UFOs in Reality (2 page)

Those were the very early years of the Space Age, when the Americans and Soviets were committing vast resources to the Cold War ‘Space Race’ – and having many failures, even on the launch pads. It was quite clear to us all that more effective and economical ways of launching things into space had to be found before Britain could produce its own launchers in quantity. An attempt was being made to adapt the Blue Streak IBM for satellite launching, but after a few trials, the Government of that time eventually withdrew its support for that project and, also, for the less well-known Saunders-Roe Black Knight and Black Arrow rocket launchers.

In contrast, space efforts within the Special Projects Office were being concentrated in very different directions.

Prior to my presence, John Allen had conceived a provisional cheap launcher for small satellites, which would be carried aloft by a Vulcan bomber before release. That was a practicable possibility. Having already designed, produced and tested the air launched, liquid-fuelled, Blue Steel supersonic cruise missile, the Company had already acquired the necessary skills and expertise to produce an air-launched rocket with a very different purpose.

Looking towards the future, we were encouraged to investigate rocket launchers using ‘exotic’ fuels (to reduce the physical size of the craft), recoverable stages, and very advanced ‘aerospaceplanes’. The aerospaceplanes
were winged vehicles. They were intended to take off from conventional runways and then to climb to high altitude using advanced turbojet engines, whilst accelerating to Concorde speeds (Mach 2). From there, ramjets would accelerate them to still higher altitudes and to speeds greater than Mach 5. Finally, rockets would power the rapidly climbing craft into orbit. On leaving its orbit, an aerospaceplane would glide back through the atmosphere (like the Space Shuttle) and land on an airfield. Only the fuel and the satellite would be left behind, instead of all those expensive throw-away rocket stages.

Through his efforts to promote Space-mindedness in Britain, John Allen became known as an expert on such matters by influential people at the Granada Television Studios in Manchester. He was often consulted about the latest developments in the Space Race and, to help them produce a programme about the distant future, he was asked for spacecraft designs that represented our thinking on future manned missions to the Moon and to Mars. Much of that task was allocated to me. With advice on aerodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), astrophysics, celestial mechanics, advanced micro-‘g’ propulsion units (for use in space) and advanced structures, freely available from the various specialised experts within the department, I was able to produce schemes for those missions. The spacecraft conceived for the Mars mission used nuclear rocket propulsion and one of them looked very similar to the Jupiter Mission ship in the film “2001 - A Space Odyssey”, which was produced some years later. All aspects of the missions were considered, especially, how the crew members were going to be accommodated, sustained and protected (from radiation and meteors, for example) during periods of many months in the hostile environment of the Solar System. It was inspiring stuff for a young forward-looking engineer to begin his career with — but, alas, all too far ahead in terms of the available technology and funding. (NASA abandoned its National Aerospaceplane project, and the planned Mars Mission is still some years away into the future.)

In 1963, after becoming part of the Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Group, the entire department was disbanded. Having just settled in that desirable area with a wife and small son, it suited my requirements to try to remain at that site for a few more years. Even though I knew I would be stepping down from the main promotional ladders, I accepted an offer of a post in the Hawker Siddeley Aviation (H.S.A.) Wind Tunnels Department as an engineer/analyst. The tunnels were situated on the other side of the airfield at Woodford. Therein, I made new friends, gained new knowledge and expertise, and lived with the hope that, one day, I might be able to progress further with my envisaged career. That was my situation when, in 1967, strange things began to happen in the skies above the entire Manchester area.

The 1967 Happenings.

During the late summer period of 1967, people reported having seen strange aerial craft, often with multicoloured lights, flying low, or hovering, over residential areas. As Autumn approached, the number of reports appearing in local newspapers increased rapidly. I began to take an interest in those reports, because many of the witnesses were convinced that they had seen artificial objects that had not been produced on Earth. The newspapers often referred to them as ‘Flying Saucers’, even when the description given in the article described something nothing like a saucer. I decided to carry out a low-key investigation of the reports, using the newspaper cuttings. Aerial craft were my professional business and my four years’ ‘crash course’ in astronautics (the science of travel in Space) was still very fresh in my mind. Little did I know that that spare-time study would go on – and on – and on – for more than forty years, to the present day!

What follows, in this Phase 1 section, is my report of that early investigation, which expanded quickly to include UFO reports from all over Britain. The Phase 1 study lasted for six years.

CHAPTER 2
T
HE THINGS IN THE SKIES
 

During the Cold War years, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) always asserted that its interest in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) was limited. Its sole purpose was to determine whether any reports of that kind represented potential military threats to the UK. In effect, if the objects described by witnesses were considered not to be Soviet surveillance craft, then the reports were simply filed away and virtually forgotten. The author believes that, even today, the full story has yet to be revealed. In his view, in order to support MoD’s perfectly legitimate position, its technical departments would have been tasked with thoroughly investigating each report in detail. Only then would it have been possible for the MoD publicly to dismiss the defence significance of UFO reports.

In the following chapter, the author describes his own professional investigations of individual reports. He has good reasons to believe that MoD’s technical staff would have carried out similar studies and would have probably arrived at the same conclusions.

Investigations Begin

The descriptions of the strange aerial craft (SAC), seen in the air above the Manchester area during 1967, varied considerably. Clearly, the first question to be addressed was whether or not the reports made any engineering sense. Were these objects just figments of imaginations fired by the initial rumours? Were they real but commonplace things, say, like newspapers carried along by a strong wind and, at night, reflecting the lights of the city below? Or, were the witnesses correct in thinking that they were being surveyed by craft from another planet, somewhere out there in space? There was only one way to find out – the reports had to be analysed in detail.

One thing seemed to be very clear to me – whatever they were, they would certainly
not
be experimental military aircraft flying at such low altitudes over residential areas. The risks of failure and disaster on the ground below would be too high. Nor did I take seriously the suggestion that perhaps the Soviets had managed to produce spy-craft of that nature, which had avoided detection by the NATO radar systems. My analysis of the reports soon confirmed that there were no obvious explanations for the things described. They had often frightened the witnesses by their complete silence and their controlled manoeuvres, at times, just over the housetops. They had also displayed coloured lights and, most eerily, some had seemed to have had an all-over glow in the darkness.

I drew coloured sketches of selected craft and listed their characteristics and manoeuvres –- their arrivals and departures, changes of body colour and of the lighting configurations as the objects moved about.

The list of Manchester sightings was soon to be supplemented by similar events being reported in Staffordshire, in the Stoke-on-Trent area, some 35 miles (56 Km) to the south of Manchester. The same things were happening there too. Just occasionally a national newspaper would report a sighting in the South of England, but North West England seemed to be where the activity was being concentrated. Most commonly, eye-witnesses described objects that were discs with rounded domes on top, which I categorised as ‘DISC/DOME’. Very few resembled saucers. In fact, they didn’t seem to resemble any sensible kind of aircraft at all! They were more like a collection of hats and the lids of kitchen utensils, yet they apparently displayed such agility and rapidity in the air that no man-made aircraft (or missile) could have possibly hoped to match them.

When I obtained a copy of a report
[1]
in 1968, more detailed information on the Staffordshire events became available to me. My earlier observations were reinforced by that excellent piece of documentation produced by two amateur astronomers. The objects seemed to be real enough. This was confirmed in various ways, but one of the most tangible proofs of their reality came from this Staffordshire report of an event that occurred on the night of 2nd September, 1967 :-

“
No sound
[engine noise?]
was heard by any of the witnesses during the whole
sighting, although
[one of the witnesses]
said
“it was like a wind when it came over”
.

“Four of the witnesses were asked to make a drawing of what they had seen. The four simple outline drawings
[produced by them]
all show the same object - a disc, surmounted by a dome. All witnesses were agreed that the disc was a dull orange/yellow while the dome was
bright red..
[One witness]
said the red dome was stationary, but the disc seemed to be spinning.”

The report also stated that the object had travelled low over the houses before appearing to land in a field some 400 to 800 yards (metres) away from them. One boy witness said that, after the landing, the bright red dome went out “like a light” but that the orange disc had turned more yellow before fading away. The fading process had taken between one and three minutes. There seemed to be little doubt that the residents of that new housing estate had seen a flying craft of some kind. But, if so, it was obviously using propulsion techniques unknown to me or, I suspected, to anyone else in the aerospace business. The boy’s account was very revealing. The entire structure of the vehicle had seemed to be electrically energised, at least during its deceleration and descent into the field. After a landing had been accomplished, the power source had seemed to have been switched off, as the boy had suggested.

The police
had been called and three policemen arrived at the estate some thirty minutes after the event. By then, some of the venturesome boys had already begun to explore the fields in the direction of the object’s location. The police sent the boys to their homes and then began to continue the search, without success. They were returning and joking about the affair when a light was seen ascending from the distant fields by one of the residents. Everyone turned to look and all saw a big white light, like a distant glowing orb, climb into the night sky above the low hills. After reaching an estimated altitude of about 300 feet (100 metres) above the top of the hills, it stopped, and then may have tilted before disappearing
“like the picture when the television set is switched off”.
(When an old black-and-white TV was switched off, the picture collapsed into a central bright spot, before the screen became blank).

All this substantiated my already well-established suspicion that we were dealing with sci-fi technology, such as we could only speculate about. If the things being observed were really solid objects, they seemed to be quantum-mechanically propelled –- which meant that the Laws of Newton, Aerodynamics and Thermodynamics (which govern all human aerospace engineers’ efforts) were apparently incidental to their operations.

So, were they solid? That was the burning issue to be resolved.

The vital first clue came from the witness who had said “
it was like a wind when it came over”

Gliders and sailplanes have very smooth, streamlined, shapes. These are necessary to minimise the air resistance of unpowered aircraft created to ascend in rising air currents, like soaring birds. They are designed to slice through the air and cause the smallest possible amount of commotion (turbulence) in the air trailing behind them (wakes). A turbulent wake means lost energy. It translates into a resistance to motion, called ‘Drag’. Even so, when one of those very efficient and graceful aircraft passes low, overhead, perhaps during a landing, a loud ‘SWOOSH’ is heard. This noise is created by unavoidable disturbances in the air caused by the rapid motion of the glider and vortices shed from the wingtips.

Solid objects that do not have smoothly and gently curved (streamlined) shapes are called ‘bluff’ by airflow specialists (aerodynamicists) – and such shapes, when speeding through the air, leave a lot of disturbance trailing behind them. Consider what this means. If a low-flying glider produces an audible swooshing noise, what kind of noise would a gliding, bluff, disc/dome shape produce when flying overhead? My expectation was that it would create a blustering buffeting noise, rather like the noise we hear in our ears when we’re walking head-on into a fairly-strong wind. The witness who had been standing directly beneath the flightpath of that glowing dome from the skies had given me the vital clue. That flying thing that had landed in Staffordshire had been almost certainly SOLID! At least, it had been so during its presence in that area. Will-o-the- wisps and hallucinations do not cause wind noises.