“…At the time immediately I didn’t feel frightened. I did subsequently
feel that we were looking at something that really we shouldn’t be
seeing. And I remember being told on landing that I looked fairly
shaken, almost as if I had seen a ghost….”–Air Commodore Michael Swiney O.B.E. (RAF Retired)
|
October 2002 marked the 50th anniversary of what
we believe to be the most impressive UFO incident ever reported to the
Ministry of Defence. The sighting involved two highly experienced
military pilots whose visual report was backed up by two independent
radar plots. Yet details of their amazing story have remained an
official secret for half a century – until the key witnesses agreed to
be interviewed during the research for our book
Out of the Shadows and the BBC Radio 4 production ‘Britain’s
Secret X-Files’ broadcast in April 2002. Since that time further
evidence has come to light which
|
By David Clarke
The UFO Chronicles
5-10-21
|
underlines our contention that this case constitutes
the best evidence for unidentified flying objects as a real defence
threat.
For the first time, the full story of the Little Rissington incident can now
be told.
Background
1952 marked a turning point in terms of the British Government’s interest in
the UFO enigma. In the previous year the final report of the Flying Saucer
Working Party had recommended that no further investigations of aerial
phenomena should be undertaken by the MoD “until some material evidence
becomes available.” When, in July 1952 UFOs were tracked by radar and pursued
by interceptors above Washington D.C. the USAF was obliged to hold an
unprecedented press conference in an attempt to play down the furore. News of
the Washington flap reached the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who
famously asked his Air Minister for a briefing on the subject of ‘flying
saucers.’ He was assured there was nothing to worry about: “….nothing has
happened since 1951 to make the Air Staff change their opinion” that UFOs were
optical illusions, hoaxes and misidentifications of known objects.
It is unfortunate that Churchill did not, as far as we are aware, pursue his
question later that same year. For an incredible series of events occurred
during the autumn of 1952 that produced a radical change in the attitude of
both the MoD and the Royal Air Force towards unidentified flying objects.
These were the sightings made by airmen and naval personnel who took part in
the NATO Exercise Mainbrace staged in September 1952 to simulate a Soviet
invasion of Western Europe. According to Captain Edward Ruppelt, who led the
USAF’s Project Blue Book, it was these sightings which “caused the RAF to
officially recognise the UFO.”
Indeed, the high-level of interest which the Mainbrace sightings generated is
reflected in a sensational memorandum prepared by the CIA’s Assistant Director
of Scientific Intelligence, Dr H. Marshall Chadwell in December 1952. The memo
–
‘British Activity in the Field of UFOs’ – remained “Secret” for 50
years until we obtained a copy in 2001 following an application and appeal
under the American Freedom of Information Act. Chadwell, who had worked
closely with the British Flying Saucer Working Party in 1950-51, reported to
the CIA director how the MoD had been forced to take a second look at UFOs as
a direct result of the Mainbrace incidents. It had covertly reformed the
British UFO ‘working party’ under Dr R.V. Jones who was the new Director of
Scientific Intelligence at MoD. Chadwell further reported how Jones was
‘distressed’ at the newspaper coverage of sightings reported by military
personnel, particularly those by Shackleton pilots at RAF Topcliffe in
Yorkshire, that had made headlines across the globe.
Chadwell noted that UFO activity was “quiet and normal” until what he called
“the Yorkshire incident”:
“…In some RAF field, there was some sort of demonstration to which high
officials of the RAF in London had been invited. During the show, a
‘perfect flying saucer’ was seen by these officials as well as RAF pilots.
So many people saw it that many articles appeared in the public press.
This is distressing to [Dr] Jones because he realises that the creation of
the correction of public opinion is a part of his responsibilities.”
Although the Topcliffe incident received wide publicity, the even more
spectacular Little Rissington report was successfully kept secret. The former
Royal equerry, the late Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, told us how he was
personally notified of the report, but as he was about to leave England for a
Royal tour of Australia, he was unable to interview the aircrew for his study
on behalf of Prince Philip. As was the case with the Mainbrace sightings, the
Little Rissington incident occurred in the midst of a major military exercise,
code-named ARDENT, organised by RAF Bomber Command. This fact may explain the
renewed concern, and the determination to prevent service personnel speaking
about a phenomenon that could not be officially explained or controlled.
“What on Earth is going on?”
Flying saucers were the last thing on Flight Lieutenant Michael Swiney’s mind
when he climbed into the cockpit of a Meteor trainer jet on the afternoon of
21 October 1952. Swiney was a staff instructor based at the RAF’s Central
Flying School (CFS) at Little Rissington, Gloucestershire, where his job was
to provide tuition to Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm student instructors.
Seated behind him was his student for the day, a Royal Navy Lieutenant, David
Crofts. In Michael Swiney’s Flying Logbook Exercise 18 is described as “a
high-level cross-country flight” that would take the two men on a
southwesterly course towards a turning point on the south coast, then return
to Little Rissington. Swiney, who was instructing, occupied the front seat and
his student was seated directly behind him in the small cockpit. As the
aircraft taxied along the runway, there was nothing to suggest this exercise
would be any different to other routine flights both men had made together.
Little did they realise it would become the most dramatic – and unusual –
experience of their entire flying careers.
In our interviews, Swiney described how, as the Meteor jet punched through a
layer of cloud at around 15,000 feet he suddenly “..got the fright of my life
because there appeared to be, smack in front of the aeroplane three white, or
nearly white, circular objects. Two of them were on a level keel, and one of
them was canted at a slight angle, to one side. I thought ‘God Almighty this
is three chaps coming down on parachutes,’ and I literally took the stick or
pole, as we used to call it, out of David’s hand so we didn’t tear through
these parachutes. He issued some sort of expletive, I don’t know what it was,
and said ‘What on Earth is going on?’ and I said: ‘David, have a look at
this!’
“It was something supernatural. I immediately thought of course, of
saucers, because that’s actually what they looked like. They were not
leaving a condensation trail as I knew we were. They were circular and
appeared to be stationary. We continued to climb to twice that height [to
30,000 feet] and as we did so they did in fact change position. They took
on a slightly different perspective. For example the higher we got they
lost their circular shape and took on more of a ‘flat plate’ appearance –
like when you hold a tea-saucer above your head and look at it, and then
bring it down to your eye-level, it loses the circular shape and becomes a
flat plate. “At one time the objects, which were still very much in view,
appeared to go from one side of us to the other, and to make quite sure it
was not an illusion caused by us in our aeroplane moving to one side, I
checked that we were absolutely still on a very steady heading, and sure
enough they had moved across to the starboard side of the aircraft.”
As the Meteor levelled out at 35,000 feet the three strange objects remained
clearly visible. They were saucer or plate shaped, slightly off-white in
colour and emitted a fuzzy or iridescent light from their edges. There were no
visible signs of propulsion: no portholes, turrets or other tell-tale signs
that might have identified them as conventional aircraft viewed at an unusual
angle.
According to the version recounted by Sir Peter Horsley, the instructor
(Swiney) found it so difficult to take in what he was seeing that he thought
he was suffering from oxygen failure. David Crofts’ account corroborates
Horsley’s memory. In 2002 he told us:
“I remember doing the 35,000 foot check and Mick, who was in the front
seat, said: ‘David, did you have anything to drink at lunchtime?’ and I
said: ‘No, why?’ and he said: ‘Is your oxygen on?’ and I replied: ‘Mick,
we’ve just done the 30,000 foot check and you checked with me that your
oxygen was alright and I checked with you that my oxygen was alright’…then
he said: ‘Well, look at that – straight ahead!’
“Mick [who was in the front seat] put his head to one side and I looked
straight through the D-window and there were three dots ahead…[initially]
they wouldn’t have been bigger than my thumb-nail at arm’s length and
there were certainly three of them. I looked up from time to time and saw
they were approaching and getting further and further apart. What I saw
looked like the bottom of a stemmed glass. They were lens shaped, like an
ellipse and the sun was behind them, and there was no cloud at that
height. It was impossible to tell the size of them or how far away they
were.
“I was thinking all the time that I’ve got to make this a good exercise
and didn’t want to muff it by looking around at extraneous things…but Mick
kept talking about them and saying that he thought they were UFOs so I
thought: ‘Oh yes, well let’s go after them!’ thinking well now we can stop
doing the exercise and we can officially say we are off the hook. But he
didn’t, he said: ‘Oh Lord no, don’t you remember something that happened
on the West Coast of America where a couple of pilots went after one of
these things and they all got vapourised and they have never been seen
since.’ I then asked him what he intended to do, and with that he called
Air Traffic Control at Little Rissington and said what he could see and
within a very short time he said: ‘I have control’, he turned the aircraft
and we headed back to base.”
Swiney recalled what happened at this stage:
“We got to the top of the climb and I decided that really there was
nothing much we could do. I was too shaken by what I had seen and decided
to call the exercise off and go back to base. I called up Air Traffic
Control at Rissington and said I had three unidentified objects fairly
close and gave them my course. I understand later that there was a certain
amount of pandemonium on the ground because they weren’t used to having
their own staff instructors calling up saying ‘we have got three
unidentified flying objects in front, what do we do?’ They didn’t know
what to do either.”
According to Horsley’s account, Air Traffic Control instructed Swiney to
approach the UFOs and the pilot subsequently turned the aircraft towards them,
opening up to full power. “At Mach.8 they gained quite rapidly but when the
circular object [sic] filled half their windscreen, it suddenly turned on its
side ‘like a plate’ (their words) and climbed away out of sight at great
speed.”
Swiney and Croft’s memory is somewhat less dramatic.
“It was quite extraordinary. As we kept them under observation, thinking
what else could they possibly be, all of a sudden, having looked across at
them at one moment, then looked back in another direction just to clear
one’s eyes a bit, we just looked back and they simply weren’t there. They
had just disappeared.”
Altogether the three ‘flying saucers’ had been in view for around ten minutes.
He added:
“I had then been flying for about nine years and I had seen many funny
reflections, refractions through windscreens and lots of other things, but
this was nothing of the sort. We tried very hard to explain away what we
were looking at but there was no way we could do that. There was something
there, there is absolutely no doubt about it. It was NOT a reflection.”
Tracked on Radar
Unknown to the two men on the ground, the control tower at Little Rissington
had called HQ Fighter Command at Stanmore, near London. It was the height of
the Cold War, and with fear of a Soviet attack looming, senior officers
triggered an air defence alert. Simultaneous with the Meteor pilot’s visual
report RAF Sopley, a Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) radar in southern
England, were tracking an “unidentified aircraft” moving across the southwest
of England. Sopley’s controller alerted the commander of RAF Southern Sector
at Rudloe Manor between Chippenham and Bath in Wiltshire. The nerve centre of
the Sector – known as RAF Box – was an underground bunker that contained a
Signals HQ and a fighter plotting control room where aircraft movements were
monitored over the whole of southern England.
All unidentified blips were treated as hostile until positively identified,
and the Sector Commander gave the order to scramble interceptors. A pair of
Meteors on 24-hour Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) duty at RAF Tangmere, Sussex,
screamed into the air and were vectored towards the unidentified radar target
under Sopley’s control. According to Sir Peter Horsley, officers in the filter
room at Rudloe Manor were able to identify Swiney’s Meteor on the plotting
table as it closed on the unidentified blips, which suddenly disappeared off
the tube at speed estimated as 1,000 mph. The two Meteors from Tangmere
followed the target, but failed to make contact.
Independently, Mick Swiney described from memory how on his return to Little
Rissington he was informed that “a radar station, which I think was a place
called Box, somewhere in the Bath area, confirmed that they could see exactly
what [we] could see, but it was on their radar screens as opposed to visible.”
David Crofts was even more precise about the source of this information. He
said the radar tracking was confirmed to him by intelligence officers from the
Air Ministry who had travelled from London to interview the two men. Crofts
said:
“They also told me that they [the UFOs] had been picked up on radar. I’m
sure he said Sopley radar [Sopley G.C.I. north of Ringwood, Hampshire]. He
certainly said that the fighters had been alerted and scrambled and that
the target had a ground speed of 600 knots or 600 miles per hour, heading
east but the fighters saw nothing, didn’t make a contact and returned to
base.”
Further confirmation came in November 2002 when a retired RAF Signals officer,
Terry Barefoot, contacted us independently with his own story. Terry worked in
the underground complex at Rudloe Manor as a switchboard operator in 1952 and
remembered the telephone call they received from the GCI station. “The radar
station called up saying that three objects had entered our airspace, going at
a fantastic speed, approximately 3,000 miles per hour. We had nothing that
went that fast, and neither had the Russians or the Americans.” Mr Barefoot
said the incident triggered a commotion in the control room, and led to an
order to scramble a squadron to intercept the UFOs. Before the pilots could be
vectored towards the fast-moving blips, they had disappeared from the plotting
tables – still in formation – off the coast of Kent and out towards the
English Channel.
The central role played by RAF Signals in relaying messages between RAF
stations during the UFO alert may explain another intriguing feature of this
incident, which again underlines its unique status in official history. For it
appears that GCHQ, the Government’s secret listening station at Cheltenham, in
Gloucestershire, were made fully aware of the events as they took place. In
1997 researcher Robin Cole privately circulated a booklet researching GCHQ’s
role in the alleged ‘UFO cover-up,’ drawing upon sources who worked there.
Cole wrote that the earliest UFO case that was linked to the secret listening
post occurred in 1952 “when pilots from RAF Little Rissington were out on
manoeuvres when in their sights, an object similar to the descriptions of a
flying saucer came into view.” This was clearly the same incident described by
Swiney and Crofts.
Coles’ knowledge of the case came from the person who typed the report on the
case at GCHQ. At that time the listening station had no ‘UFO branch’ of its
own but became involved by virtue of its critical role in the collection of
‘Signals Intelligence’ (SIGINT). Cole concluded his account of the incident by
noting “that it appears that GCHQ picked up on the various messages passing
back and forth from the aircrew and RAF Little Rissington. In other words,
GCHQ intercepted the conversation.”
What’s more, there is now evidence that a second, independent civilian radar
station had plotted the movements of the UFOs during the incident. During our
research at the PRO we came upon an entry in the Operations Record Book of CFS
Little Rissington, dated 21 October 1952. It read:
“Flight Lieutenant M.J.E. SWINEY, instructor, and Lieutenant D.CROFTS,
R.N., student, sighted three mysterious, ‘saucer-shaped objects’
travelling at high speed at about 35,000’ whilst on a high level
navigation exercise, in a Meteor VII. Later, A.T.C.C. Gloucester reported
radar plots to confirm this, but Air Ministry discounted any possibility
of ‘extra terrestrial objects.”
The ORB entry was the first contemporary official record we found that
corroborated the accounts of the eye witnesses. What’s more it confirmed that
Air Traffic Control radars, in addition to the RAF’s air defence radars, had
detected unidentified flying objects at the same time as the visual sighting
from the Meteor jet. When we located the PRO record the first question that
occurred to us was this: how could the Air Ministry “discount the possibility
of extra terrestrial objects” so soon after the incident happened? Where is
the file containing the final report? Maybe this is where the role of GCHQ –
and its direct connections with the Security Services and US intelligence –
played a crucial role in the investigation. To officially admit the role
played by these secret agencies in a UFO incident would expose the agency’s
interest in a subject that has long been denied. This factor alone may explain
why the authorities continue to claim they have no record of this case to this
day.
The Air Ministry investigation
David Crofts memory of what happened when they landed at Little Rissington
after the experience are clear after 50 years.
“….[as soon as we disembarked] Wing Commander flying grabbed the pair of
us, he came out to the aircraft if I remember rightly. I was told to go to
my cabin, I was not to talk to anyone, all my meals would be brought to
me, if I wanted anything to drink I would have to get in touch with
someone to get them for me, I wasn’t to go in the bar. Mick was to go home
forthwith, and stay there until he reported to Wing Commander flying the
next morning. I was to be there too at 9 o’clock and there were a couple
of officers from the Air Ministry intelligence section who debriefed us
separately. They interviewed us and got us to talk about it and to draw
what we thought we saw.
“Thinking back I don’t think they asked the right questions. They didn’t
give me the impression that they were very high powered, I wouldn’t have
thought they were any higher than Squadron Leader in rank. I have an
opinion now that they didn’t know much about what it was all about. They
said yes we are looking into it, and gave me the impression that we had
seen something unusual. But I got the impression that they were just going
through a routine.”
We asked Lt Cdr Crofts what questions the intelligence officers asked.
“What did you see? What happened? Tell us your story?…Much the same as
you’ve done now, but they didn’t go into the detail that you’ve gone into
and they should have perhaps tried to locate where we were when we saw
them. They told us, or he told me, that they had been in telecommunication
with every country in the world that was likely to have that sort of
aircraft in the vicinity at that time and they all agreed that they
didn’t.
“The only thing that I could think of was that we happened to see three
Bell X supersonic aircraft that at that time were doing that sort of thing
in a loose formation over the UK all the way from the USA. But of course
it was not possible with the aircraft we had, and it was not possible with
the Bell X-100. The only other possibility I have considered were
lenticular clouds. But I remember going to the base Meteorological Officer
afterwards and asking: ‘Is there any possibility that it could have been a
lenticular cloud or any cloud at all?’ and he replied: ‘David, there was
no possibility of there being any clouds above when you broke through the
cloud base.”
When the officers left base, the incident was officially ‘closed.’ Neither
Swiney nor Crofts recall being specifically warned not to discuss their
sighting in public. However, a year later the Air Ministry felt it was
necessary to issue new instructions to all RAF stations, warning all aircrew
that reports of ‘aerial phenomena’ were classified as ‘Restricted.’ “Personnel
are warned that they are not to communicate to anyone other than official
persons any information about phenomena they have observed, unless officially
authorised to do so.” (HQ No 11 Group letter ref 11G/0.2802/8/Int. 16 December
1953).
The reports produced by Swiney and Crofts, including drawings of the three
UFOs were returned to London for scrutiny at the headquarters of the Deputy
Directorate of Intelligence, or D.D.I. (Tech), on the 9th floor of the Hotel
Metropole near Trafalgar Square. And there they disappeared into the same
black hole that swallowed many other ‘classic’ UFO incidents reported to the
MoD, never to be seen again.
In December 1953 the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence) Air Marshal
Sir Francis Fressanges delegated to D.D.I. (Tech) responsibility for the
investigation of UFO reports made by radar stations and aircrew. Early in 1955
D.D.I. (Tech) produced a 10,000 word report on their study of reports received
since 1950. A security-cleared version of this ‘Secret’ report, at a quarter
of the original length, was published in the Air Ministry’s
‘Secret Intelligence Summary’ available at the PRO. It concluded that
90 percent of the reports could be explained as “meteors, balloons, flares and
many other objects” but 10 percent remained unexplained. These cases “need be
attributed to nothing more sinister than lack of data.”
Group Captain Harold Collins was Deputy Director of Intelligence at Air
Ministry from 1950-52. Now aged 95, he still recalls receiving “about a dozen
so-called reports of aerial phenomena” as part of his duties: “..they ranged
from one woman who reported on a man from outer space knocking on her door to
two reports we were never able to explain as misidentifications,” he recalled.
Significantly, Group Captain Collins confirmed that the two reports that
remained “unexplained” were made by RAF aircrew. We believe one of these was
the Little Rissington incident.
GCHQ and Whitehall: UFO cover-up?
Mick Swiney was to rise in rank to Air Commodore before retirement at the end
of a long and eventful career in the RAF. During the course of his career, he
heard nothing further about his ‘UFO’ experience. Although he was to have two
further, but less dramatic “sightings” whilst piloting aircraft from bases in
Germany during 1953-54, he was able to ‘explain’ one of these as a sighting of
an escaped meteorological balloon. But he was never able to account for his
1952 experience, and it continued to play upon his mind, particularly the
official silence that continued to surround the circumstances. It was not
until 1974, during a posting to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, that he
decided to make some discreet inquiries of his own.
At that time, the MOD’s standard answer to all public and Parliamentary
questions was that because UFO sightings had such mundane explanations all
files were routinely destroyed at five yearly intervals. This practice, they
said, had been halted in 1967, and as a result the earliest UFO records held
in MoD archives dated from 1962. Evidently, in public at least, someone was
being economical with the truth, because about 1974 – long after the date at
which the MoD claimed they had been destroyed – the reports made by Swiney and
his co-pilot remained on file.
“I was then in a position to say that I wanted to see the report I had written
in 1952. I simply said ‘I want to see it’ and the next thing was one of my
staff (a RAF Group Captain) plonked it on my desk,” Swiney explained. The file
was obtained from an Air Intelligence branch that had inherited D.D.I.
(Tech)’s records, and the officer who recovered the file said it had been
located “in the Blue Book.”
“So I had a look at it,” Swiney continued. “It was all there, and if I
remember rightly I also saw David Croft’s report which was attached to it. I
had a look at it and when I was satisfied I put it in the out-tray. I should
have taken a copy there and then.”
In 2002 Michael Swiney, now in retirement, made a fresh attempt to recover his
original report with our assistance. Firstly he wrote to the RAF’s Air
Historical Branch, now based in the old Fighter Command HQ building at Bentley
Priory. They said that UFO reports submitted to Air Ministry intelligence
could have been preserved for transfer to the PRO, or alternatively marked for
destruction. If MoD record reviewers “did not consider it worthy of
preservation then I am afraid it would have been destroyed, which [we] think
is its most likely fate.”
Not satisfied with this response, Swiney wrote directly to the Director
General of GCHQ to inquire if the station had retained a copy of his report.
In reply, a civil servant said an archive search had failed to locate the file
and his request had been passed to colleagues in London “who historically
dealt with such matters.” This was of course, the Air Staff secretariat at
Whitehall, DAS 4 (formerly Sec(AS)2a during Nick Pope’s incumbency in
1991-93). In due course, the ‘UFO desk’ replied with a standard statement that
returned the inquiry to square one. Swiney was advised that “…it was generally
the case that before 1967 all UFO report files were destroyed after five
years…[but] since 1967, following an increase in public interest in this
subject ‘UFO’ files are now routinely preserved. Any files from the 1950s and
early 1960s which did survive are available for examination at the Public
Record Office.”
In reply, Swiney asked a pertinent question:
“If it was generally the case that before 1967 all UFO report files were
destroyed after five years, how was it that I actually saw and read it in
about 1974, some seventeen years later, when serving at the MoD?”
The veteran airman does not expect to receive an answer, because to admit that
‘secret’ files on dramatic UFO incidents exist that fall outside the scope of
the public records system would lead to questions about the honesty of the
Government’s official policy that UFOs are “of no defence significance.”
Now in his late 70s, Air Commodore Swiney is obliged to accept that he may
never learn the truth about what it was he saw half a century ago. “I can’t
believe it is an intentional cover-up,” he told us, but I don’t really
understand why they are being so difficult.” Although the official records
relating to the Little Rissington incident are “missing presumed destroyed”
Michael Swiney can still point to his own documentary evidence. In what is
probably a unique in the in the history of RAF flying logbooks, there exists
an entry, in Swiney’s handwriting, dated 21 October 1952, that reads:
“(SAUCERS!) 3 ‘Flying Saucers’ sighted at height. Confirmed by G.C.I.”
Michael Swiney’s final words on the UFO experience which made such a lasting
impression on his life are these:
“I am completely open-minded. I don’t think there are little green men
who are going to suddenly land and get out of peculiar-looking craft. But
what I do know is that both David Crofts and I saw something, the like of
which we had never seen before, and I have never seen since. I cannot
explain it. But all I do know is that I did see, as did he, something
which was most unusual.”
Acknowledgements:
This article is based upon transcripts of taped interviews with Air
Commodore M.J.E. Swiney, April 2001 and May 2002 and with Lieutenant
Commander D. Crofts in February 2002. We wish to thank both men for their
assistance in our research. Thanks also to the late Sir Peter Horsley,
Terry Lightfoot and to Nick Redfern.
Note: Air Commodore Michael Swiney, OBE, RAF officer, was born on August
19, 1926. He died of cancer on September 30, 2016, aged 90. His obituary
appeared in The Times on 15 October 2016.
Further reading:
David Clarke and Andy Roberts, Out of the Shadows: UFOs, the Establishment
and the Official Cover-up (London: Piatkus, 2002).
Sir Peter Horsley, Sounds from Another Room (London: Leo Cooper, 1997)
Robin Cole, GCHQ and the UFO Cover-up (Cheltenham: Privately published,
1997)
Copyright David Clarke 2020
