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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
from radar without playing havoc with the tracking and control of military aircraft? The answer was a gadget that simply tuned out the ‘noise’ created by the presence of smaller birds and other clutter from radar screens whilst at the same time increasing the strength and visibility of echoes created by aircraft. This system was simplified further when all ‘friendly’ aircraft were fitted with transponders that transmit a coded identification signal to ground stations. Advances in radar technology may help explain why the majority of accounts describing UFOs on radar were made during the 1940s and 1950s, before technological innovations removed the noise that plagued older sys- tems. The older post-war radars appear to have been more effective detec- tors of a range of natural and unusual phenomena including ‘angels’. Once computers were used to remove anything that did not behave like an air- craft from screens, reports of UFOs on radar became fewer. This was brought home to me during a visit to a busy RAF radar control centre in 2005. When I asked one of the operators if they ever detected radar UFOs she replied, with a smile: ‘Sometimes, but when we spot one we just send for the technicians who come along and tune them out.’ T H E F LY I N G S A U C E R A G E 5 3 NOTES ON THE TEXT 17 Extract from interview with S. Hubbard, 18 April 2002; 18 New York Times, quoted in TheTimes, 30 July 1952; 19 Churchill Archives, University of Cambridge, Lord Duncan Sandys papers, DSND 15/4; 20 Extract from interview with Michael Swiney, 13 March 2002; NOTES ON THE TEXT 21 Extract from interview with David Crofts, 26 February 2002; 22 AIR 29 /2310; 23 J. Gough, Watching the Skies (HMSO 1993); 24 RAF Radar Museum newsletter no. 35–36, April–July 2003; 25 AIR16 /1485.
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.