Flt Lt James Salandin's Meteor near miss over Southend-on-Sea

In 1954 the Royal Auxiliary Air Force still flew with weekend pilots. Flight Lieutenant James R. "Jimmy" Salandin was one of them, serving with No. 604 (County of Middlesex) Squadron. His aircraft was a Gloster Meteor F Mk 8, a single-seat jet fighter. By his own later account, he had been sceptical about flying saucers.

Thursday, 14 October 1954. Salandin took off from RAF North Weald in Essex at 4:15 p.m. The weather was perfect. The sky was blue and cloudless. Two other Meteors were flying nearby.

At about 16,000 feet, over the outlying districts of Southend, he noticed a whole lot of contrails high above him, possibly at 30-40,000 feet. Something came down through the middle of them toward Southend. Then it headed toward him.

Two circular objects hurtled past, travelling in the opposite direction to the Meteors. One was silvery in colour. The other was gold. The Daily Sketch later put their speed at about 1,100 mph. They went off to his port side.

The third object did not. It "came straight toward me and closed to within a few hundred yards, almost filling the windscreen." He described a bun-shaped top, a flange like two saucers in the middle and a bun underneath. It was silvery and metallic. No portholes. No flames. No markings. "The thing was right in my sights."

At the last second, it flipped to one side and streaked past at tremendous speed, down his port side.

Badly shaken, Salandin flew around quietly for 10 minutes or so to regain his composure. Then he reported his experience to ground control at North Weald. The gun camera was loaded. Everything had happened so quickly that he never pressed the button. No film exists.

On the ground, the squadron intelligence officer Derek Dempster, a former RAF pilot, took his account. Dempster said he was fully convinced of Salandin's sincerity and professional reliability.

The report went to Air Ministry Intelligence. Nothing further was heard about it. In June 1956 the writer D. Wightman put the case to an Air Ministry official for the magazine URANUS. The official said there were no investigation results for this and several other cases. No radar data was mentioned in any account.

Gordon Creighton, a later editor of Flying Saucer Review, wrote that a former 604 Squadron member told him personnel had been warned to keep away from the magazine.

No official conclusion was ever recorded, and no published explanation has been found. The accounts differ in places. The original magazine article printed the date as 4 October, an error TRUE magazine repeated in 1967. Versions also differ on whether the two smaller objects passed between the Meteors or broke away to port. In 1985 Salandin told the researcher Timothy Good: "I haven't found a satisfactory explanation for what I saw, but I know what I saw."

The story reached the Daily Sketch on 2 February 1955 under the headline "Flying Saucer Buzzed Me". That spring it ran in the very first issue of Flying Saucer Review, with Dempster as the magazine's first editor. Salandin's near miss sits among a cluster of 1950s British encounters reported by Meteor pilots, and it has never been explained.