The Cosford Incident

The Ministry of Defence kept a small desk for UFO reports. Nick Pope ran it from 1991 to 1994. On the night of 30 to 31 March 1993, he later said, "the phones were ringing off the hook." Some call it "Britain's Roswell", a name that usually belongs to Rendlesham Forest. Most simply call it the Cosford Incident.

It began in Somerset at about 8:30 pm. In the Quantock Hills, an off-duty police officer with a group of scouts saw a craft "like two Concordes flying side by side and joined together." At Rugeley, a family chased a huge, low craft by car. It seemed to land in a field. By the time they arrived, it was gone. After midnight, on one farm, a herd of cattle stood silently in a circle, facing inward.

Then, about 1:10 am. A two-man RAF Police patrol at RAF Cosford saw "two circular creamy white lights moving southeast at approximately 1000 feet." No engine noise. "A slight red glow could be seen at the rear of the lights as they disappeared from view over the horizon." Police in Devon and Cornwall and an Irish Defence Forces helicopter crew reported bright lights too.

The Cosford police phoned the Met Office observer at RAF Shawbury, about 20 miles away, and told him to watch for UFOs. Wayne Elliott had served in the RAF for 8 years. At about 2:40 am, he saw a triangular craft, somewhere between a C130 and a B747 in size. It moved slowly towards the base. From about 400 to 500 ft it fired a narrow beam at the ground, "sweeping backwards and forwards across the field beyond the perimeter fence, as if it were looking for something." He could feel its low humming as well as hear it. Then the beam vanished. The object passed over his head at several hundred miles per hour.

More than 30 sightings reached the MoD in about six hours. Radar tapes showed nothing unusual. Military and civil air traffic were ruled out. Pope briefed his superiors that "an unidentified object of unknown origin was operating in the UK Air Defence Region without being detected on radar." On 22 April 1993, Air Marshal Sir Anthony Bagnall was told the sightings matched some characteristics of the rumoured Aurora spy plane. The Pentagon drew a blank. Pope was told to drop the subject. His file opened at The National Archives on 17 August 2009.

Skeptics see two causes. Cosmos 2238, a Russian satellite, was launched from Baikonur on 30 March. Its rocket body re-entered at around 1:10 am. Gary Anthony of BUFORA modelled the track over Ireland, Devon and Cornwall, and NASA/NORAD told Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos the path "correlates perfectly well." Pope later wrote that most of the sightings "can be attributed to this event."

Shawbury came about 90 minutes later. In 2005, a former Shawbury airman identified the object as a Dyfed-Powys police helicopter following a stolen car down the A5, its observer using a NiteSun searchlight. Elliott agreed: "now I'm convinced that what I saw has been explained." Pope argued the re-entry never explained the low level sightings. The evening reports, four hours earlier, still have no specific explanation.

David Clarke called it "a classic case of misinterpretation." Pope called Cosford "the turning point." He died on 6 April 2026, aged 60. His file is still there, open to anyone.