FT263/264

The recent closure of British air space due to an ash cloud from a volcano in Iceland led to an interesting side effect. During the UFO age, the skies above the UK have never been so empty of normal aviation distractions.

Almost straight away, eager ufo­logists referred to the unique opportun­ity provided by this interruption. It was proposed that we stage sky watches in the certain knowledge that anything witnessed could not be a terrestrial aircraft. Would this prove an irresistible lure to some non-terrestrial craft? optimists asked.

So far, no aliens; but early indicat­ions do suggest that there were more sightings than usual reported during the week of the big shut down. A video appears to show a trio of flashing lights over Liverpool rooftops on the evening of 20 April. Other sightings of moving glows were described over Aberdeen and Northampton, and UFO group LAPIS reports that on 18 April two men camping at Wirksworth in Derbyshire had a scare at 4.30am as two stars moved slowly across the sky and seemed to fire a smaller light from one to the other.

I personally fielded as many calls from primary sources such as Jodrell Bank between 16 and 20 April 2010 as over the preceding three months, supporting the argument that skies clear of aircraft allowed witnesses to see more UFOs. However, I suspect most are typical misperceptions of things like Chinese Lanterns unaffected by the aviation restrict­ions. In my view, people became unusually aware of the sky during the volcanic hiatus and were more likely to think ‘UFO’ when they saw something unusual. Indeed several witnesses made the point that “it must be a UFO because there were no planes”, suggesting they had no idea of the other things (such as the hundreds of orbiting satellites) that can seem UFO-like as they move sedately and then vanish on entering the Earth’s shadow.

Nevertheless, I’m mindful of what happened when a flood of seemingly innocuous reports arrived in 1991 and I was equally tempted to dismiss them all as misperceptions.


THE BIG GREEN THING
I started to get an influx of calls from witnesses who contacted Jodrell Bank on the night of 20 February 1991 and, as in 2010, they didn’t seem too interesting at first.

A group of workers at an office at Stoke on Trent described seeing a big streak of light that moved majestically and then lit up the sky with a silent explosion. Other reports came from across northern Britain.

One of the most lucid was from a farmer’s wife near Sandbach in Cheshire. She told me of a “a big green thing” that appeared in the south west then headed away. She saw it very clearly against the dark sky, pulsing from dark, almost devilish green to a much brighter lurid green. She assumed it was an aircraft, quite possibly on fire and about to crash. Then – as it moved behind an outbuilding – she awaited the explos­ion but none came. Neither did the object reappear.

By a delicious irony, the local UFO group of which I was a member had been meeting in central Manchester. After a minor tiff, the subject long forgotten, members were ebbing away into the night. Talking about UFOs, none of us thought to look skyward through the neon glare. Had we done so, it’s possible that the meeting would have been hastily re-convened.

Back home and fielding the incoming calls – reporting the events between 7.00 and 7.30 that night – I soon thought that I knew what had happened. Reasonably consistent sightings spread over a large area point to a phen­omenon high in the atmosphere. The short duration (10 seconds maximum), vivid green colour, references to silent explosions and the fear of having witnessed a plane on fire are all common to accounts of a bright fireball meteor or space junk burn-up. I’d handled several examples of both and seen emergency services called to the scene of a thankfully non-existent accident.

There was no plane crash that night, as the lack of any missing aircraft soon revealed. Nor were any pieces of old satellite or booster rocket known to be in decaying orbit over the UK. Very quickly, the most likely scenario – that this was a fireball meteor – emerged. But of course, this idea could only ever be informed guesswork so soon after a sighting.


AFTERMATH
By the next day, I was moderately secure in my hypothesis after speaking with astronomers at Jodrell Bank. I knew that it would be some weeks before I had all the data collated and could offer more than a tentative opinion.

However, the case had taken on a life of its own. The BBC in Manchester asked me to appear live on their breakfast show to comment on the sightings – one or two of which had made it to the newswires by then. So I offered my very early thinking and the reasons behind the meteor suggestion, as well as the steps needed to try to establish that as the truth.

Then the phone calls started from irate witnesses accusing me of ridiculing their sightings – even though none were people I had spoken to before and they would not say how they got my ex-directory number. One voice I felt sure that I recognised as a local UFO buff, though he was talking in a strange accent and using a different name.

Only after these calls, when I switched on the TV news, did I discover the reason for all this anger. There I was being cited – secondhand via the radio interview, and rather out of context – as stating it was a meteor without any of the qualifications I had offered live about the need to gather evidence first.

As is the way of the world, this was only a news story for a few hours and the media didn’t want to wait for a fully reasoned answer but wanted an instant yes or no – which in UFO terms is rarely possible. No surprise, then, that my apparent assurance had upset these witnesses, even if a meteor was a reasonable working theory for the reports so far.

Of course, it was this same need to rush to judgement that led to the banning of air traffic in April 2010 before the scientific evidence as to whether this was necessary could be coll­ected and analysed.

That February day had become a bit of a nightmare, but the case was about to take an extraordinary turn that would brighten my mood - it would bring some new high-profile witnesses, presage by over a decade the links with the MoD and the release of their files through Dr David Clarke, and reveal a remarkable close encounter with hints of missing time.

So much for it being just a meteor!

MAKING CONTACT WITH THE MOD
Although I’d concluded that a meteor was the most likely explanation, it turned out that Manchester Air Traffic Control (MATC) had also fielded some calls. MATC confirmed that a report came from the crew of an aircraft inbound to Manchester that evening. It matched a call from a witness in Sale, Cheshire, who’d reported a green glowing object above the airport. More importantly, it was identical to observations by senior ATC staff then working inside the control tower.

The aircrew had preferred not to file an “air miss” incident report, because the object never came close enough to be a threat. But it was mentioned in passing by the report filed with the MoD by the airport ATC officers.

Seeking verification, I contacted the MoD. Surprisingly, the then Air Staff UFO desk officer, Owen Hartop, was willing to cooperate. Hartop – about to hand over the reigns to one Nick Pope – told me that the MoD had “no reason to link these sightings with a satellite re-entry” (as NORAD data confirmed) and had no “definitive explanation for what was witnessed”. He was also willing to release the MoD files! There was a report (name excised) from someone who appeared to be the man who had called after being upset by my comments the morning after the sighting. The second file was from the MATC tower staff and described what they had seen that night. Armed with this, I wrote a polite letter to the airport asking if they would be willing to talk about the sighting. To my surprise, one controller phoned me and, while declining to put anything in writing, was happy to discuss the events of that night.


CONTROLLED OBSERVATIONS
The tower officer was one of four who had witnessed events from their commanding views over the airfield and across Cheshire to the south. He’d had 35 years experience and knew that what they had seen was unusual: timed at 7.19 that February evening, its pass­age across the south was charted for five seconds, yet had not shown up on radar. The officer described it as a “broad band in the sky, very bright and changing from green to yellow to white”. It was in the form of a single object with “a line of light inside” and was carefully measured as moving from bearing 200 to 220 degrees at an elevation of between 15 and 25 degrees from the horizontal. The case I’d written off as a meteor had suddenly become much more interesting.

Indeed, I now discovered that a Manx Airlines BAe ATP was en route from the Isle of Man to Manchester that night with a two-man flight crew, and they had seen two separate UFOs during the short hop over the Irish Sea. They timed the first at 7.07 pm. They were descending through 3,000m over the Wirral peninsula when they saw a bluish streak of light to the south. It was parallel to their course but very transient, so they did not immediately report it. However, 12 minutes later, while taxiing into the airport, they observed the same phenomenon as other witnesses (including the ATC staff) – a brilliant and vivid bluish glow to the south that was so prominent it easily outshone the runway lights.

The two pilots were sufficiently puzzled by this second object that they did call the control tower – unaware that the four ATC operators had just been watching it as well.

The radar operator told me they had wondered whether they were seeing the northern lights; as this was in the southern sky, clearly not. There had been reports of a Devon power station suffering problems and the ATC staff debated the idea of electrical arcing discharging into the sky. But the distance involved (over 320km) ruled that option out.


CLOSE ENCOUNTER
On 21 February, as I began collating reports of the blue glow, things took an even stranger turn further south, where three youths had attended a school reunion in Buckinghamshire and were driving home through the village of Leckhampstead.

‘Alan’ in the back seat of the car was listening to music on his Walkman when he shouted that there was a strange glow ahead of them to the east. ‘Brian’, driving, woke ‘Chris’, dozing in the front passenger seat. They saw a large cigar-shaped object glowing brightly with “thousands of lights” radiating “from all angles”.
Alan slowed the car so they could watch closely, and they could see that the UFO was over a wood just ahead before it suddenly accelerated away at immense speed to the south. Brian saw that the object was now apparently hovering over the village of Maids Morteon.

They arrived there just before 1.00am. The object was huge and tilted at a steep angle, moving from house to house above the darkened village. Parking in a small field, Brian and Chris went on foot for a closer look, leaving a terrified Alan in the back seat. But they soon returned to their vehicle when the thing began to move closer, emitting a mass of powerful lights.

Now keen to get away, they repeatedly turned the ignition, but the car was completely dead. Then, a massive beam of light emerged from the UFO and completely enveloped the vehicle as the air was filled with a faint humm­ing sound.

Half-blinded, Brian was frantically trying to find the steering wheel; Chris tried to open the door and flee, but it was stuck firm as if welded; Alan had thrown himself flat on the back seat, burying his head in his hands.
Suddenly, Brian’s fingers found the ignition and this time it worked. They shot out of the field, headed at speed in the opposite direction to the way home, heading for the perceived safety of Buckingham with its bright lights.

After driving around for some time, they stopped outside a police station and debated making a report. Instead, they finally headed home. It was now after 4.00am – three hours after their close encounter – implying a period of time missing from their recall, although they might simply have lost track in their panic. The two youths who were wearing watches discovered that both had stopped just after 1.10am – when the light beam had struck.

Was this case connected with the mass sighting in and around Manchester airport the night before? We may never know, but something strange was in the sky during those hours and the reports now released from the MoD archives barely scratch the surface of this fascinating encounter.

There are hundreds of sightings in every batch of files being released into the National Archives through David Clarke’s efforts. Only rarely do we know more about them than what is contained in a few terse paragraphs of text. How many might hide a case as intriguing as this one?