The Wash Incident: Lights Over Skegness and the Boston Stump Blip

Saturday, 5 October 1996. The early hours. Police patrols at Skegness reported "a strange red and green rotating light in the sky southeast from Skegness". It seemed to hang high in the sky directly over The Wash. The press log, timed at 03:14, is brief: "stationary and there is no sound." Yarmouth Coastguard faxed the report to the RAF and alerted RAF Kinloss.

Out on the water, the crew of a tanker logged as the "Conocoast" had the lights in view. At 03:46 they were "flashing red, green and white", "approximately one mile high". At 04:08 they were "still stationary and flashing red, green, blue and white". "The lights are both visible with the naked eye and both exhibit the same characteristics."

At 05:17 police in Boston saw a light "towards the south-east... about 40-45 degrees up in the sky." They reportedly filmed it. At 07:08 the crew of a civil flight described "multi-coloured, flashing, stationary lights." Flt Lt McFarlane at RAF Neatishead passed the report on.

At RAF Neatishead, a controller spotted a stationary blip on the feed from the civil Claxby radar near Market Rasen. It sat over Boston. RAF Kinloss reported that Northwood had a contact "221 degrees at 16 miles", stationary, height unknown. It must be "quite a size", Kinloss remarked, to be visible from Skegness.

The Eastern Evening News wrote of "two large unexplained objects hovering in the skies above the Wash". Ministry of Defence spokesperson Nigel Sergeant told the paper: "We don't know what they are." Then, at 19:20, Anglia radar gave its verdict. It was Boston Stump.

February 2010. The Ministry of Defence files for 1994 to 2000 were released through The National Archives. The blip, they said, was the tower of St Botolph's Church in Boston, the Boston Stump, which "appears occasionally on some radars in certain radar propagation conditions." Operators at two separate locations had judged it a permanent echo, "not suspicious in nature."

The lights were "observed from three separate locations high above the horizon and in the same general direction, but without corroborating radar data." No associated air vehicle was detected. "This suggests a distant celestial source." The police video only reached the ministry on 5 November. Drawing on it, the Royal Observatory Greenwich judged the lights "of celestial origin and likely to be Venus which had been exceptionally bright during the week in question."

June 2017. A second release, and a new story in the press. The Sun and others reported that RAF Coningsby had tracked the object for seven hours, and that a request to scramble aircraft was "overruled at the highest level". Letters on House of Commons letterhead to former Defence Secretary Michael Portillo called the military response an "absolute shambles". The Lincolnite said the papers "suggest a cover-up". These claims rest on press coverage. Years earlier, a page credited to Ian Reed of the National UFO Society UK had argued that the Boston Stump verdict "contradicted earlier technical observations".

A bright planet low in the south-east before dawn, twinkling through colours near the horizon. A church tower long known to radar. A blip that happened to sit near where Boston police were looking. Officially, the night had "no significance for the integrity of UK airspace". Remembered as the Wash Incident, it stands beside Cosford and Rendlesham Forest among Britain's radar-visual cases.