UFO research guide

2
aircraft were discounted, the identity of a UFO was of no further interest to the British
military.
To understand the origins of the British government's interest in UFOs it is necessary to
look back to an earlier period of 20th century history. In 1909 and 1913 phantom
airships - dark cigar-shaped flying objects carrying searchlights - were sighted at night
moving over many British towns and cities. As tension grew in the build up to the First
World War, newspapers and some politicians accused the Germans of sending Zeppelin
airships to spy on dockyards and other strategic areas around the British coastline.
In October 1912, when sightings of an unidentified aircraft were made over the Royal
Navy torpedo school at Sheerness, Essex, questions were asked in the House of
Commons. This led the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to order an
investigation. Inquiries by naval intelligence failed to establish the identity of the aircraft
but the Germans were widely believed to be responsible. The relevant papers are in AIR
1/2455 and AIR 1/2456.
Both the War Office and Admiralty investigated further sightings of unidentified airships,
aircraft and mysterious moving lights. These were usually seen at night and were
frequently reported to the military authorities from many parts of the British Isles during
the First World War. In 1916 a War Office intelligence circular found that 89 percent of
the reports could be explained by bright planets, searchlights and natural phenomena. It
concluded: „There is no evidence on which to base a suspicion that this class of enemy
activity ever existed‟ ('Alleged Enemy Signalling 1916', WO 158/989).
More sightings of aerial phenomena were made during the Second World War by RAF
aircrew. These included balls of fire and mysterious moving lights that appeared to
pursue Allied aircraft operating over occupied Europe. American pilots dubbed these
UFOs „foo-fighters’, from a character in a comic strip whose catch phrase was „where
there's foo there's fire.‟ Although the foo-fighters did not appear to be hostile the
sightings alarmed air intelligence branches of the Air Ministry and US Army Air Force
as they prepared for the invasion of France. The RAF began to collect reports of „night
phenomena‟ from 1942 and later in the war, the Air Ministry shared intelligence on the
subject with the US authorities. They assumed the phenomena were German secret
weapons, such as the Me262 jet fighter. At the end of the war no traces of advanced
aircraft or weapons that could explain the „foo fighters‟ were found by the Allied
occupying forces. In addition, intelligence officers such as Dr RV Jones discovered that
German pilots had observed similar unexplained aerial phenomena. (See bibliography)
Air Ministry reports on „night phenomena‟ are at AIR 2/5070 while reports from aircrew
with Bomber Command's 115 Squadron in December 1943 can be found in AIR
14/2800.
In 1946 and 1947 the War Office and Air Ministry became involved in an investigation of
mysterious ghost rockets sighted over Scandinavia. Initially intelligence officers at the
Air Ministry believed the „flying bombs‟ (RV Jones memoirs, „Most Secret War‟ chapter
52, pg 510-11, 1978) were modified V2 rockets fired by Soviets, from captured Nazi
rocket plant at Peenemunde in the Baltic. Dr RV Jones, Director of Intelligence at the Air
Ministry in 1946, was sceptical of this theory. Drawing upon his wartime experiences, he
believed the scare was triggered by sightings of bright meteors in countries that feared