Lightning XS894: Capt. William Schaffner and the Foxtrot 94 "UFO Abduction" (North Sea, 1970)

Autumn 1970. NATO was running a tactical evaluation exercise, a TACEVAL, simulating a Soviet air attack on the east coast. At RAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire, No. 5 Squadron flew the English Electric Lightning F6. Capt. William Schaffner was a USAF exchange pilot and a Vietnam veteran. He had 121 hours on the Lightning. Only 18 of them were at night.

8 September 1970. Schaffner took off in Lightning XS894. Without the squadron being told, the task had changed from interception to shadowing a low-speed target. Nobody told him its speed. The target was an Avro Shackleton, WR981, coming down the North Sea at 1,500 feet, navigation lights on.

A controller at RAF Patrington guided him in. "Contact with a set of lights in that area," Schaffner reported. He would need to "do some manoeuvring to slow her down a little bit." The controller told him to "keep a sharp look out." Then the calls went unanswered. "Nothing heard." Aboard the Shackleton, the crew had glimpsed a flashing white light. When it "went out", Colin Pomeroy recalled, "we all thought that this was because it had flown off to starboard."

The Lightning struck the sea at low speed and planed along the surface before sinking, five miles off Flamborough Head. Royal Navy divers found the wreck on 7 October 1970. It was almost intact. The canopy was closed. The cockpit was empty. Schaffner's body was never found.

1992. Pat Otter, assistant editor of the Grimsby Evening News, had covered the search as a young reporter. An anonymous caller claiming to have served on the RAF crash investigation team now told him a different story. Schaffner, he said, had been vectored onto a UFO tracked on radar "ninety miles east of Whitby". It turned sharply and sped up to "17,400 mph". The caller's transcript described "a bluish conical shape which was so bright he could hardly look at it", accompanied by an object like a large glass football. It ended: "Wait a second, its turning…coming straight for me….am taking evasive action…."

The RAF Board of Inquiry papers, released in the 2000s, tell it differently. Schaffner flew into the sea during a low-level night shadowing task he had not been trained for. During servicing, the canopy's firing unit had been seated wrongly. He pulled the ejection handle, but the cartridge did not fire, the canopy stayed on, and the seat interlock blocked ejection. He opened the canopy by hand and escaped, but became separated from his survival equipment and is presumed to have drowned. The canopy closed later as hydraulic pressure decayed.

David Clarke found the authentic transcript bore no resemblance to the UFO version. A USAF colleague called its language "utter hokum". Otter later said he "never believed the man's story, but felt it was too good not to publish when he came up against a wall of official denials." Dodd held firm: "I don't think that we will ever get to the bottom of what happened because the RAF would never accept that a UFO could be involved."

The pilot's youngest son, Michael Schaffner, put it simply: "Not once in the 30 years since my father's death had we any thought that it was anything more than a tragic accident." Clarke compares the case to Flight 19, a myth grown around a real loss. Papers on it surfaced in the Ministry of Defence UFO files released by The National Archives in 2011. One file is reportedly closed until 2085.