UFO Britannia: Part 2 – World War Foo & Post War Cover Ups

continued from Part 1



During the 2nd World War the “foo fighters” would fly alongside both Allied and Axis aircraft at night. Sightings continued during the Korean War and were even reported by civilian aircrews. “Foo Fighter” was a term that may have not been commonly used until the near to the end of the war by British flight crews who referred to them simply as the ‘light’ or strange balls of light. There were times when crews had fired at the lights but they never appeared to fight back.

A number of MoD documents, declassified in the 1990s, mention unusual phenomenon sighted by RAF crews . A case from 1942 describes a raid on Turin the night of November 28/29, when an object an estimated at 200-300 ft. in length, 40-50 ft. in diameter, and travelling at an estimated 500 mph, with four equally spaced red lights along its length was reported. The pilot, Captain Lever, said he saw a similar object during the summer, north of Amsterdam. The crew was adamant of the story despite ridicule. On the night of 26/27th May 1943, during a raid on Essen, Germany, the crew of an RAF bomber reported a large cylindrical object similar to the one mentioned earlier. There were a number of "portholes" spaced evenly along its length. It was much larger than their aircraft and departed at a speed estimated to be in the "thousands of mph!”. Many other reports were of bright, small spherical objects that would follow the aircraft as they carried out their missions.



Information on specific RAF sightings on the internet though is somewhat sparse. It seems to be one of the most well known but least detailed chapters in Ufology. Even official investigations conducted for the MoD failed to mention them during a very paranoid period of the Cold War.

One interesting comment came from Comedian Michael Bentine, sadly no longer with us, who was an intelligence office during World War II. He is on record as having said :

‘When I was an intelligence officer in Bomber Command in the winter of 1943-44, I debriefed several crews about some lights that had attacked them when they were over the Baltic. They fired at the lights, which didn’t shoot back. These lights didn’t seem to do anything, just pulse and go round. We put it down to fatigue, but later, after I had sent the reports in, an American G2 Intelligence Officer told us that their bombers saw lights in the sky - ‘foo-fighters’ he called them.’

In summary though it seems that the Foo fighters were not fighters at all. By 1994 they were more famous as a rock band.

Further reading: rotwang5.tripod.com...

www.uk-ufo.org...

A UFO Crash Retrieval in Britain?

After a visit to the UK, US journalist Dorothy Kilgallen alleged that the British Government had recovered a crashed UFO just after the war. An article she wrote in the Los Angeles Examiner on 23 May 1955 stated:

“British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified. ‘We believe’ he said on the basis of our enquiry thus far, that the saucers are staffed by small men – probably under four feet tall. It is frightening, but there is no denying that the flying saucers come from another planet. This official quoted scientists as saying a flying ship of this type could not have possibly been constructed on earth. The British Government, I learned, is withholding an official report on the flying saucer examined at this time, possibly because it does not wish to frighten the public. When my husband (Richard Kollmer, Broadway producer and radio commentator) and I arrived here in Britain for a brief vacation, I had no premonition that I would be catapulting myself into the controversy over whether flying saucers are real or imaginary. In the United States all kinds of explanations have been advanced. But no responsible official of the United States Air Force has yet intimated that the mysterious flying ships had actually vaulted from outer space.”

It is widely believed that Kilgallen’s source was Earl Mountbatten who relayed this to her at a cocktail party he hosted in May 1955. But the story has also been dismissed as a hoax by many.

Dorothy Killgallen was a very popular newspaper columnist who involved herself in the investigations of a number of conspiracy theories and died somewhat mysteriously after interviewing Jack Ruby regarding the JFK assassination which is beyond the scope of this thread.

More on Killgallen’s death here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

There is however more to a story of a crashed UFO on British soil during this era.

Ghost Rockets, Flying Bombs and the Westerham Incident 1947

Reginald Victor Jones had played a key role in predicting and countering German technical advances in radar, radio-beam navigation, V-1 and V-2 rockets and the early German nuclear programme. He was appointed Assistant Director of Intelligence (Science) in 1941 and promoted to Director of Intelligence in 1946.

Jones also became involved in investigations of the post-war Ghost Rockets wave in Scandinavia. At first the Soviets were suspected of launching test missiles over Sweden. Eventually though, by autumn of 1946, Swedish intelligence, were dumbfounded and could not trace the source of these rockets despite assistance from the British. Close to a thousand incidents had been logged with around 80% dismissed as “celestial phenomena”. But some cases included visual, radar and other detection methods as evidence. Most fragments retrieved from potential crash sites turned out to be ordinary slag. Jones was never convinced by the stories and asked for tangible evidence of the ghost rockets.

So in early 1947 a substance that allegedly fell from a “ghost rocket” over Sweden was sent for scientific tests to Farnborough in England. The investigation showed 98% of it was of an unknown element. The story circulated around the globe. Then Jones stepped in. Jones declared that just by looking at the substance anyone could see it was “a lump of coke”. His lifelong friend and scientist Sir Charles Frank is mentioned as being in agreement with him. But up until that point it seems no one had questioned it.

The conundrum is that had a real unknown piece of material been identified then it would almost certainly have been buried in a veil of secrecy with a mundane cover story issued to the press. Reginald Victor Jones would have been the ideal man in Britain to provide such a cover a story.


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The Westerham Incident

The Westerham incident involved the alleged crash of an object at Westerham in Kent, dating back to 1946. Westerham is just a couple of miles from Chartwell, then the home of Sir Winston Churchill. It started, with an irate call from a farmer called "Gunyon" to the Air Technical Intelligence Staff. He wanted the Air Ministry to remove “one of those darned contraptions” which had fallen onto his farm. Secretly, two staff cars were dispatched. On arriving in Westerham the agents could not locate the farm or the farmer. They eventually traced a farmer named "Bunyan", who strenuously denied having made the call. The two officers involved then theorized that their Director R.V Jones was behind a prank to dampen their belief in “ghost rockets”.

According to his book, Most Secret War a message received from General MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo, asked for confirmation that a ghost rocket or ‘flying bomb’ had recently crashed in England. Director of Intelligence, Air Commodore Vintras, asked Jones for advice on how to respond and accidentally let it slip that this could be tied in with the “Westerham Incident”. In his book, Jones implies he had no knowledge of the incident until Vintras told him of it and denies any deception of the officers sent out to investigate.

However in 1947, simple things like lumps of coke and weather balloons were becoming difficult to identify on both sides of the Atlantic. The murky world of UFOs and government secrets had already began.

More :

R.V. Jones The Natural Philosophy of Flying Saucers

www.project1947.com...

Most Secret War - R.V. Jones

preview.tinyurl.com...

Need to Know - Timothy Good

preview.tinyurl.com...


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Churchill, Eisenhower and a UFO Cover-Up?

Many news sources speculated that Churchill himself had ordered a UFO cover-up after the release of UK MoD Archives in 2010.

Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public "panic" and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.

The former Prime Minister allegedly banned reporting of the “bizarre” incident, off the east coast of England, for half a century amid fears disclosures about unidentified flying objects would create public hysteria.
He is said to have made the orders during a secret war meeting with US General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.

The story had in fact come from a number of letters on file from a person claiming to be the grandson of one of Churchill’s bodyguards. He obviously liked to eavesdrop at every opportunity. In the letters it was claimed that an RAF reconnaissance crew had been intercepted by a metallic craft close to the East Coast of England. The object made no noise, and after tracking the aircraft, simply sped off at great speed leaving no trace.

One of the claims made in the correspondence was:

This event was discussed by Mr. Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations... another person raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future prime minister.

Searches through available documentation produced nothing. Either these documents never existed, were missing, had been destroyed or had still not been cleared for release.

One document that did turn up was a letter Churchill wrote to the Air Ministry in 1952 saying:

"What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?"

Ref: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos DEFE 24/2013

This was almost certainly prompted by the July 1952 UFO flap over Washington when USAF interceptors were sent chasing UFOs over the US capital and the air force organized a press conference to try to calm the fears of the public and play down the subject.


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Flying Saucer Working Party

Intelligence chiefs formed The Flying Saucer Working Party in 1950 to investigate flying saucer reports, partly encouraged by Lord Mountbatten, who believed UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin.

The Flying Saucer Working Party began in October 1950 at the the request of MoD, Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Henry Tizard. He felt that UFO reports required a serious study and duly authorized a small team to look into the phenomenon.

A response was provided to Churchill less than 2 weeks later ,based on a study in 1951, concluding that all reports were explainable as hoaxes, natural phenomenon or the delusions of the observer.

click to view

The study referred to was the work of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence & Joint Intelligence Committee - DSI/JTIC Report No. 7 (National Archive reference DEFE 44/119). The report dismissed the Scandinavian ghost rockets as atmospheric phenomena. It defined cases from Projects Sign and Grudge as due to explainable aerial objects, illusions, hoaxes or psychologically disturbed witnesses. The fatal Thomas Mantell case in the USA was blamed on the pilot chasing Venus.

It was just as dismissive of UK cases but notably it did not mention “foo” fighter sightings during wartime. The conclusions were:

When the only material available is a mass of purely subjective evidence, it is impossible to give anything like scientific proof that the phenomena observed are, or are not, caused by something entirely novel, such as an aircraft of extraterrestrial origin, developed by beings unknown to us on lines more advanced than anything we have thought of. We are, however, satisfied that the bulk of the observations reported do not need such an explanation, and can be accounted for much more simply. There is a very old scientific principle, usually attributed to William of Occam, which states that the most probable hypothesis is the simplest necessary to explain the observations. We believe that this principle should be applied to the present case, and accordingly conclude that all the observations reported were due to one or other of the following causes:---

• Astronomical or meteorological phenomena of known types.
• Mistaken identification of conventional aircraft, balloons, birds, or other normal or natural objects.
• Optical illusions and psychological delusions.
• Deliberate hoaxes.

The Working Party had also liaised with American counterparts in the CIA to debunk sightings and impose a tight security clampdown to ensure the more puzzling cases did not reach the media. Skeptics interpret this, as a wise move to avoid a dangerous , possibly nuclear, confrontation with the Soviet Bloc during a very paranoid phase of the Cold War.

But was there something more to all of this? The report also mentioned a Flying Saucer crash:

We have been informed, in conversation with a member of the United States investigating team, that the even more sensational report of the discovery of a crashed “flying saucer,” full of the remains of very small beings, was ultimately admitted by its author to have been a complete fabrication.

One British citizen who actually heard radio broadcasts confirming a saucer crash in 1947 was entertainer Hughie Green. Green recalled that whilst driving across the USA, in Summer 1947, he heard numerous radio reports that a flying saucer had crashed in New Mexico and that the United States army were moving in to investigate. After promises that the story would be updated he then recalls everything went silent. In his dying days during the 1990s he confirmed in a letter that he heard on the radio that a UFO crash occurred in the Tucumcari area.

More on Hughie Green's story here: www.abovetopsecret.com...


Esteemed UFO researcher and journalist Dr. David Clarke, however, appears to have taken the FSWP report as official confirmation that the Roswell story is a fabrication and myth. "I Don't Want to Believe" seems to have been his mantra ever since the MoD gave him access to their UFO files.

drdavidclarke.co.uk...

However the report almost certainly points to the Frank Scully story featured in Behind the Flying Saucers of a crashed flying saucer in Aztec, New Mexico in 1948. Neither Roswell, nor Aztec, is directly referenced in the report which concluded:

….we recommend very strongly that no further investigation of reported mystery aerial phenomena be undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available.”

The decision was a little premature when Flying Saucers became a very real problem…as we shall see when we go back to the 1950s ..which is coming soon in part 3 which maybe tomorrow?

Some great work on both threads there Mirageman and look forward to part three tomorrow - the MOD's certainly got some explaining to do when it comes to its official attitudes on the UFO subject and there's an incident described in this thread where the British MOD document was said to be so so sensitive that "an extra three years was added to its 25 year release date", there's also another case here where the MOD broke with all official protocol when reporting and investigating the incident so I really do wonder why they are claiming not to be concerned about the UFO subject.

I'm also sure MOD officials are aware of close range radar/visual cases like the one described in the interview below (and there are also unexplained incidents like this one within the flight corridors of one of the world's busiest airports) so I also wonder about their claims of UFOs 'not posing a threat to the nation’s security' -if only for the aviation safety factor aspect.

See 13:55

In the article below it also mentions the Operation Mainbrace UFO incidents that were said to cause the RAF to 'officially recognize' the UFO subject and other UFO cases which forced the MOD to 'rethink and then reverse its policy' - it also states that two Air Ministry Divisions were actively involved in investigating UFO sightings (S6 and DDI) - don't know what the findings of their investigations were but if the British MOD were taking specific UFO incidents that seriously back then I can't see them just changing their mind and abandoning the subject nowadays.

Commentary on DSI/JTIC Report No 7:

In chapter 17 Ruppelt reveals that even after he had left Project Blue Book and the USAF, friends in RAF intelligence kept him informed about latest developments, on a private basis.

Another indication of the strong US influence on the Flying Saucer Working Party is the fact that their June 1951 final report was entitled Unidentified Flying Objects. This term had been devised by Ruppelt himself, early in 1951, but was not at the time in use outside US Government circles.

..The Flying Saucer Working Party had been dissolved in 1951 amidst a frenzy of scepticism that had clearly been fuelled by the Americans. The response that Churchill received to his 1952 enquiry showed that the sceptics still had the upper hand within the MOD. But this was soon to change.During the period 1952 to 1957 there were a series of UFO sightings involving the military, which forced the MOD to rethink and then reverse its policy. These included sightings during Operation Mainbrace in September 1952 (including those at RAF Topcliffe), the West Malling incident on 3 November 1953, Flight Lieutenant Salandin’s near-collision with a UFO on 14 October 1954, the Lakenheath/Bentwaters radar/visual sightings on 13 and 14 August 1956 and the RAF West Freugh incident on 4 April 1957.

High-profile sightings such as these, together with the increasing number of reports from the general public, pushed the sceptics within MOD onto the defensive. The Flying Saucer Working Party’s recommendation that UFO sightings should not be investigated was overturned and by the mid-Fifties two Air Ministry Divisions were actively involved in investigating UFO sightings. The divisions concerned were S6, a civilian secretariat division on the air staff, and DDI(Tech), a technical intelligence division. Their brief was to research and investigate the UFO phenomenon looking for evidence of any threat to the UK.

Full Article

There's also some relevant reading at the link below concerning the work of British researcher Julian J.A. Hennessey and he does a good job of pointing out some of the 'inherent shortcomings' of MOD UFO policy including claims of 'force fit' debunking and massaging the statistics of actual unknown reports (just like their American counterparts).

If one accepts the above as the only "true" picture, which is how the public now sees it, then the Ministry's investigation is one of gross incompetence that endangers National security. However, my observations lead me to believe that it is not the only investigation."

link

Cheers.

reply to post by karl 12


Feel free to add whatever you feel is relevant karl. Your posts along with a few others are of real quality and it always frustrates me how many of them vanish rapidly.

Nothing to add at the moment but awesome..thankyou S&F

reply to post by mirageman


Thanks for the comments Mirageman and the forum definitely needs more threads like this one, I don't know if you saw it but there's a relevant post here dealing with the British Government's involvement with the UFO subject and, according to U.K. Under Secretary of State Ralph Noyes there used to be secret screenings of UFO Gun camera footage for Air Defense staff as far back as 1970 - he also mentions there was no trace of the films in the archives in the 1990's but then I wasn't really surprised by that.

Love him or hate him I also thought Nick Pope made a good point below about the MOD's claim that 'UFOs are of no defense significance', he also brings up the fact that the MOD were quietly asking the Americans about UFOs in their airspace since the mid 1980's (and the Americans were asking them).

"The official line from the Ministry of Defense is, 'Yes, this happened. No, we don't know what it is, but we say that it is of no defense significance.' How can it possibly be of no defense significance when your best jet is left for standing by a UFO? And, again, how can it be of no defense significance when your air defense region is routinely penetrated by structured craft?"
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994


"We were asking the Americans, 'Are you operating a prototype aircraft in our airspace?' That, of course, was nonsense. You simply would not do that from a diplomatic and political point of view. It would undermine the entire structure of NATO if you were putting things through someone else's airspace, particularly a close ally, without seeking the proper diplomatic clearance. But we had to ask. And the Americans, having had similar reports, I guess, since the Hudson Valley wave [New York state, mid-1980s], had been quietly asking us if we had some large, triangular shaped object that could go from 0 to Mach 5 in a second. Our response was that we wished we did. This was the bizarre situation: that we were chasing the Americans, and the Americans were chasing us."
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994

Cheers.

S+F mate, nice compilation of cases. I'm pretty sure Winston Churchill was fascinated with UFOs right through his days up to being P.M. There was almost certainly a cover up also.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I hope putting in almost first hand experience with foo fighters is ok on this thread. I remember the war, but as an orphaned child here in the states. In 49 or 50, I was taken into a home by a wonderful man and woman, poor but having been a pilot in the worse part of bombing raids out of England. In fact the planes illustrated here was what he flew, but then crashed on his last mission. Most of his group in fact was destroyed as it was that bad.

Now what he told me, which was only a few years after the missions was detailed accounts of the foo fighters which often would come in just off his cockpit, follow in formation, then dart to another plane or go from one wingtip to another. He never gave an order to fire on them, or if so did not tell us kids of it. All I can say is, he was of high intelligence and a level person, he never made up stories nor embellished them. I think, having so many friends die there sobered him in many way. As a side note, he did not glorify the event, but would cry at the number of innocents that must have died due to the bombs he delivered.

sailormon thank you for your contribution to the thread. It adds to the mystery of what the Foo fighters really were. Whilst I think others sightings were labelled as foo fighters but were definitely much larger than small spheres and possibly a totally different phenomena. Some very sobering thoughts about the horrors of war as well.


Zcustosmorum - thanks also for the link to the information Churchill. Feel free to post any other links of relevance that I and others may have missed and can jump off to read through.

Karl - Some great information as always. Some I had not come across before and I hope others find interesting.

I am still working through part 3 - the 1950s , but will post the link in this thread as well once it's all done.

OK Part 3 - The 1950s, continues here

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by mirageman


mirageman --- I long for the day...when I can have another foofighter sighting. My last foo sighting, was back one night in November of 1976; approx. 40 miles west of Washington D.C. I was captivated and awestruck by the alien starship sighting --- that had the technological prowess of a flying machine that could change speeds [approx. 15,000 mph down to 30 mph] --- various plasma color changes [bluish-white hi-power phase to the flaming red-orange offensive/defensive/landing phase] of a starship that had a red-orange plasma shield of approx. 500 --- 800 feet in diameter. It was the most beautiful object I ever saw in my life.

Cheers,

Foofighter's

Erno86

reply to post by mirageman

Really good work here Mirageman. Very detailed information on the foo wartime phenomenon.

What they are or were is anybodys guess, you hear loads of theories on them being probes sent down from motherships, light orbs, angels, individual massive space ships that shrink down for hiding purposes when near to planet Earth, elementals, Jinn, etc.

Maybe they are spirits. What if they are the spirits of deceased airmen who were still in someway connected to their previous missions and somehow can't leave the flight paths alone? This could explain why they suddenly started appearing during a state of war.

It would be very interesting to see if the number of sightings increased as the number of deaths due to conflict increased. If someone with more time than I've got could analyse the numbers then it could throw light on the foo being spirits.

Please note that I don't particularly lean towards the spirits of dead airmen, I've seen them in connection with readiant white massive motherships so I go more alien/inter dimensionsal, It's just very coincidental that the sightings occured as many people were being killed in the air. Maybe the bigger space ships are something spiritual and is just as the Bible talks of them being gods chariots/Merkava

originally posted by: mirageman

Churchill, Eisenhower and a UFO Cover-Up?

Many news sources speculated that Churchill himself had ordered a UFO cover-up after the release of UK MoD Archives in 2010.

Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public "panic" and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.

The former Prime Minister allegedly banned reporting of the “bizarre” incident, off the east coast of England, for half a century amid fears disclosures about unidentified flying objects would create public hysteria.
He is said to have made the orders during a secret war meeting with US General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.

The story had in fact come from a number of letters on file from a person claiming to be the grandson of one of Churchill’s bodyguards. He obviously liked to eavesdrop at every opportunity. In the letters it was claimed that an RAF reconnaissance crew had been intercepted by a metallic craft close to the East Coast of England. The object made no noise, and after tracking the aircraft, simply sped off at great speed leaving no trace.

One of the claims made in the correspondence was:

This event was discussed by Mr. Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations... another person raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future prime minister.

Searches through available documentation produced nothing. Either these documents never existed, were missing, had been destroyed or had still not been cleared for release.

One document that did turn up was a letter Churchill wrote to the Air Ministry in 1952 saying:

"What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?"

Ref: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos DEFE 24/2013

This was almost certainly prompted by the July 1952 UFO flap over Washington when USAF interceptors were sent chasing UFOs over the US capital and the air force organized a press conference to try to calm the fears of the public and play down the subject.


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10.16.2023

WOW...This keeps circulating every few years. Is now on the 2023 radar again.

Today's bulletin references this 2010 article: abcnews.go.com...

a reply to: mirageman

I don't know about that