Fortunately, between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, Britain’s air defences had to deal with few red alerts. The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Glenn Torpey, recently confirmed that, prior to 2001, there had been a long period of ‘zero’ scrambles for the RAF’s Tornados since the end of the Soviet threat in 1990. 1 Today, fighters are only scrambled to intercept aircraft entering UK airspace that might pose a threat, but during the early part of the Cold War they were frequently sent up to identify UFOs and ‘angels’ detected on radars. But after the source of the ‘Radar Angels’ was identified (FT195:36–37) modern military and air traffic radar systems were designed to ignore unusual returns that do not behave like aircraft. This explains the almost total dearth in ‘radar visual’ UFO reports in recent years.

The Condign study also found “a significant absence of radar plots/tracks compared to the large number of visual sightings reported to the MoD”. The report claimed there was “only one UK event on record” where three radars “had simultan­eous contact with a UAP, which eventually faded and disappeared”. This occurred in October 1996, at the height of a UFO flap in East Anglia. Significantly, this area of England has a long back-catalogue of anomalous radar phenomena, including the radar/visual incident at Lakenheath (FT213:28–32) and the famous UFO ‘landing’ in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk (FT152:28–32; 183:24; 195:28; 204:32–39).

The 1996 flap began in the early hours of 5 October with a UFO sighting by police patrols at Skegness, Lincolnshire. Shortly after 2am, they reported seeing “strange red and green rotating lights” above the horizon over the Wash. They reported the sighting to the Yarmouth coastguard and, soon afterwards, colleagues in nearby Boston also spotted a bright light in the sky to the south-east. Calls were also received from members of the public reporting UFOs. The coastguard alerted the RAF’s air rescue centre at Kinloss in Scotland, who could find no evidence of aircraft in distress. They asked the radar complex at RAF Neatishead, on the Norfolk Broads, for help in identifying the lights.

Neatishead is the most important air defence centre in southern England. It produces a 24-hour ‘real time’ display of the radar picture that is constructed from electronic data channelled to the RAF from a number of satellite stations. One of these is the air traffic control radar at Claxby, near Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire. Shortly after the alarm was raised, staff at Neatishead noticed a ‘blip’ on the Claxby radar head. Seen from Neatishead, this blip appeared to be stationary over Boston, where some of the visual sightings were then occurr­ing. At this point, the RAF could not detect any height information, but they knew it was not an officially acknow­ledged aircraft because it had no trans­ponder signal.

This apparent confirmation of the visual reports appears impressive until you appreciate that the radar blip remained over Boston until lunchtime the following day – a total of nine hours! By this time, the airfield radar at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, detected another blip in a different position. Controllers asked the crews of three civil airliners that passed through the area to keep a lookout. None reported seeing any other airborne object. Early in the night, experienced staff decided the blip was a ‘permanent echo’, often generated by ground features like tall buildings. The market town of Boston had an excell­ent contender: the 273ft (83m) spire of St Botolph’s church, which can be seen for miles across the flat fenland landscape and is known locally as ‘The Boston Stump.’

This type of echo would normally have been ignored. It was only noticed because visual sightings of UFOs were being reported to the RAF at the same time. Following the UFO reports, coastguards put out a call to shipping in the North Sea and received a response from a tanker, the MV Conocast, that was taking fuel to dredgers in the Wash. The crew of four reported seeing two separate sets of lights from 2am until daybreak, when they faded in the dawn. One group appeared to be above the horizon to the south and might have been the same phenomena seen by the police in Skegness. Another group was visible in the opposite direction, high above the North Sea. These were stationary, flashing red, blue, green and white.
While the RAF was satisfied that the source of the radar UFO had been explained, they remained baffled by the source of the lights seen by police and the tanker crew. Initially, they suspected some rare natural phenomenon or even a lightning storm at sea. But the police themselves provided a far more likely explanation. One of the Skegness patrolmen said he watched the twinkling light periodically for a period of two hours until “the star was fairly high in the sky looking very similar to the rest”. Just before daybreak, PC Dave Leyland used his camcorder to film the UFO from the roof of the force control room. His five minutes of footage depicts a single, stationary white light above a block of flats.

By daybreak, the panic was over. PC Leyland and his colleagues decided their UFO was a star or a planet, an identification that was confirmed by astronomers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In their report to the RAF, the observatory said that Venus, ‘the queen of UFOs’, which had been shining with exceptional brilliance in the early morning sky to the east, probably explained the light shown on the video. Astronomer Ian Ridpath identified the colourful flashing object seen from Skegness earlier as the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, low on the horizon to the southeast. Another bright star, Vega, explained the lights seen in the opposite direct­ion by the tanker crew. He explained that impression of rotating colours as a well-known optical phenomenon – autokinesis – in which light from stars is distorted by the atmosphere and appears to move when being stared at intensely.

But these mundane explanations came far too late to kill the excitement the sightings had generated. News that the UFO sightings, made by credible witnesses, had been ‘confirmed’ by RAF radars spread quickly through the ufological grapevine. A tran­script of the conversation between the coastguard, police and RAF fell into the hands of the local media and UFO groups with predictable results. The headlines said it all: “MYSTERY LIGHTS: WERE THEY UFOs?”, “OUT OF THIS WORLD” and “UFOs EXPOSE 9–5 DEFENCE DANGER”. 2 These were seen by a Labour MP, Martin Redmond, who had read Nick Pope’s recent book, Open Skies Closed Minds, which described Pope’s conversion to a ‘believer’ in ET visitors during his time on the MoD’s UFO desk.

The headlines led Redmond to write a furious letter to Defence Minister Michael Portillo. “What strikes me as incredible is that no aircraft were scrambled when an uncorrelated target was picked up so close to the [UK] coast,” he wrote. “The RAF are supposed, or so I believed, to be responsible for keeping a watchful eye on activity in the UK air defence region but seem to have no idea as to what is going on.” Stung by the criticism, the RAF ordered a full investigation, which occupied a senior officer full-time for eight working days. He took the unheard-of step of interviewing key witnesses for his 23-page report, completed in November – which concluded that the RAF’s low-key reaction was fully justified. Although not all the light phenomena could be fully explained, he wrote, “research has not revealed evidence that alarming or extraordinary events were being witnessed” and there was no justific­ation to order the scramble of RAF fighters. 3

The idea that The Boston Stump, the planet Venus and assorted stars could have been responsible for the UFO scare was dismissed as absurd by some ufologists, who saw these explan­ations as evidence of a MoD cover-up. One ufologist, in a letter to his local news­paper, drew parallels between the use of the Boston Stump to explain this UFO flap and the Orford­ness light­house, which sceptics claimed had fooled the US airmen in Rendle­sham Forest 15 years earlier. He wrote: “It seems that ‘The Stump’ is not on dry land after all. In fact, it is situated somewhere in the North Sea, or The Wash, or the North Norfolk coast, or at Yarmouth, or even floating in the sky miracul­ously above the A47 in Norfolk.” 4

In 1996, The X-Files was at the height of its popularity and ufologists quickly adopted the show’s catchphrase ‘The Truth is Out There.’ But as seasoned investigators are painfully aware, in Daniel Webster’s words, “there is nothing so powerful as the truth and often nothing as strange.”