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The National Archives published this edited extract from Chapter 2 of David Clarke's 2009 book The UFO Files, which draws on Ministry of Defence UFO records. It covers Stan Hubbard's 1950 Farnborough sightings, which the Flying Saucer Working Party attributed to optical illusion or normal aircraft. It also covers Churchill's 1952 memo asking about flying saucers, the Topcliffe sighting during Operation Mainbrace, a Meteor crew's sighting from Little Rissington, and RAF research concluding that most radar 'angels' were birds.
“RAF”14 pages
ition and then vanished. Subsequently he learned that aircraft were scram- bled by Fighter Command to intercept these UFOs. When I interviewed Michael Swiney in 2004 he recalled his reaction: ‘I was frightened, I make no bones about it. It was something supernat- ural, perhaps, and when I landed someone told me I looked as if I had seen a ghost. I immediately thought of saucers, because that was actually what they looked like… I even put an entry in my logbook, which reads: “saucers! … 3 ‘flying saucers’ sighted at height, confirmed by GCI [radar].”’20 On landing at Little Rissington the two men were ordered to remain in their quarters until the following day, when an Air Ministry team arrived to interview them.The team took statements and asked the men to draw what they had seen. Swiney’s student, David Crofts, recalled he was told ‘they [Air Intelligence] had been in communication with every country in the world that was likely to have that sort of aircraft in the vicinity and drew a blank.’ When I interviewed him in 2004 he remembered: ‘They also said they [the UFOs] had been picked up on radar; fighters had been scrambled and the target had a ground speed of 600 knots, heading east but the fight- ers saw nothing, didn’t make a contact and returned to base.’21 Despite this clear testimony it appears the men’s statements describing 5 0 T H E F LY I N G S A U C E R A G E FIg.18 An extract from the Operations Record Book of RAF Little Rissington that includes a sighting of ‘three mysterious saucer- shaped objects’ by the crew of a RAF Meteor jet on 21 October 1952. aIR 29/2310
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.