by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
On March 30, and 31, 1993, reports of a UFO over Southern England came in to the Ministry of Defense. Nick Pope was manning the “UFO desk” at the time, and he described that “the phones were ringing off the hook.” He posted a description of the most dramatic reports on February 20, 2007, on the Physics Forum website. He appeared in a 2009 7 News Spotlight (an Australian program) segment presented by Russ Coulthart and described himself as “broadly skeptical” and his investigation of this series of reports as “the turning point.” Pope described the case in his 1996 book, “Open Skies, Closed Minds,” which helped to make it a classic, but Jenny Randles of the British UFO Research Association suspected that some of the sightings were of a satellite rocket booster from Cosmos 2235 (sent up by the Commonwealth of Independent States) re-entering the atmosphere. One report from RAF Shawbury that was described by Pope was later reconsidered by the witness as also having a prosaic explanation. Because the file (Part 1, Part 2) on the case was released to the public by the MoD, the details of the case can be examined by anyone with an interest.
According to Pope on the Physics Forum site, the first sighting was in Somerset at 8:30 p.m. on March 30, followed by another at 9:00 p.m. in the Quantock Hills section of Somerset. Pope describes the Quantock Hills report as having come from a police officer who was with a group of scouts. The officer reported seeing a craft that looked “like two Concordes flying side by side and joined together.”
Pope wrote that when he got to his desk the next morning, he received “a steady stream of reports” and realized that he had a major UFO situation on his hands. He describes “one of the most interesting reports” as having come from a man in Rugely, Staffordshire, who said that he and his family chased a 200-feet-diameter UFO in their car and that when they got to a field where they thought it had landed, it was gone. According to Pope, many of the reports were of triangular-shaped craft or lights in a triangular pattern.
The last sighting report Pope describes came from a meteorological officer at RAF Shawbury. According to Pope, the man told him he saw a UFO that was between the size of a C-130 Hercules transport plane and a Boeing 747. He said it was travelling at 30-40 mph, shining a white beam of light at the ground, and sweeping it back and forth as if it was looking for something and that he heard a low humming sound. He said the beam then, in Pope’s words, “retracted in an unnatural way” and that the craft then accelerated and moved off to the horizon many times faster than any military plane.
This case is looked at in much more detail by Joe McGonagle on the website Flying Saucery. Not only is there a list of sightings with details and original source documents, there is a section looking at evidence supporting prosaic explanations for some of the sightings.
The MoD department Pope worked in is described in the section titled “The MoD Investigation.” According to McGonagle, UFO reports were directed to “a department at Whitehall which was called Sec(AS)2a at the time, which had limited resources.” Pope is quoted as saying, “I shall stress that, overall, in the scheme of things, UFOs is a tiny part of my branch’s business – probably not even taking up a quarter of my time.”
Describing the MoD’s response to the reports, McGonagle points out that the “UFO desk” was only staffed during office hours. This meant that Pope first became aware of the reports when he got there on the morning of the 31st.
The reports as they are documented come from written reports from the night before, phone calls received by Pope while he was at his desk, police reports, filled out MoD reporting forms, and an “Interim Report” (pages 19-25 in Part 2 of the MoD file) sent to Sec(AS)2a by private investigator Doug Cooper of the Devon UFO Research Organization and the British UFO Research Association.
In the section, “Sightings Reported to the MoD on 30/31st March 1993,” McGonagle provides a chronology of the sightings “based on a handwritten list compiled by Sec(AS)2a” which was probably written by Pope. Details were filled in from all available file materials and many of them come from Cooper’s report.
The Quantock Hills report described by Pope in his posting was taken from Cooper’s report. According to Cooper, a police officer reported that while he was off duty at 9:00 p.m. on March 30, with a group of scouts, they saw a large object flying in low from the north that looked like “two Concorde aircraft fixed together” that was covered in bright white lights. While the report appears 2nd in the chronology, Cooper reports that he got it after he gave details of sightings reported by police officers over the phone, starting at 2:20 a.m. on March 31, to the Taunton Gazette and Honiton News, both of which published them on April 2nd.
According to Cooper, his first call (at 2:20 a.m. on March 31st) was from Sergeant (name redacted) with the Devon and Cornwall Police. The sergeant reported that at 1:10 a.m., he saw, in Cooper’s words, “two very bright white objects hovering at approximately 2000 feet north of his position.” He had been alerted by two other officers who reported seeing two objects coming from the northwest. They said they ascended somewhat quickly to 10,000 feet and moved southeast in an arc.
According to Cooper, he contacted Police Control Headquarters in Exeter, Devon, and was told they had received similar reports, including one from the South Wales, Gwent, Police. He contacted them, and a sergeant there told him that he and another officer also saw, in Cooper’s words, “two very large bright white lights approaching from the north, across the Bristol Channel.” He contacted other police stations and got similar reports.
Cooper sums up the reports this way:
At this point, I now had some seven or eight reports, mostly police officers, who had all observed two very bright white lights or objects, travelling across the night sky from approximately N.W. to S.E. in complete silence and trailing some form of illuminated vapour trail behind them – it!
The incident from which this series of sightings gets its name is described in a report in the MoD file (pages 20-21 in Part 1) from the RAF Police at RAF Cosford. An officer reported that he and his patrol partner saw two circular creamy white lights moving southeast at approximately 1000 feet. He noted that a slight red glow could be seen at the rear of the lights as they disappeared from view over the horizon.
The report from RAF Shawbury that Pope described in his posting was first described in the RAF Cosford report. According to entry 12 in the report, Mr. (name redacted) from the Shawbury Met Office contacted Corporal (name redacted) and said he’d seen two lights that came towards him over the airfield from 15-20 km away. He said they moved erratically, unlike any aircraft, at hundreds of miles per hour. He said they seemed to be searching for something and he could hear a low humming sound. He watched it for five minutes until it disappeared from sight towards the south. He said he had never seen anything like it in his eight years as a met officer. In a later interview with David Clarke, he reconsidered and described what it was that he might have seen.
Next Week: From UFO to IFO?
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