Saturday, August 15, 2015
Thursday, October 23, 2008
"Fire a Full Salvo of Rockets at the UFO."
By Nicholas Spangler
The Miami Herald
Possible interstellar war was averted when the unidentified flying object sped away.
"It was not made of this Earth," said Torres, 77, a retired Florida International University engineering professor. "I'd love to take a tour of that ... UFO, whatever it was."
The account was included in thousands of pages of UFO-related documents recently declassified by the British Ministry of Defense and posted online. To everyone's surprise, the truth was not just out there, but in Florida, where Torres lives with his wife, Dorothy.
By midweek, he'd done a television interview with Great Britain's Sky News and been featured on "Good Morning America." "Nightline" had panned across pictures of him as a young lieutenant. Reporters were calling hourly, and Dorothy was leaving the phone off the hook at night.
Torres' account begins with him scrambling his F-86D Sabre jet from an airfield in Kent, near the southeast coast, to intercept what he has since called a UFO circling East Anglia.
Ground control vectored him in at top speed, around 700 mph, and gave the order to "fire a full salvo of rockets at the UFO."
From 15 miles away, he locked on to a target as big as an aircraft carrier, according to his radar screen. He was on course to intercept in 10 seconds but still hadn't seen the thing when it started to move away. Within seconds, the UFO was off lock; it soon vanished.
Back at the airfield, Torres was told the mission would be considered classified. The next day, an American who looked "like a well-dressed IBM salesman, with a dark-blue trench coat," debriefed him and warned he would be breaching national security if he talked about what had happened.
Looking back, Torres said he's glad he never got a shot off that night; surely a craft capable of moving as that one did would have had weapons systems to match. "I would have been vaporized," he said.
"Just a dumb little kid going to slaughter."
He's angry, convinced that the British and U.S. governments have information they're not sharing; and wistful, because he believes he'll never know the truth. "We can't be alone out here," he said.
The phone then rang, CNN on the line.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
UFO Archive Release: The Best Pictures on File
The Telegraph
10-21-08
Here we present a selection of the most striking, perplexing and entertaining drawings and eyewitness testimonies submitted by member of the public.
Monday, October 20, 2008
UFO Files Reveal Orders To Shoot Down UFO!
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| An American fighter pilot flying from an English air base at the height of the Cold War was ordered to open fire on a massive UFO that lit up his radar, according to an account published by Britain's National Archives on Monday. |
The unnamed pilot said he and another airman were scrambled on the night of May 20, 1957 to intercept an unusual "bogey" on radars at a Royal Air Force Station Manston, an airfield at the southeastern tip of England about 75 miles from central London.
"This was a flying object with very unusual flight patterns," the pilot said, according to a typed manuscript of his account mailed to Britain's Ministry of Defense by a UFO enthusiast in 1988. "In the initial briefing it was suggested to us that the bogey actually was motionless for long intervals."
Ordered to fly at full throttle in cloudy weather, the pilot said he was given the order to fire a volley of 24 rockets at the mysterious object.
"To be quite candid I almost (expletive) my pants!" the pilot said, saying he asked for confirmation — which he received.
Retired U.S. airman Milton Torres told Britain's Sky News on Monday that he was the pilot and has spent 50 frustrating years attempting to uncover the truth of his mid-air encounter.
Speaking from his home in Miami, Florida, Torres said he never saw the UFO with his naked eye, but watched in awe as it appeared on his jet's radar and sped off before he had chance to fire.
"All of a sudden as it was coming in, it decided to take off and leave me behind ... The next thing I know it was gone," Torres told Sky News. "It was some kind of space alien craft. It was so fast, it was so incredible ... it was absolutely death defying."
In the newly published government file, the U.S. airman said the UFO appeared impossible to miss.
"The blip was burning a hole in the radar with its incredible intensity," the pilot said. "It was similar to a blip I had received from B-52's and seemed to be a magnet of light. ... I had a lock on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier."
As he closed in on the object to prepare for combat, however, the object began to move wildly before fading off his radar. The target gone, the mission was called off, and he returned to base to an odd reception.
"I had not the foggiest idea what had actually occurred, nor would anyone explain anything to me," the pilot said. He said he was led to a man in civilian clothes, who "advised me that this would be considered highly classified and that I should not discuss it with anybody not even my commander."
"He disappeared without so much as a goodbye and that was that, as far as I was concerned," the pilot said, according to the account.
Britain's military said it had no record of the incident, according to the files. Neither did the U.S. military. The second pilot's account, also included in the files, paints a somewhat different picture of events, saying there were not one but several "unknowns" and that he did not remember being contacted by anyone about staying quiet. He did not mention the targets' size.
"I know this is not a very exciting narrative but it is all I can recall," the second pilot said.
His name, like his colleague's, was redacted from the files.
David Clarke, a UFO expert who has worked with the National Archives on the document release, said it was one of the most intriguing stories he had culled from the batch of files released Monday.
He said that the CIA once had a program intended to create phantom signals on radar — and that this may have been an exercise in electronic warfare. Whatever the case, Clarke argued that "there's no doubt something very unusual happened."
Clarke said the batch of files released Monday — which include witness accounts, investigations, and sketches — was part of a three to four year program intended to make a total of 160 UFO-related files available to the public.