Official History
This
world exclusive article will reveal for the first time the secret history of the
British Government’s early involvement in the UFO issue, giving an insight
into the politics and personalities responsible for shaping official policy.
The bulk of this article concerns the post-war period, but to understand
what happened and why, we need to go back a little further.
The
mysterious wave of airship sightings that took place over America in 1896 and
1897 were mirrored by a series of sightings that took place in Britain, starting
in 1909. One of the first of these
so-called ‘scareship’ sightings occurred in the early hours of 23 March
1909, when PC Kettle from Peterborough heard a strange buzzing sound from above.
When he looked up, he saw a bright light attached to an immense,
oblong-shaped craft, which moved at a fairly high speed across the sky.
Numerous further sightings were reported.
On
13 May 1909 an airship of about 100 feet in length was seen over Kelmarsh in
Northamptonshire, while on the same night two men claimed to have seen a landed
airship on Ham Common in London and spoken to the two crewmen, who they said
were German and American. The
German asked for some tobacco for his pipe and the two witnesses reported having
been blinded by a searchlight during some of the sighting. Another report of a landed airship concerned an event that
took place on 18 May 1909, on Caerphilly Mountain in South Wales.
The witness reported having seen two strangely-dressed occupants who he
heard talking to each other in a strange language that he was unable to
identify. A subsequent examination
of the alleged landing site revealed some damage to the ground.
The
public perception was that these were sightings of German airships carrying out
reconnaissance missions. But there
is no indication that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s airship programme was
sufficiently advanced in 1909 to conduct such operations over the UK.
In any case, German airships of the period could manage nothing remotely
close to the sorts of speeds and manoeuvres that were being reported.
The British airship programme was significantly less advanced than the
German one, so we do not believe that the ‘scareship’ mystery can be
explained in terms of prototype British military hardware with which members of
the public would be unfamiliar. To
this day these sightings remain unexplained.
Further information can be found in The
Scareship Mystery - A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares, 1909 - 1918, edited
by Nigel Watson.
Our
reason for mentioning these sightings is that they mark the beginning of
official interest in unexplained aerial phenomena. The 1909 wave was followed by further reports in 1912 and
this is where our story begins in earnest.
There had been sightings of an airship over Sheerness in Kent and with
tension between Britain and Germany being so high, it was suggested that a
Zeppelin was involved. On 27
November 1912 William Joynson-Hicks MP raised the matter in Parliament and
quizzed the First Lord of the Admiralty about the events.
The latter confirmed that reports had been received, but said that
subsequent investigation had not produced any explanation for what had been
seen. The First Lord of the
Admiralty at the time was Winston Churchill.
Sightings
continued throughout 1913 and one consequence of this was the strengthening of
the Aerial Navigation Act of 1911. A
Bill was duly passed which set up prohibited areas. If these were violated or if an airship failed to respond to
signals from the ground, it could then be shot down and to enable this to be
carried out, the War Office stepped up efforts to produce a gun capable of
bringing down an airship. The War
Office continued to investigate the 1913 sightings, but drew a blank.
While
the media championed the theory that these sightings involved German dirigibles,
some newspapers suspected that hoaxes or hysteria might be more logical
explanations, especially in the cases of those reports involving sightings of
landed craft and occupants. Crucially,
however, the Government was not prepared to make such a judgement and continued
to take the view that all sightings should be investigated.
If there is evidence that your airspace is being penetrated by aerial
craft one does not ignore the data. Whatever
one’s personal beliefs, anyone within government and the military cannot
ignore evidence of this nature and must assume that they are hostile.
If governments investigate such things and they turn out to be bogus, all
they lose is a little time and money. But
if they ignore something that turns out to be real and hostile, they leave the
country vulnerable, as well losing the opportunity to exploit it (e.g. copying
the technology). This philosophy
underpins official interest not just in UFOs but in other areas such as remote
viewing, so in a sense the War Office response to the scareship mystery set the
template for future official investigations into UFOs.
Most
UFO researchers are familiar with the Foo Fighter mystery, which involved
strange balls of light and small, metallic objects seen by both Allied and Axis
pilots during the Second World War. File
AIR 14/2800 at the Public Record Office contains one of the few surviving
official British reports of these objects, detailing how aircrew from Bomber
Command’s 115 Squadron saw some of these strange objects on bombing raids in
December 1943.
What
is more pertinent to this story is the way in which the Foo Fighter sightings
were viewed by the British Government. Perhaps
the best indication comes from Professor R. V. Jones, one of the key wartime
scientific intelligence experts and someone who is one of the key figures in
this story, even though his involvement with the UFO issue is not widely known.
Writing in chapter 52 of his book Most
Secret War, he says:
“We
had already seen scares arise during the war by the imaginations of men under
strain interpreting fearfully observations which had a natural explanation.
KGr 100 pilots had seen red lights over England.
We had to deal with reports of Fifth Columnists letting off rockets; and
our bomber crews had reported single-engine nightfighters with yellow lights in
their noses over Germany at times when we knew that no single-engine
nightfighters were flying.”
Foo
Fighter sightings, so it seems, were dismissed out of hand by officialdom.
Or were they?
As
R. V. Jones features prominently in this history of officialdom’s involvement
with the UFO issue, we should give a brief summary of his career.
He was a protégé of Churchill’s key scientific advisor Frederick
Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) and Sir Henry Tizard.
He played a key role in anticipating and countering German technical
advances in fields such as radar, radio-beam navigation, V-1 and V-2 weapons and
the embryonic German nuclear programme. He
was appointed as Assistant Director of Intelligence(Science) in 1941 and
promoted to Director of Intelligence in 1946.
He left government service that same year, taking the chair of Natural
Philosophy (the old term for physics) at the University of Aberdeen, his
candidacy having been supported by Winston Churchill and Lord Cherwell. He returned to government service in 1952 at Churchill’s
request, as Director of Scientific Intelligence at the MOD, but returned to his
academic career at Aberdeen at the end of 1953.
During
his government service Jones forged very close links with the Americans,
especially the CIA, who in 1993 honoured him with a perpetual intelligence medal
in his name. When he died in 1997
the CIA issued a press release containing eulogies from Director George Tenet
and former Director James Woolsey (This press release can be viewed online at www.cia.gov).
Jones’
involvement in the UFO issue is not widely known, but is documented in a number
of sources, including the following:
1. Chapter 52 of his book Most
Secret War.
2. Annex V of the Condon report.
3. CIA Chief Historian Gerald Haines’ article CIA’s
Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90: A Die-hard Issue.
4. Private papers held at the Churchill Archives Centre,
Churchill College, Cambridge.
Before
we return to R. V. Jones, we will make brief mention of how US journalist
Dorothy Kilgallen alleged that the British Government had recovered a crashed
UFO. Writing in the Los
Angeles Examiner on 23 May 1955 she said:
Writing
in Flying Saucer Review (Volume 25,
Number 4 and Volume 31, Number 1) Gordon Creighton, who had researched this
story in detail, made it clear that he believed Kilgallen’s source was Earl
Mountbatten of Burma. Indeed, it
has been suggested that Kilgallen picked the story up at a cocktail party hosted
by Mountbatten in May 1955. Kilgallen’s
story has widely been dismissed as a hoax, but as we shall see, other events may
put her claims in a new light.
In
the immediate aftermath of the Second World War a new mystery was to emerge,
which again involved R. V. Jones. This
was the so-called “Ghost Rocket” wave of sightings that occurred in
Scandinavia in 1946. In chapter 52
of Most Secret War Jones is as
dismissive of these sightings as he had been about Foo Fighters, believing them
to be either “imaginary” or meteors. But
a number of personnel working in Air Technical Intelligence believed these were
sightings of Russian “flying bombs” and investigated the matter thoroughly.
Jones reveals how the Swedish authorities recovered what they believed
were pieces that had fallen from a Ghost Rocket.
These fragments were subsequently acquired by Air Technical Intelligence
staff and sent to the Chemical Analysis Section at the Royal Aircraft
Establishment at Farnborough. It
transpired that an embarrassing mistake had been made and the fragments were
nothing more than pieces of coke, but the story is interesting in what it
reveals about official interest in these sightings and the way in which British
scientific intelligence experts were able to acquire the material from a neutral
country.
Chapter
52 of R. V. Jones’ book Most Secret War
contains a truly bizarre anecdote concerning the alleged crash of an object at
Westerham in Kent, in 1946. Apparently
a signal was received from General MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo, asking for
confirmation of a report that a Russian flying bomb had recently crashed in
England. The other Director of
Intelligence on the Air Staff, Air Commodore Vintras, suggested to Jones that
this might tie in with the “Westerham Incident”.
The
Westerham Incident started, apparently, with an irate call to the Technical
Intelligence Staff from a farmer called Gunyon who wanted the Air Ministry to
come and remove one of these “darned contraptions” which had fallen onto his
farm. The intelligence officers
asked for directions and were told to drive from Croydon to Westerham, turning
onto a lane when they reached a pub called The White Dog. Amidst great security, two staff cars were dispatched, but
failed to find the farm. They
located a pub called The White Hart and a farmer named Bunyan, who strenuously
denied having made the call. This
bizarre incident remains unexplained and although it appeared to be a hoax, few
people would have had the wherewithal to get through to the Technical
Intelligence Staff and convince them to make a field visit.
Indeed, the intelligence officers believed that Jones himself had been
behind the affair.
Is
there a link between the Westerham Incident, General MacArthur’s enquiry about
a crashed Russian flying bomb and Dorothy Kilgallen’s story?
Could these be references to the same incident?
Was it really a hoax? If so,
it was one that went to the very heart of the British Establishment.
As a final footnote, perhaps it is worth noting that Westerham is just a
couple of miles from Chartwell, which was the home of Sir Winston Churchill.
We
should never underestimate the power of the media, or its capability to set the
political agenda, even to the extent that it can drive government policy.
This is as true today as it was in the post-war years.
The year that ufology first really hit the headlines in the UK was 1950. Prior to that there had, of course, been coverage, but this
largely concerned US sightings and the reporting was often dismissive.
But on 8 October 1950 two major newspapers started a series of articles
on the subject. The Sunday
Express began to serialise Gerald Heard’s book The
Riddle of the Flying Saucers (The book was subsequently published in the US
under the title Is Another World Watching?).
The rival Sunday Dispatch, a London paper, ran extracts from Frank Scully’s Behind
the Flying Saucers and Donald Keyhoe’s The
Flying Saucers are Real.
But
it was not just the media who were clamouring for answers and pressing the
Government for action. Some very
senior Establishment figures felt that something should be done and lobbied on
the subject, sometimes openly and sometimes behind the scenes.
Some of these figures were quite prepared to express openly the view that
some UFO sightings might well be extraterrestrial in origin.
One
senior Establishment figure who took an active role in this subject was Earl
Mountbatten, whose interest is well known to most ufologists and has been widely
documented, not least in Philip Ziegler’s 1985 book Mountbatten: The Official Biography.
In
chapter four of his book Flying Saucers
and Common Sense, published in 1955, Waveney Girvan reveals that Earl
Mountbatten had written a personal letter to the editor of the Sunday
Dispatch early in 1950. This
letter followed an earlier article concerning a wave of UFO sightings in
America, in the town of Orangeburg. The
letter read as follows:
“These
extraordinary things have now been seen in almost every part of the world -
Scandinavia, North America, South America, Central Europe, etc.
Reports are always appearing and the newspapers generally try to ridicule
them. As a result it is difficult
for any seriously interested person to find out very much about them.
I should therefore like to congratulate you on having had both the
intelligence (and, incidentally, the courage) to print the first serious helpful
article which I have read on the Flying Saucers.
I have read most other accounts up to date, and can candidly say yours
interested me the most”.
Girvan
goes on to reveal that Mountbatten and the editor of the Sunday Dispatch had a lengthy conversation about UFOs in mid 1950,
which led directly to the serialisation of Scully and Keyhoe’s books, as
mentioned previously.
It
is also well known among ufologists that on 23 February 1955 it is alleged that
a UFO was sighted at Mountbatten’s estate at Broadlands in Hampshire.
The witness was Frederick Briggs, a bricklayer employed at Broadlands.
Briggs said that the craft had been shaped like a spinning top, was
metallic and about 20 or 30 feet in diameter with portholes around the centre.
Watching from a distance of less than 100 yards, Briggs estimated that
the craft was 80 feet above the ground. Briggs
saw a humanoid figure dressed in what looked like overalls and a helmet descend
from the craft on some sort of column with a platform at the bottom. He was then dazzled by a bright blue light from the craft and
fell over, where he lay unable to move, as if held by a strange force.
The craft then flew off at high speed.
Mountbatten
took a personal interest in this incident, interviewed Briggs and searched the
area of the meadow over which the UFO had been seen. He subsequently had a statement prepared, detailing Briggs’
claims. This story was written-up
by Desmond Leslie in 1980, in Flying
Saucer Review (Volume 26, Number 5). Mountbatten’s
signed statement on the incident is held with many of his other private papers,
at the Broadlands Archive.
Another
senior Establishment figure whose interest and belief in UFOs is widely known
and documented is the wartime Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief
Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. He was as
outspoken as Mountbatten on the issue. Writing
in the Sunday Dispatch on 11 July 1954
he said:
“I
am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by
any nation on Earth. I can
therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from some
extraterrestrial source.”
We
have learned from veteran British ufologist Emily Crewe that when contactee
George Adamski visited the UK in 1963, Dowding and Mountbatten met him in London
and subsequently took him to Broadlands to see the site of Frederick Briggs’
1955 UFO sighting.
Sir
Peter Horsley, who died on 20 December 2001, was a former Air Marshal whose
distinguished RAF career saw him retire as Deputy Commander-in-Chief at HQ
Strike Command. A chapter of his
1997 autobiography Sounds From Another
Room relates to his interest in UFOs and the interest of friends and
colleagues such as Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, General Sir Frederick
Browning and General Martin.
While
serving as a Royal equerry in 1952, Horsley began a study into the UFO
phenomenon, with the full knowledge of the Duke of Edinburgh, who was briefed on
Horsley’s findings. Horsley has
said that the Duke of Edinburgh was interested and open-minded on the subject,
though keen that Horsley’s inquiry should be low-key.
An
Establishment figure whose interest in UFOs is less well known is Sir Henry
Tizard. Tizard is best known for
his pioneering work on the development of radar technology prior to the Second
World War and his various wartime posts included Scientific Adviser to the Air
Staff. He returned to the Ministry
of Defence in 1948 as Chief Scientific Adviser, a post that he held until 1952.
Although
largely outside the scope of this article, it is perhaps interesting to note
that although Sir Henry Tizard and Lord Cherwell had once been friends, a series
of disagreements over various policy issues had ended their friendship and
turned them into great rivals. We
do not say that this had any direct bearing on the subsequent handling of the
UFO issue, but their differing opinions on the subject should perhaps at least
be viewed in the context of their rivalry.
It was Cherwell who had the last word on Churchill’s 1952 enquiry on
UFOs, telling the Prime Minister that he agreed entirely with the Secretary of
State for Air’s sceptical views. When
it comes to UFOs, the believer versus sceptic debate is as active within
government and the military as anywhere else, as is clear from the books of
those people (e.g. Ruppelt and Hynek) who have been involved in official
government UFO research and investigation programmes.
Tizard
had followed the official debate about ghost rockets with interest and was
intrigued by the increasing media coverage of UFO sightings in the UK, America
and other parts of the world. Using
his authority as Chief Scientific Adviser at the MOD he decided that the subject
should not be dismissed without some proper, official investigation.
Accordingly, he agreed that a small Directorate of Scientific
Intelligence/Joint Technical Intelligence Committee (DSI/JTIC) working party
should be set up to investigate the phenomenon.
This was dubbed the Flying Saucer Working Party.
The DSI/JTIC minutes recording this historic development read as follows:
“The
Chairman said that Sir Henry Tizard felt that reports of flying saucers ought
not to be dismissed without some investigation and he had, therefore, agreed
that a small DSI/JTIC Working Party should be set up under the chairmanship of
Mr Turney to investigate future reports.
After
discussion it was agreed that the membership of the Working Party should
comprise representatives of DSI1, ADNI(Tech), MI10 and ADI(Tech).
It was also agreed that it would probably be necessary at some time to
consult the Meteorological Department and ORS Fighter Command but that these two
bodies should not at present be asked to nominate representatives”.
The
Flying Saucer Working Party was set up in October 1950, but operated under such
secrecy that its existence was known to very few. Nevertheless, there were two clues that such a study had been
carried out. One of these clues was
obvious, but the other was more obscure.
The
first clue was in the Secretary of State for Air’s response to Prime Minister
Winston Churchill’s famous 28 July 1952 memo in which he enquired “What does
all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?
What can it mean? What is
the truth? Let me have a report at
your convenience”. The response,
dated 9 August 1952, began “The various reports about unidentified flying
objects, described by the Press as “flying saucers”, were the subject of a
full Intelligence study in 1951”.
The
second clue was in a minute dated 29 May 1959, written by an official in S6 (a
now defunct MOD division whose responsibilities for researching and
investigating UFOs were latterly taken on by DS8, Sec(AS) and now DAS).
This minute contained a sentence which read “The subject was reviewed
by the J.I.C. some years ago and their views agree with a more extensive review
carried out by the Americans”. This
minute can be found at the PRO in file DEFE 31/118.
There
was some considerable discussion and debate about the terms of reference of the
Flying Saucer Working Party. The
final version read as follows:
1. To review the available evidence in reports of “Flying
Saucers”.
2. To examine from now on the evidence on which reports of
British origin of phenomena attributed to “Flying Saucers” are based.
3. To report to DSI/JTIC as necessary.
4. To keep in touch with American occurrences and
evaluation of such.
The
five man working party was chaired by Mr G. L. Turney from one of the MOD’s
scientific intelligence branches. All
the members were specialists in the field of scientific and technical
intelligence. One member, Wing
Commander M. Formby, Assistant Director of Intelligence (Technical) at the Air
Ministry, also chaired the Guided Missiles Working Party.
The
working party’s conclusions were set out in a document dated June 1951 and
bearing the designation DSI/JTIC Report No. 7.
It was entitled “Unidentified Flying Objects” and classified
“Secret Discreet”. The report
comprises six pages (including the cover sheet) and is reproduced here, in full.
We obtained it last year under the Code of Practice on Access to
Government Information (as did a number of other researchers) and it was
subsequently made available at the Public Record Office on 1 January 2002.
Some of the key PRO file references containing the Report and related DSI/JTIC
discussions are DEFE 10/496, DEFE 41/74 and DEFE 41/75.
As
the report is reproduced here, in full (aside from some material in paragraph 4,
relating to liaison with the Americans, which has been withheld) we do not
propose to do much more than give a brief summary of the document, as we believe
it speaks for itself. The following
commentary should be viewed in conjunction with Graham Birdsall’s analysis in
the January 2002 issue of UFO Magazine.
The
report begins with a history of the UFO phenomenon, covering the Scandinavian
“Ghost Rocket” wave of 1946, Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, the death of
Captain Thomas Mantell and the work of Projects Sign and Grudge.
Curiously, Foo Fighters were not mentioned at all.
Through our study of various DSI/JTIC minutes it seems that this
oversight occurred because while Fighter Command were invited to submit views to
the Flying Saucer Working Party, Bomber Command were not.
Roswell
is not mentioned, although there is reference to a report of a “crashed flying
saucer full of the remains of very small beings”. But the Report states that the author of these claims had
admitted that it had been a fabrication and it is clear that this is a reference
not to Roswell but to Frank Scully’s claims about the recovery of a UFO at
Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948.
The
report then details some British UFO sightings, concentrating on three cases
involving military witnesses. But
in each case, the sightings are dismissed as either optical illusions or
misidentifications of ordinary aircraft or meteorological balloons.
One visual sighting from a pilot had apparently been correlated by radar,
but this was attributed to interference from another radar system.
The report concludes that all UFO sightings could be explained as misidentifications of ordinary objects or phenomena, optical illusions, psychological delusions or hoaxes. The main body of the report ends with the following statement:
“We accordingly recommend very strongly
that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be
undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available”.
The
report was duly considered by the DSI/JTIC and Mr Turney recommended that in
view of the its sceptical conclusions, it should be regarded as a final report.
He further suggested that the working party be dissolved with immediate
effect. This was agreed by the meeting, thus bringing to an end the
MOD’s first UFO research project.
The DSI/JTIC minutes of the meeting that agreed to dissolve the working party contain the following telling quote, recording Mr Turney’s views:
“He went on to say, that following the lead given by the Americans on this subject, the Report should he thought, have as little publicity as possible and outside circulation should be confined to one copy to Sir Henry Tizard”.
We should point out that in this context the terms “publicity” and
“outside circulation” refer to publicity and distribution of the report
within the MOD. There was certainly
no question of informing the public.
In
looking at the activities of the Flying Saucer Working Party one cannot
overstate the influence of the Americans. The
phrase “following the lead given by the Americans on this subject” which we
quote in the previous paragraph is extremely revealing and it is clear from the
report itself that much of the material comes from liaison with those involved
with Projects Sign and Grudge. There
are other clues. As we have said,
R. V. Jones forged extremely close links with the Americans on a range of
intelligence issues and it is interesting to note that the fourth item of the
Flying Saucer Working Party’s terms of reference (requiring them to liaise
with US authorities) was a late - though undoubtedly sensible - addition to the
original remit.
Once
the terms of reference included a requirement to get alongside the Americans on
the UFO question, active liaison began. A
member of the Flying Saucer Working Party duly travelled to America to meet with
US authorities. It is also known
that H. Marshall Chadwell was consulted and sat in on at least one of the Flying
Saucer Working Party’s meetings.
Chadwell
was Assistant Director of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and in
1952 and 1953 was one of the key figures in the Scientific Panel on UFOs, better
known as the Robertson Panel, after its chairman H. P. Robertson, an eminent
physicist from the California Institute of Technology.
Robertson
had been President Eisenhower’s Scientific Adviser during the war, holding the
rank of a four-star General. He had
worked closely with R. V. Jones on various scientific intelligence matters and
moved seamlessly between government service and academia.
His post-war appointments included a post as theoretical physicist in
Pasadena, associated with the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Observatories, and
a spell as head of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group at the Pentagon.
The
Robertson Panel’s sceptical report concluded that further study of the UFO
phenomenon was not warranted, though as CIA Chief Historian Gerald Haines has
confirmed, the CIA did not abandon their interest in the phenomenon.
It
is also interesting to note what Edward Ruppelt (former head of the USAF’s
Project Blue Book) says about the British UFO research effort.
Writing in his 1956 book The Report
on Unidentified Flying Objects he makes a number of specific references to
the UK.
In
chapter 3 he states that the 1948 document Estimate
of the Situation (prepared by staff on the USAF’s Project Sign, initially
classified Top Secret and concluding that some UFOs were extraterrestrial)
mentioned that “Ghost Aeroplanes” had been detected on British radar early
in 1947.
In chapter 10 there is a sentence that reads as follows:
“Two RAF intelligence
officers who were in the US on a classified mission brought six single-spaced
typed pages of questions they and their friends wanted answered”.
Chapter 14 mentions the September 1952 UFO sightings during Operation Mainbrace (including the sightings at RAF Topcliffe). Ruppelt comments:
“It was these sightings, I was told by an RAF
exchange intelligence officer in the Pentagon, that caused the RAF to officially
recognise the UFO”.
In
chapter 17 Ruppelt reveals that even after he had left Project Blue Book and the
USAF, friends in RAF intelligence kept him informed about latest developments,
on a private basis.
Another
indication of the strong US influence on the Flying Saucer Working Party is the
fact that their June 1951 final report was entitled Unidentified Flying Objects. This
term had been devised by Ruppelt himself, early in 1951, but was not at the time
in use outside US Government circles.
To
put the above remarks about US influence into context, it is worth noting the
extent to which Britain was in thrall to America more generally by the early
Fifties. This process had started
during the Second World War with the Lend-Lease Bill, the terms of which had
contributed to the decline of British power and influence.
By the end of the war it was clear that in a very real sense the British
Empire had been supplanted by an American one.
In intelligence matters too, the historic position had been reversed and
in post-war years Britain was very much the junior partner to the US.
The
Flying Saucer Working Party had been dissolved in 1951 amidst a frenzy of
scepticism that had clearly been fuelled by the Americans.
The response that Churchill received to his 1952 enquiry showed that the
sceptics still had the upper hand within the MOD.
But this was soon to change. During
the period 1952 to 1957 there were a series of UFO sightings involving the
military, which forced the MOD to rethink and then reverse its policy.
These included sightings during Operation Mainbrace in September 1952
(including those at RAF Topcliffe), the West Malling incident on 3 November
1953, Flight Lieutenant Salandin’s near-collision with a UFO on 14 October
1954, the Lakenheath/Bentwaters radar/visual sightings on 13 and 14 August 1956
and the RAF West Freugh incident on 4 April 1957.
High-profile
sightings such as these, together with the increasing number of reports from the
general public, pushed the sceptics within MOD onto the defensive.
The Flying Saucer Working Party’s recommendation that UFO sightings
should not be investigated was overturned and by the mid-Fifties two Air
Ministry Divisions were actively involved in investigating UFO sightings.
The divisions concerned were S6, a civilian secretariat division on the
air staff, and DDI(Tech), a technical intelligence division. Their brief was to research and investigate the UFO
phenomenon looking for evidence of any threat to the UK.
This
article gives what we believe is the most comprehensive overview yet written
concerning the early years of official British interest in UFOs.
We hope that the information and references will encourage other
researchers to follow some of the leads given here.
Some
time in the future, it may be that the MOD writes an Official History of its
involvement in the UFO issue, in much the same way as such accounts are produced
on major events such as the Falklands Conflict or the Gulf War.
If and when such an Official History is written, it will doubtless cover
much of the material in this article, as well as more recent events such as the
Rendlesham Forest incident.
But
any Official History must also focus on the personalities involved in official
research and investigation into UFOs. In
looking at the story told in this article it is clear that the same names crop
up repeatedly and that there are some intriguing links between some of these key
players. It is also intriguing to
see the way in which the sceptic versus believer debate about the
extraterrestrial hypothesis has been conducted at the very highest levels of
government and military. This is as
much a part of the story as the incidents themselves.
by
Georgina Bruni and Nick Pope