by Leslie Kean
The UK UFO was seen by a patrol of Air Force police based at the RAF station in Cosford, 150 miles northwest of London. Their official police report (classified Police In Confidence) stated that the UFO passed over the base “at great velocity … at an altitude of approximately 1,000 feet.” It described two white lights with a faint red glow at the rear, with no engine noise being heard. The Air Force police report also contained details of a number of civilian UFO sightings they had received in the course of making enquiries with other military bases, civil airports, and local police.
Later that night, the meteorological officer at RAF Shawbury—the base that provides advanced training for helicopter aircrew, air traffic controllers, and flight operations personnel for all three of the UK’s armed services—saw the UFO. He described to me how it had moved slowly across the countryside toward the base, at a speed of no more than 30 or 40 mph. He saw the craft fire a narrow beam of light (like a laser) at the ground and saw the light sweeping backward and forward across the field beyond the perimeter fence, as if it were looking for something. He heard an unpleasant low-frequency humming sound coming from the object and said he could feel as well as hear this—rather like standing in front of a bass speaker. He estimated the size of the craft to be midway between a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and a Boeing 747. Then he told me that the light beam had retracted in an unnatural way and that the craft had suddenly accelerated away to the horizon many times faster than a military aircraft. Here was an experienced Royal Air Force officer who regularly saw aircraft and helicopters, telling me about something he said was quite unlike anything he’s ever seen in his life. The MoD party line about UFOs being of “no defense significance” was looking decidedly shaky. What was I supposed to say to him, I wondered—“Don’t worry, it was probably just a weather balloon”?
For a number of reasons UFOs are notoriously underreported. The two main factors here are fear of disbelief and/or ridicule, and the fact that many people do not know who to contact with details of their sightings. While there were standing instructions that UFO reports sent to military bases, civil airports, and police stations should be forwarded to the MoD for investigation, this national reporting system did not always work. The case file on the March 30–31, 1993, UFO incident makes it clear that there were many more sightings than ever reached the department. One throwaway line from a police report of a sighting in Liskeard, Cornwall, stated that the object was “seen by other police officers throughout Devon and Cornwall.” We can only guess at the number of sightings that went unreported that night.
Because of the similarity between these reports and those repeatedly filed in Belgium in 1989 and 1990, I asked the Defence Intelligence Staff to make some discreet enquiries to the Belgian authorities through the British embassy in Brussels. As I recall, our air attaché was able to speak to General De Brouwer and the two F-16 pilots. It was clear that De Brouwer had done an excellent investigation under very difficult circumstances.
Like De Brouwer, I launched a detailed investigation into the Cosford sightings, the main difference being that the Cosford incident was not a “wave” but a one-time event, as are most UFO cases. I worked closely with the RAF, colleagues in the Defence Intelligence Staff, and personnel at the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at RAF Fylingdales. One of the first things that I did was order that radar tapes be impounded and sent to me at MoD Main Building in Whitehall. The radar data was downloaded onto standard VHS video cassettes and arrived shortly thereafter. I watched it with the relevant RAF specialists, who told me that there were a few odd radar returns, but that they were inconclusive. Radar is not an exact science, and in certain circumstances, false returns can be generated. Later, a more formal assessment of the radar data was made. Unfortunately, one of the radar heads was not working on primary radar during the reporting period, so only aircraft working secondary surveillance radar could be seen. But with this and with other checks, we were able to build up a picture of all aircraft and helicopter activity over the UK, so that we could factor them into the investigation and eliminate them from our enquiries if appropriate.
The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at RAF Fylingdales, with its powerful space-tracking radars, was an important part of my UFO investigation. The authorities there quickly alerted me to the fact that there had been a reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere of a Russian rocket carrying a communications satellite, Cosmos 2238. We postulated that this was a possible explanation for a cluster of UFO sightings that occurred at around 1:10 a.m. on March 31.
A theory often put forward to explain some of the most spectacular UFO sightings is that they might be prototype aircraft, drones, or other unmanned aerial vehicles. Of course, at any time we will be test-flying various things that you won’t see at the big air shows for several years, but the bottom line is that these tests occur in specific areas, so at least within government we can differentiate between black projects—a classified project that is not publicly acknowledged, such as the F-117 stealth fighter program, prior to 1988—and UFOs.
Even so, there had been controversy brewing about the American Aurora, an alleged hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird that some journalists and aviation enthusiasts alleged was being flown in British airspace without the knowledge of the UK authorities. So we raised the issue of the March 1993 UFO sightings with the U.S. authorities, through the British embassy in Washington. Was it possible that something had gone wrong with the normal processes for overflight of another country and could our UFO sightings be attributable to some U.S. prototype? The answer I got back—via our air attaché at the UK embassy in Washington—was extraordinary: The Americans had been having their own sightings of these large, triangular-shaped UFOs and wanted to know if the RAF might have such a craft, perhaps as part of a “black” program, capable of moving from a virtual hover to speeds of several thousand mph in an instant. We wish we had! The interesting thing about this was that somebody in the United States was still clearly taking an interest in UFOs, despite the apparent disengagement from the subject in 1969 with the closing of Project Blue Book.
Given the MoD’s “no defense significance” conclusion on UFOs, it seems fitting to conclude this section with quotes from MoD documents which contradict the usual stance. In a briefing that I prepared for the division head on April 16, 1993, after the Cosford investigation, I wrote: “It seems that an unidentified object of unknown origin was operating in the UK Air Defence Region without being detected on radar; this would appear to be of considerable defense significance, and I recommend that we investigate further, within MoD or with the U.S. authorities.”
My division head was normally skeptical about the UFO phenomenon, but on this occasion he agreed with my conclusion. His April 22, 1993, brief to the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (one of the UK’s most senior RAF officers) stated: “In summary, there would seem to be some evidence on this occasion that an unidentified object (or objects) of unknown origin was operating over the UK.”
This is about as close as the MoD will ever get to saying that there’s more to UFOs than misidentifications or hoaxes.
The Rendlesham Forest Incident:
A Cold Case Review
Britian’s most spectacular UFO incident occurred late on Christmas night 1980 and in the early hours of Boxing Day, when strange lights were seen in Rendlesham Forest, near Ipswich. The many witnesses were mainly United States Air Force personnel based at the joint U.S. Air Force/NATO twin bases RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk. Even though the events took place on British soil, these bases were U.S. Air Force facilities at that time. Rendlesham Forest lies between the twin bases, and as the Cold War was still decidedly frosty, a UFO sighting at two of the nation’s most sensitive military sites was most decidedly of interest.
At the UFO project, I had2 access to the large MoD file on this incident, which at that time had not been released to the public. Even the most basic information on this case was extraordinary, and
I decided to launch what police would call a cold case review of the incident. This was essentially an analysis of the MoD file on the case, assessing what we knew and—more important—seeing what the investigators had missed.
The series of events began in the early hours of December 26, when duty personnel reported seeing lights so bright that they feared an aircraft had crashed. They sought and obtained permission to go off-base and investigate. They didn’t find a crashed aircraft—they found a UFO.
The three-man patrol from the 81st Security Police Squadron—Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Ed Cabansag—saw a small metallic craft moving through the trees. At one point it appeared to land in a small clearing. They approached cautiously and Penniston got close enough to see strange markings on the side of the craft, which he likened to Egyptian hieroglyphs. He made some rapid sketches in his police notebook.3
Later on, because of the complicated legal and jurisdictional position of United States Air Force bases in the UK, police from Suffolk constabulary were called out to the site where the object had apparently landed. They conducted a brief but inconclusive examination and then left. But three indentations were visible in the clearing, and when mapped they formed the shape of an equilateral triangle. A Geiger counter was used to check the site and the readings peaked markedly in the depressions where the object—possibly on legs of some sort—had briefly come to Earth.
News of the UFO encounter spread quickly around the bases and came to the attention of the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt. He was skeptical, but had the witnesses write up official reports, including sketches of what they had seen. Two nights later Halt was at a social function when a young airman burst in and ran up to the colonel. “Sir,” he stammered, “it’s back.” Halt looked confused. “What?” he retorted. “What’s back?” “The UFO, sir—the UFO’s back.” Halt remained skeptical but gathered together a small team and went out into the forest to investigate. He subsequently stated that he went out with no expectation of seeing anything; in his own words, he said that his intention was to “debunk” the whole affair.
But he never did. He, too, encountered the UFO, becoming one of the highest ranking military officers ever to go on the record about a UFO sighting. As he and his men tracked the UFO, their radios began to malfunction and powerful mobile “light-alls,” brought along to illuminate the forest, mysteriously began to cut out. One piece of equipment that didn’t malfunction was the hand-held tape recorder that the colonel took with him to document his investigation. The tape recording still survives, and one can hear the rising tension in Halt’s voice and in the voices of his men as the UFO approaches: “I see it, too … It’s back again … It’s coming this way … There’s no doubt about it … This is weird … It looks like an eye winking at you … It almost burns your eyes … He’s coming toward us now … Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground … one object still hovering over Woodbridge base … beaming down.”
At one point the tension in their voices almost seems to become panic as the UFO makes a close approach and fires light beams down next to Halt and his men. Following these events, Charles Halt wrote an official report of the incident and sent it to the Ministry of Defence. Although somewhat innocuously entitled “Unexplained Lights,” his report described the first night’s UFO as being “metallic in appearance and triangular in shape … a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath … The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.” He went on to detail the radiation readings taken from the landing site and set out the description of his own sighting.
Halt’s report was received by the same Ministry of Defence section where, a little over ten years later, I would spend three years researching and investigating UFO sightings. The report went to my predecessors, who began an investigation. But they were hampered by a critical mistake that was to have dire consequences. For whatever reason—and it may have been nothing more than a simple typographical error—Charles Halt’s report gave incorrect dates for the incident. So when the MoD checked the radar tapes, they were looking at the wrong days.
Looking at radar evidence is a critical part of any UFO investigation. There have been plenty of spectacular UFO sightings over the years, many correlated with radar. The MoD’s comprehensive UFO files detail several such cases, including ones where RAF pilots encountered UFOs and gave chase—unsuccessfully, I might add. In the absence of any radar data that might confirm the presence of the Rendlesham Forest UFOs, the investigation petered out. Yet, as I was to discover years later, the UFO had been tracked, after all.
I spoke to former RAF radar operator Nigel Kerr, who had been stationed at RAF Watton at Christmas 1980 and had received a call from somebody at RAF Bentwaters. The caller wanted to know if there was anything unusual on his radar screen. He looked, and for three or four sweeps, something did show up, directly over the base. But it faded away, and no official report was ever made. It was only years later that Kerr even heard of the Rendlesham Forest incident and realized he might have a missing piece of the puzzle.
At the time, however, in the apparent absence of radar data to verify the presence of the UFO, arguably the most critical piece of evidence was never followed up: The Defence Intelligence Staff had assessed the radiation readings taken at the landing site and judged them to be “significantly higher than the average background.” In fact, they were about seven times what would have been expected for the area concerned.
In reassessing the case during my review, I was disappointed by what I found. I discovered a series of additional mistakes that had fatally flawed the first investigation: failure to cordon off the landing site, search it with metal detectors, or take soil samples; delay in reporting the incident to the MoD; failings in information-sharing between the MoD and the USAF. If the investigation had been handled differently, we might know a lot more today about the strange object that landed. While delay and poor information-sharing were arguably human errors, the root of the problem was confusion about jurisdiction and whether the British or the Americans should lead the investigation. My own view is that both had jurisdiction but that the UK authorities had primacy and should have led. In fairness, the difficulties were compounded by the unprecedented nature of the incident. There was simply no standard operating procedure to cover a situation like this. I rechecked the assessment of the radiation readings, this time with the Defence Radiological Protection Survey, and they confirmed the original analysis.
I have spoken with the key witnesses in this complex case on many occasions. I am convinced that they are being truthful, and while recollections vary in some instances, this is to be expected given the time that has passed and given the fact that events occurred over several nights, with different people being involved at different locations. Indeed, I would be suspicious if everyone told exactly the same story, because in my experience this would suggest improper collusion between the witnesses.
But the simple fact that this is a multiple-witness event, where those involved are military personnel and where there is physical evidence, makes this one of the most significant UFO sightings ever.4
The late five-star admiral Lord Hill-Norton, the UK’s former Chief of the Defence Staff (the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States), though retired at the time, often asked me to brief him on the UFO phenomenon and draft material for him on the subject—a fearsome task for a middle-ranking government official. He was particularly outspoken on the Rendlesham Forest case and felt strongly that the MoD’s line on the incident (that the events were of “no defense significance”) was entirely unacceptable and at odds with the facts. In a letter that he wrote to a UK defense minister, which he copied to me, the admiral summarized his views on the case as follows:
My position both privately and publicly expressed over the last dozen years or more, is that there are only two possibilities, either:
An intrusion into our Air Space and a land
ing by unidentified craft took place at Rendlesham, as described. Or:
The Deputy Commander of an operational, nuclear armed, U.S. Air Force Base in England, and a large number of his enlisted men, were either hallucinating or lying.
Either of these simply must be “of interest to the Ministry of Defence,” which has been repeatedly denied, in precisely those terms.5
Project Condign
On May 15, 2006, under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, which is broadly similar to the U.S. FOIA, the Ministry of Defence published a formerly secret report on UFOs. Much information about UFOs had already been released, both at the National Archives and on the Ministry of Defence’s website, but the release of this latest study was different and totally unprecedented. The study was classified “Secret UK Eyes Only” and only eleven copies of the report were ever made. It ran to over 460 pages and was given the code name Project Condign. Work started in 1996 and the final report was not published until December 2000.
Interestingly, the timescale is broadly similar to the semiofficial COMETA Report from France, which was initiated in 1995 and released in 1999. There was no link between the two projects, and the high classification and extreme sensitivity of the UK study precluded liaison with any other country.
The report represented an attempt to undertake a proper, in-depth scientific study that was going to look at all the evidence the MoD had amassed over the decades and come to a definitive view about the UFO phenomenon. My opposite number in the Defence Intelligence Staff, who was my main DIS contact and my gateway to this secretive organization, had first discussed this with me in 1993. Like me, he seemed intrigued by certain UFO cases in our files and our discussions about UFO aerodynamics and propulsion systems were like something from a Star Trek script. Nothing was said openly, but when conventional explanations for some of the most compelling UFO cases were eliminated, fingers were pointed suggestively upward. And whenever the question of who was operating these UFOs was mentioned, the marvelous phrase “these people” was used. More often than not, these were private meetings between the two of us, at which no notes were taken. However, on one occasion my boss accompanied me and sat in silence for most of what turned out to be a particularly surreal briefing. “What did he mean by the phrase ‘these people’?” he asked, in an exasperated fashion, on the way back to our own office.