The RAF Tangmere Meteor Flying Saucer and the Wartling Radar Return

RAF Tangmere lies near Chichester, on the West Sussex coast. In 1950 it was home to Meteor jet fighters. About 70 kilometres to the east, on the Pevensey Levels near Eastbourne, stood RAF Wartling. It was a wartime Ground Controlled Interception radar station. On one summer afternoon, a pilot from the first and a radar crew at the second would report something neither could explain.

1 June 1950. 14:30. A Meteor pilot from Tangmere was flying an easterly course over the Portsmouth area at 20,000 feet. Then the object appeared. It was travelling at very high speed on a reciprocal course, 1,000 to 2,000 feet above the jet and roughly 1,200 yards to starboard. The pilot described it as circular, and of bright metallic appearance.

In David Clarke's words, it "sped past his Meteor jet fighter at 20,000 feet." The newspapers later added a detail the official report does not contain. It was "shining, revolving, and disc-like." The pilot reported the object on landing at Tangmere. The pilot is not named in the accounts that survive.

The pilot was being debriefed by squadron intelligence when Tangmere made inquiries of the radar station at Wartling. The answer was startling. At about the same time as the sighting, the Duty Controller and three radar operators had observed an unusual response on the P.P.I., the radar's circular plan display. The target appeared to be moving at between 1,300 and 1,650 knots, "first approaching and then receding from the station." Then it vanished from their screens. No aircraft of 1950 could fly that fast.

On 7 June 1950 the story made page one of the Daily Herald and the Western Mail. The Western Mail called it "Britain's first flying saucer." Sir Henry Tizard, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence, felt that such reports "should not be dismissed out of hand." The Tangmere case helped lead to the Flying Saucer Working Party.

It had five members, drawn from the technical intelligence branches of the Air Ministry, Admiralty, War Office and Ministry of Defence. It was chaired by G. L. Turney. It first met in October 1950 at the former Hotel Metropole on Northumberland Avenue, London. Out of hundreds of reports, Tangmere was one of only three it thought worth a closer look. Another was the Farnborough sighting of 14 August 1950.

The secret report, DSI/JTIC Report No 7, arrived in June 1951. It found it "impossible to believe" that "an unconventional object could have flown at high speed and low altitude over a densely-populated area on a fine summer morning without anyone else having reported it." The pilot, it concluded, had experienced an optical illusion or mistaken a normal aircraft. The radar blip was blamed on a signal from another transmitter, possibly ship-borne, somewhere in the Portsmouth and Isle of Wight area. If its pulses were timed in step with Wartling's, it would look like a fast-moving target. Sighting and blip were treated as separate events that happened to coincide. The party recommended "very strongly that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available."

The report stayed hidden for half a century. In 2001 the Ministry of Defence released it to David Clarke and Andy Roberts. Clarke calls it the last surviving copy. It is held at The National Archives as DEFE 44/119.

Some details still do not sit easily. The verdict speaks of low altitude on a summer morning. The pilot reported 20,000 feet at 14:30. An object heading west over Portsmouth would have been moving away from Wartling, yet the radar target first approached. The working party set up at Tizard's urging closed the matter. Two years later, Exercise Mainbrace revived Air Ministry interest.