs at Andrews AFB to hide it, and refused to answer some very innocuous questions.’40
In March 2007, former Arizona Governor Fife Symington III admitted to having seen an enormous triangular craft during the extraordinary air display over Phoenix on the evening of 13 March 1997. A cousin of the late Senator Stuart Symington, a former Secretary of War for Air (p. 82), the Governor had hitherto publicly ridiculed the incident. ‘Unless the Defense Department proves us otherwise,’ he stated during a CNN interview (21 March 2007), ‘it was probably some form of alien spacecraft.’41
REFERENCES
1. Martín, Jorge, ‘US Jets Abducted by UFOs in Puerto Rico’, The UFO Report 1991, ed. Timothy Good, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990, pp. 192–204.
2. Martín, Jorge, ‘Puerto Rico’s Astounding UFO Situation’, The UFO Report 1992, ed. Timothy Good, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1991, pp. 103–5.
3. Filers Files #41, 2005. www.georgefiler.com
4. Personal interviews, Paris, 12 December 2000, and Gretz-Armainvilliers, 15 November 2004.
5. Foxhall, Richard, ‘The 1990 Tornado UFO Sighting’, UFO Magazine (UK), August 2002, pp. 58–64.
6. Pope, Nick, ‘Britain’s Real X Files, Daily Mail, 2 February 2005, p. 13.
7. MoD signal from RAF West Drayton, 061340Z Nov 90.
8. Whitehead, Paul, ‘Special Report to FSR’, Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, 1991, p. 10.
9. Pope, Nick, Open Skies, Closed Minds, Simon & Schuster, London, 1996, pp. 134–40.
10. Rolfe, Chris, ‘The Kent Flying Triangle’, UFO Magazine (UK), September/October 1997, p. 22. Chris Rolfe can be reached at ufomek@hotmail.co.uk
11. Miller, Stuart, with Chris Rolfe, ‘Something of the Night’, UFO Magazine (UK), January 2004, pp. 4–11.
12. ‘Alien revenge hits Howard’, Sunday Times, 24 August 1997.
13. Hamilton, Sebastian, ‘Tories hid Howard’s “alien visitation”’, Sunday Times, 18 January 1998.
14. ‘Howardgate’, UFO Magazine (UK), March/April 1998, p. 6.
15. Derbyshire, David, ‘Take us to your leader’, Daily Mail, 19 January 1998.
16. ‘Howardgate’, op. cit., p. 8.
17. Letter from the Rt. Hon. Michael Howard QC MP, Leader of the Opposition, House of Commons, 24 September 2005.
18. Kitei, Lynne D., MD, The Phoenix Lights, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, VA 22902, 2000/2004, pp. 1–2.
19. Ibid., p. 20.
20. National UFO Reporting Center, PO Box 45623, University Station, Seattle, WA 98145. Hotline number (for recently observed events): +001 (206) 722 3000. www.nuforc.org
21. Kitei, op. cit., p. 23.
22. www.qtm.net/~geibdan/a1999/aug/b7.htm. See also Kitei, op. cit.
23. Kitei, op.cit.
24. Ibid. op. cit., p. 48.
25. Ibid., pp. 64–5.
26. Ibid., p. 31.
27. Howell, Georgina, ‘One glance at the shining metallic object in the sky changed this writer’s life for ever’, Sunday Times Magazine, 9 August 1998, pp. 10–13.
28. Telephone interview, 7 July 1998.
29. Howell, op. cit., p. 13.
30. Lesniakiewicz, Robert K., ‘UFOs, Alles-Stones and Stone Balls’, UFO Magazine (UK), May/June 1998, pp. 48–9. In May 2006, I participated in a private debate and a public UFO conference in Wroclaw, Poland. One of the participants was Major Józef J. Makiela, a retired Polish Air Force (Reserve) pilot, who confirmed that the subject is taken very seriously by the military.
31. Agence France-Presse, Shanghai, 5 November 1998.
32. Metehan Demir, ‘Turkish Jet’s Dogfight with UFO’, Hürriyet, Ankara, 8 August 2001. Translated by Esen Şekerkarar.
33. Thouanel, Bernard, Objets Volants Non Identifiés, Michel LAFON, Paris, 2003, p. 203.
34. Vatan, 2 June 2003; Sabah, 2 June 2003; UFO Magazine (UK), August 2003, p. 57.
35. Letter from Joan Woodward, 19 April 2006.
36. Young, Kenny, ‘UFO Violates DC Airspace’, MUFON UFO Journal, No. 413, September 2002, p. 11.
37. Woodward, Joan, ‘The Washington, DC, Jet Chase of July 26, 2002’, International UFO Reporter, Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter 2002–2003, pp. 3–7, 22–5.
38. Woodward letter, 19 April 2006.
39. Woodward, ‘The Washington, DC, Jet Chase’, op. cit.
40. Woodward letter, 19 April 2006.
41. Kean, Leslie, ‘Symington confirms he saw UFO 10 years ago’, Prescott Daily Courier, 18 March 2007.