A UFO spotted by the UK’s ballistic missile early warning base led to a secret inquiry, an RAF captain has revealed.
RAF Fylingdales in Yorkshire, famous for its iconic ‘golf ball’ radars, scans the skies for foreign attacks. First active during the Cold War, it is responsible for the infamous ‘four-minute warning’ in the event of incoming missiles.
However, the radars are also able to track objects 3,000 miles into space, and it has been revealed they often pick up UFOs – unidentified flying objects, now more commonly known as unidentified anomalous phenomena.
One such UFO caused such concern it triggered a top secret inquiry.
RAF Group Captain David Todd, former senior duty officer at the base, has revealed the details of the incident.
‘Unknowns came up on the radars at regular intervals for all sorts of reasons,’ he said, speaking to The Sun.
‘At that time if the radar had sufficient capacity spare, it was told to go track them.
‘That was because we are interested in unknowns and sometimes we needed to find out what it is, where it is and most importantly what it might run into during its orbit such as spy satellites.’
This particular incident took place in 1981 or 1982 – it is not known if the date has been withheld for security reasons, or because there is no official record of it.
‘I remember this [incident] particularly clearly. It came up as an unknown and [Fylingdales] radar tracked it,’ said Gp Capt Todd.
‘We could not match it up with anything on our computers. And radar tracked it for quite a long time.
‘We had quite a lot of information on it. It appeared to be in Earth’s orbit and we waited for it to come around again but it did not return.
‘So that got us really interested, because people started saying “ooh, is it a UFO?”.’
Despite keeping radars on the lookout, the UFO did not return – so Gp Capt Todd ordered defence contractor Serco to investigate it further.
‘We were duty bound to do so, because this was an unknown object,’ he said. ‘They did a hell of a lot of work on it and came up with various theories. One of which was “an unidentified flying object with little green men inside!”
‘Well, you have got to be open minded about this stuff, you can’t discount that possibility.’
Sadly for believers, the truth turned out to be something still out of this world, but not quite other-wordly.
The investigation concluded the object was a meteor.
‘We decided the most likely explanation was a meteor that was rotating in the same direction as the Earth,’ said Gp Capt Todd.
The planet is constantly bombarded with meteors, with thousands hitting the atmosphere daily and others simply passing by.
But despite routine explanation, the incident wasn’t the Group Captain’s last encounter with UFOs – he later joined the Ministry of Defence’s ‘UFO desk’.
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