Little Rissington UFO Incident

Autumn 1952. RAF Little Rissington, Gloucestershire, was home to the Central Flying School. NATO's Exercise Mainbrace had ended in September. A sighting at RAF Topcliffe on 19 September had made headlines around the world. The next RAF encounter would stay secret for about fifty years.

Tuesday, 21 October 1952. The afternoon. Flight Lieutenant Michael Swiney, an instructor, took off in a Gloster Meteor T.7 trainer with his student, Lieutenant David Crofts of the Royal Navy. It was a high-level navigation exercise.

At about 12,000 feet the Meteor broke through a layer of cloud. Ahead and above were three objects. Swiney's first thought was three parachutes coming down towards them. Crofts saw "three dots ahead", no bigger than a thumb-nail at arm's length.

The jet climbed towards them. The objects were later put at about 35,000 feet. Swiney described "three white, or nearly white, circular objects… two of them were on a level keel, and one of them was canted at a slight angle." Crofts called them "lens shaped, like an ellipse," and iridescent. There was no visible propulsion. No portholes. "They were not leaving a condensation trail as I knew we were," Swiney said.

Swiney radioed ground control, called off the exercise and turned for home. Crofts asked to give chase. Swiney said no. Then, "all of a sudden… they simply weren't there. They had just disappeared." The whole encounter lasted about ten minutes.

RAF Sopley tracked unidentified aircraft crossing south-west England. The plotting tables at RAF Box, Rudloe Manor, showed the targets too. ATCC Gloucester "reported radar plots to confirm this." Intelligence officers later told Crofts the targets were heading east at 600 knots. Terry Barefoot, a retired Signals officer at Rudloe Manor, recalled "a fantastic speed, approximately 3,000 miles per hour." Two Meteor F.8 fighters were scrambled. They made no contact.

After landing, Crofts was confined to quarters. Swiney was sent home until morning. The next day an Air Ministry intelligence team took statements and had both men draw sketches. Crofts found them "not very high powered." They told him they had checked with every country likely to have that sort of aircraft. None matched.

The Central Flying School record book, now at The National Archives, closes the matter in a line. The Air Ministry "discounted any possibility of 'extra terrestrial objects'." Swiney's own logbook reads: "(SAUCERS!) 3 'Flying Saucers' sighted at height. Confirmed by G.C.I."

The crew's reports and sketches went to Air Ministry intelligence in London. They have never been released. Swiney said he briefly retrieved his own report in 1974, while working at the Ministry of Defence. Officially, pre-1967 UFO files were destroyed after five years. A CIA memo of December 1952 said the autumn incidents "caused the RAF to officially recognise the UFO". It does not clearly name Little Rissington.

The two men went on the record in 2002, through research by David Clarke and Andy Roberts for the book Out of the Shadows. Clarke writes that neither man's account changed in fifty years. Swiney retired as an Air Commodore and died in 2016, aged 90. His verdict stood: "both David Crofts and I saw something, the like of which we had never seen before… I cannot explain it."