UFOs the Untold Stories: New TV series on Nat Geo UK , page 1

reply to post by mirageman

As far as I could ascertain and I did a lot of work on this incident with a view to a documentary covering it the following happened.

Shaffner was on standby with his engines running, which was a standard operational procedure at time time when ever there was any sort of tension with the Warsaw pact. . That means , his Lightning was probably parked in an open blast pen ready to taxi onto the runway and take off at a moments notice.

This is where the first dispute over what happened appears. Several personnel, including some ground crew there that night say the following. Shaffner received a direct order from an American source ,via RAF Binbrook to scramble and intercept a target over the North Sea. Two Radar operators, on station that night, have told investigators the following. Shortly before Shaffner took off, an unknown Radar contact had entered the area of the North Sea from the direction of Iceland at a phenomenal rate of knots and then suddenly slowed. In their opinion that was the "unknown object" that Shaffner was ordered to investigate.

Now this is where another problem arises. The ground crew involved have said that. Shaffner's Lightning had reached and gone past the point where it was considered safe for him to take off on any sort of mission and he should have throttled down, killed the engines and allowed the next aircraft to take over his station. This was simply because, the Lightning's engines , under the rules, had to be serviced and passed fit to fly after they had been powered up for a certain length of time irrespective of whether the aircraft had taken off.

In other words, Shaffner took off in a plane that was "not fit for purpose, something further exacerbated by them now claiming the cockpit ejection system was faulty as well. in other words they are claiming that, a vastly experienced pilot, took off knowing he shouldn't and failed to execute a very basic training run, to such an extent, he crashed into the sea without putting so much as a dent in the nose of his aircraft. Most of the damage shown in the pictures was caused during the raising of XS894, contemporary reports say it looked as if it had been "parked" on the sea floor.

Now none of this means a UFO was involved only there's one piece of information that is constantly left out. Two witnesses, on land walking their dog, said they saw an aircraft chasing a "bright light" over the Wash that night and then, minutes late,r saw two more aircraft heading in the same direction as well. They didn't see what happened to any of the objects after that, yet their testimony was given long before the "fake tape" surfaced.

That still leaves us with , pretty much, a mundane, as mundane as a pilot being killed doing his job can be, crash. Only there's a follow up.... XS894 has never been scrapped, that is, it has never been officially scrapped as it should appear as, in the records as it was recovered and brought back to land. We know this as the geeks that record the history of every single English Electric Lightning can find no record of its' scrapping anywhere. Which is a real coincidence as investigators were told that, XS894 was shipped to the USA and still there in some unknown hanger and location. Yes, that's right, the USA arbitrarily, took one of the RAF's aircraft, after it had crashed on a "routine mission" and shipped it back to the USA.

Now, the MOD, Nick Pope and Dave Clarke can say what they like, that's what the actual serving personnel told investigators before the fake tape surfaced in 1992.