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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
this dramatic incident were subsequently destroyed. On his retirement, Air Commodore Swiney made inquiries with the MoD hoping to locate a copy of his original report on the incident. He was amazed to learn that most records of UFOs before 1962 had been routinely shredded. Today all that remains in the files at the National Archives is a single surviving reference in the flying school’s operations record book which simply records how the two men ‘sighted three mysterious “saucer-shaped objects” travelling at high speed at about 35,000 feet whilst on a high level navigation exercise.’ The document adds that air traffic control later reported radar plots that appeared to confirm their report ‘but Air Ministry discounted any possibil- ity of “extra terrestrial objects.”’22 Writing in 1988 Ralph Noyes, who was private secretary to the Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, at the time recalled their ‘own embarrassed unease, widely shared by the [RAF] opera- tions staff, that “our own people” had begun to fall for “that saucer non- sense”.’ Indeed, as a direct result of these incidents a decision was taken in 1953 that the Air Ministry should investigate UFO reports on a permanent basis and responsibility was delegated by the Chief of the Air Staff to a sec- tion of the air technical intelligence branch, DDI (Tech). The memoirs of Captain Edward Ruppelt refer to an exchange visit to Project Blue Book’s base at Wright-Patterson airfield, Ohio, by two RAF officers shortly after- wards. In his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1956, Rup- pelt revealed the officers were in the USA ‘on a classified mission’ during which one admitted the sightings during Operation Mainbrace had ‘caused the RAF to officially recognise the UFO.’ From angels to aliens One of the features of the UFO phenomenon that most concerned the Air Ministry was visual sightings that appeared to be corroborated by radar operators, as featured in the report by Michael Swiney and David Crofts. Unexplained phenomena had been tracked on RAF radars early in the Sec- ond World War (see p.25 of The UFO ) and again during the ‘ghost plane’ flap of 1947 (see p.33 of The UFO Files), but until 1952 none of these had involved visual sightings. In his history of UK air defence radar systems, Watching the Skies, Jack Gough says that ‘angel’ and ‘ghost’ echoes continued to plague RAF radars during the early 1950s. They sometimes appeared from the ground ‘as a cloud of responses very similar to the echoes obtained by small aircraft’. When tracked as individual echoes they could easily be mistaken for mili- tary aircraft as they followed a steady course and were plotted at heights from 2,000 ft to 10,000 ft.23 The Air Ministry turned to their scientists to provide a solution to this T H E F LY I N G S A U C E R A G E 5 1
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.