Gloucestershire Air Force Base UFO Encounter
Date: October 21, 1952
Location: Gloucestershire, England
Royal Air Force Base Little Rissington is located in Gloucestershire, a county in south England. At the time, this air force base was the home of the air force’s main institution for training future military pilots. On October 21, 1952, Lieutenant Michael Swiney, together with his student Lieutenant David Crofts, experienced perhaps the most thrilling training flight.
On that day, Swiney and Crofts took off from Little Rissington Air Force Base on board a Gloster Meteor fighter jet for what they thought was going to be another ordinary training flight. The fighter jet had just traversed through a thick layer of clouds at fifteen thousand feet when Crofts saw three saucer-shaped objects straight ahead. At first, Crofts thought that they were parachutes, but he then noticed how perfectly circular they were and how they just hovered in the sky.
Swiney instructed Crofts to climb to thirty thousand feet and as he did so, the three saucer-shaped objects mirrored the climb and crossed from the left side of the aircraft to the right side. For over ten minutes, Swiney and Crofts observed the three UFOs and their unconventional characteristics, such as the absence of wings, exhaust plume, and visible propulsion system. Throughout the entire ten minutes, the disk-shaped aircraft remained in the sky, at the same altitude as the fighter jet, before they took off and vanished. At that point, Swiney called off the training flight and instructed Croft to fly back to base.
“It was something supernatural, perhaps, and when I landed someone told me I looked as if I had seen a ghost. I immediately thought of course, of saucers, because that’s actually what they looked like. They were not leaving a condensation trail as I knew we were. They were circular and appeared to be stationary. We continued to climb to twice that height [to thirty thousand feet] and as we did so they did in fact change position. They took on a slightly different perspective. For example the higher we got they lost their circular shape and took on more of a ‘flat plate’ appearance—like when you hold a tea-saucer above your head and look at it, and then bring it down to your eye-level, it loses the circular shape and becomes a flat plate.” 130
It was the height of the Cold War and the officers at Little Rissington immediately forwarded the report to the fighter command at Royal Air Force Stanmore Park in London. Orders were given for two Meteor F.8 fighter jets to be scrambled and patrol the sky. In that hour, several air force bases all around south England started tracking unidentified targets on their radar. At Staverton, the radar operators managed to track three unidentified targets, which were all traveling at a tremendous speed, faster than any military fighter jet. The targets were also being picked up by the airborne radar.
Interestingly enough, on one occasion, the targets on radar were in close proximity to the Meteor F.8 jets and as the pilots started closing down on the distance, the targets simply disappeared off the radar, at an estimated one thousand miles per hour. The second they disappeared, the air force base in Wiltshire detected three unidentified targets that had entered the airspace at three thousand miles per hour. Once again, here we have a case in which the reported UFOs broke the sound barrier without producing a sonic boom, implying that the aircraft must have been traveling through a vacuum.
Fifty years after the incident, Terry Barefoot, a Royal Air Force signal officer, came forward and contacted David Clarke, an investigative journalist, who researched this incident and several other UFO sightings in the United Kingdom. Barefoot stated that on the day of the sighting, he was on duty at Rudloe Manor, which is an underground complex containing a plotting control room in which the air force monitored all aircraft movements happening over the south of England. Barefoot recalled the exact moment in which he and his colleagues witnessed what he could only describe as extraordinary: “The radar station called up saying that three objects had entered our airspace, going at a fantastic speed, approximately three thousand miles per hour. We had nothing that went that fast, and neither had the Russians or the Americans.” 131
The Investigation
Back at the little Rissington Air Force Base, upon their landing, Swiney and Croft were met by the wing commander, who instructed them to go to their cabin and to not talk to anyone until they were interviewed the following day. They were instructed to not leave their room at all costs; even the meals were brought to them. The following morning, an Air Ministry intelligence officer interviewed the two separately. The reports were immediately transported to the deputy directorate of intelligence in London. Coincidentally, all the records and files for this case have been lost or destroyed and there was no further follow-up or investigation.
Conclusion
This case goes to show that the cover-up regarding the phenomenon is worldwide. Although the majority of the reported UFO cases have occurred over the United States, this case shows that even in other countries, the phenomenon is disregarded and hidden from the public eye. The three saucer-shaped objects that Swiney and Croft encountered were undoubtedly extraterrestrial in origin. It is impossible for any vehicle of any kind to operate without an exhaust plume. Furthermore, the absence of a visible propulsion system, and the fact that these UFOs had exceeded the speed of sound without producing a sonic boom, confirms that these interplanetary flying objects do not abide by the general laws of physics and aerodynamics every terrestrial aircraft is bound by. “I had then been flying for about nine years and I had seen many funny reflections, refractions through windscreens and lots of other things, but this was nothing of the sort. We tried very hard to explain away what we were looking at but there was no way we could do that. There was something there, there is absolutely no doubt about it. It was NOT a reflection.” 132