For anyone digging into the murky and unsubstantiated world of secret aircraft projects, the periodic de-classification of official documents about UFO sightings is always a potential gold mine. The latest batch, containing a wide range of UFO-related documents from the UK Ministry of Defence from 1987 to 1993, is no exception and includes some truly interesting reports.
However, just like the famous USAF’s Project Blue Book of the 1950s and 1960s which found only 6% of the 12,600 plus recorded UFO sightings to be inexplicable, the nuggets in the latest batch are hard to find. As usual, although the witnesses (whose identities have been redacted per Blue Book), appear largely genuine, the incidents themselves are mostly explainable by known phenomenon or are probably hoaxes. But amongst the records, which include several pages of AW&ST’s stories by William Scott on subjects such as Aurora, Northrop TR-3A and other mystery vehicles, there are a few tantalizing snippets that could be clues to real sightings or events.
Available on the UK government’s National Archives website, the page on the files says boldly “…If you want to find out more about close encounters over Heathrow Airport, alien abductions, stray satellites - and what the UK Government thought of it all - then this is the place to be.”
A quick scan showed up an interesting report from Scotland in August 1990 involving photographs of what appeared to be a large diamond shaped object in close proximity to a low flying RAF Harrier. The file is unusual in that it contains images (although poorly reproduced), plus some interesting detail about the UK MoD’s guidelines on how to deal with the issue.
Potentially more seriously, the reports also include a number of incidents which today could be interpreted as botched attempts to bring down an airliner with a missile. One of these relates to sightings by passengers on a Dan Air Boeing 737 shortly after take off from London Gatwick, while another is the report by an Alitalia MD-80 captain of something missile-like that passed his aircraft while descending over southern England to Heathrow. Whatever your conclusions, the files make for some interesting viewing!
A rendition based on Chris Gibson's famous August 1989 North Sea sighting around the same period as the newly de-classified files. (credit: hubpages.com/hub/War-Weapon-Aurora-Spy-Plane)
Talking of which, it would be interesting to hear Bill Scott's and Bill Sweetman's views on some of this material, much of which surrounds the first emergence of news of "Aurora".
The UK MoD never ruled out the hypothesis that the US was flying black project aircraft in UK airspace without the MoD's knowledge. (This has been apparent in earlier UFO study releases.)
Which is odd, because you'd think that the MoD would know enough to rule that out, if indeed it was not happening.
Unless, that is, the MoD knew that it WAS happening, but could not say so, making the "agnostic" standpoint the only permissible and accurate one.
By the way, it has emerged fairly recently that Blue Book included a large measure of cover for both the U-2 and A-12 programs, both of which produced numerous sightings from commercial aircrew.
At the end of an interesting 'Discovery' Doc I saw a while back, a uniformed Military officer, pointing behind him (to the Nevada desert), stated that whatever we see flying today is 50 years behind whatever 'they' have flying out there.
Sketch which appeared at page 12 of Bill's highly successful 1993 book "AURORA The Pentagon's Secret Hypersonic Spyplane" .....
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51AEY7Q2B8L._SS500_.jpg
Right, Airpower ..... the sketch only ..... no photo .....
And Redstone, when you say "highly successful" you should qualify it as "by aviation book standards", to wit, 0.0000001 per cent of the sales of the latest chick-lit fluff seen on Oprah.
By the way, one reason I've always credited both the Gibson sighting and the California boom reports is that either represents a plausible failure of security.
A USAF officer in charge of OPSEC for a black program almost certainly wouldn't have known that CalTech had just networked its seismographs, much less that they were playing around with plotting the parabolic boom fronts caused by shuttles.
It also wouldn't have occurred to him that there might be an aircraft recognition expert sitting on an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea (because there aren't any such experts in the US) or that under ideal conditions, such expert could get a pretty good look at an aircraft at refuelling altitude.