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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
range near Portsmouth he spotted what he at first thought was a ‘flying saucer’ in the distance. ‘Visibility was good, there being a cloudless sky and bright sunshine. The object was located and held by a telescope and gave the appearance of being a circular shining disc moving on a regular flight path. It was only after observation had been kept for several minutes, and the altitude of the object changed so that it did not reflect the sunlight to the observer’s eye, that it was identified as being a perfectly normal aircraft.’ ( DEFE 44 /119 ) Sceptics and believers During the summer of 1952 there was a new wave of sightings across the world. In America more than 500 sightings were reported to the United States Air Force in July alone, leading future CIA director Major General Charles P. Cabell to launch a new UFO project, Blue Book, under the con- trol of the Air Technical Intelligence Center with Captain Ruppelt as its director. For the Americans, the most alarming of these sightings occurred in the US capital,Washington DC. On 19 and 20 July 1952, strange moving blips appeared on radars at Washington’s National Airport and at Andrews Air Force Base.The phenomena reappeared the following weekend, sometimes moving slowly, then reversing and moving off at incredible speed. Aircraft were scrambled, but the crews saw nothing, despite being vectored towards targets that were visible on ground radar. At the same time, civilian aircrew and ground controllers reported seeing strange lights whilst the phenom- ena were visible on radar.These events alarmed the Truman administration and led the New York Times to demand why ‘a jet fighter of Air Defence Command, capable of a speed of 600 miles an hour, failed to catch one of the “objects”’.18 A huge press conference was called at the Pentagon as officials moved to calm public fears. High-ranking figures, including the director of United States Air Force intelligence, Major General John Samford, reassured the assembled media the radar blips were probably the result of temperature inversions created by the hot summer weather.These types of unusual con- ditions, he said, could produce false echoes on radar screens. Samford’s public reassurances followed those given to authority figures in private: President Harry Truman himself had been sufficiently concerned to phone Captain Ruppelt asking for an explanation. And Truman was not the only national leader who read the newspaper headlines. On 28 July, the day before the Washington press conference, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had sent a memo to his Secretary of State for Air and copied it to Lord Cherwell, one of his most trusted scientific advisors.This demanded: 4 6 T H E F LY I N G S A U C E R A G E
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.