We See Everything – even Flying Saucers
The RAF Topcliffe sighting made the front page splash for the Yorkshire Evening Press, 20th September 1952. (image: David Clarke)SEPTEMBER 2022 MARKS THE 70th anniversary of an unexplained sighting that confounded the Royal Air Force and led the British government to ‘take the UFO seriously’ for the first time.
Just before 11 am on Friday, 19 September 1952 a group of ten officers and national servicemen from 269 Squadron, observed ‘a perfect flying saucer’ from the runway at RAF Topcliffe in North Yorkshire as it followed a Meteor jet approach nearby Dishforth aerodrome.
The sighting took place during a NATO exercise, Mainbrace, that simulated an attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union.
Mainbrace was a 13 day exercise that involved the armed forces of eight countries, More than 150 warships and hundreds of aircraft took part.
Aircrew from the RAF’s long range Shackleton patrol bomber squadron 269 were waiting for orders at Topcliffe a former WW2 Bomber Command airbase near Thirsk. One of the officers, R.N. Paris, noticed a white object in the sky. It was at a height of 10-20,000 feet five miles astern of the descending Meteor.
According to a statement made by Flt Lt John Kilburn to Air Ministry: ‘…the object was silver in colour and and circular in shape’ as it followed the Meteor but then began to descend ‘swinging in a pendular motion…similar to a falling sycamore leaf’.
Their immediate thought the ‘object’ was a parachute or a piece of engine cowling that had fallen from the jet aircraft. But as the Meteor turned towards Dishforth the circular object suddenly halted it descent and followed, rotating along its own axis.
‘Suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a south-easterly heading before disappearing,’ Kilburn reported, continuing: ‘All this occurred in a matter of fifteen to twenty seconds. The movements of the object were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air and the rate of acceleration was unbelievable’.(TNA AIR 16/1199).
Headline from the London Sunday Dispatch 20, September 1952.On Saturday 20 September the story made headlines in the local and national media. The Yorkshire Evening Press newspaper carried news of the ‘saucer’ sighting across its front page. Journalists were allowed to interview the airmen and the RAF was forced to admit the incident was under investigation by its ‘special branch’. On the following day the London Sunday Dispatch splashed with ‘SAUCER CHASED RAF JET PLANE’ and asked: ‘What Intruded into Exercise Mainbrace?’
Soon the RAF’s top brass at Air Ministry were asking the same question…
A flash signal reporting the ‘flying saucer’, was sent to Air Ministry London from RAF Pitreavie Castle, MHQ and HQ Coastal Command. It was seen by Ralph Noyes, Private Secretary to the Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Ralph Cochrane who, in 1988, recalled his bosses ’embarrassed unease, widely shared by the operations staff, that “our own people” had begun to fall for “that saucer nonsense”‘.
Nevertheless the signal, preserved at the UK National Archives, contains a hand-written instruction from the Wing Commander in charge of Ops (Air Defence) to ‘ask PA [personal assistant] to open a folder “Unidentified Aircraft or Objects reported to Air Ministry” (TNA AIR 20/7390).
According to the memoirs of Captain Edward Ruppelt, head of the US Air Force’s re-launched UFO project Blue Book, it was the Topcliffe/Mainbrace incident that ’caused the RAF to officially recognise the UFO’ (Ed Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, New York: Doubleday 1956, p196).
So the Topcliffe incident instigated the Air Ministry’s UFO desk that began its collection and analysis of data in 1952 and continued in many different guises for 57 years until its closure in 2009.
Sadly apart from the Air Ministry signal and a file of letters from the public collated by the station commander at RAF Topcliffe, few traces of the Air Ministry investigation have survived at The National Archives.
In 1951 the Ministry of Defence closed the Flying Saucer Working Party, at a meeting attended by H. Marshall Chadwell, assistant director of the CIA’s office of Scientific Intelligence.
It concluded that all sightings could be explained as misperceptions, hoaxes and optical illusions – including those reported by RAF test pilots.
Their top secret report was used to brief Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the summer of 1952 following a massive UFO flap over Washington DC that made headlines across the world. It also led the CIA to take a deep interest in the potential of the UFO phenomenon for ‘psychological warfare operations’.
Signal from MHQ to Air Ministry London reporting RAF Topcliffe sighting (TNA AIR 20/7390).In 2001 I used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of a memo written by Chadwell dated December 1952 that refers to the ‘Yorkshire incident’ in a summary of British activity ‘in the field of UFOs’.
It reveals that the Topcliffe sighting was still under investigation by ‘a standing committee on flying saucers’ led by Dr (later Professor) RV Jones who was Chadwell’s opposite number in the British MoD.
RV Jones had a long connection with unexplained aerial phenomena that began in WW2 and its aftermath when, as intelligence officer for the Air Ministry, he was called upon to investigate the wave of ‘ghost rocket’ sightings in Scandinavia and parts of occupied Europe.
He was appointed as MoD’s Director of Scientific Intelligence by Churchill earlier that year and the signal from MHQ includes two copies of the report for Ministry of Defence DSI – Jones’s department of scientific intelligence.
The CIA’s H. Marshall Chadwell said the saucer had been observed by ‘high officials of the RAF in London’ who had been invited ‘to some sort of demonstration’ as well as RAF pilots. This might refer to the 12th anniversary of the Battle of Britain that was underway in Yorkshire and other parts of the UK from the 15th to the 20th of September, 1952. Aerobatic displays were flown by jets and older WW2 aircraft over Yorkshire towns and cities during Exercise Mainbrace.
‘So many people saw it [the saucer] that many articles appeared in the public press,’ the CIA noted. ‘This is disturbing to [Dr] Jones because he realises that the creation of the correction of public opinion is a part of his responsibilities’.
A follow-up article published by the Yorkshire Post in November 1952 revealed the RAF’s new UFO unit had failed to identify or explain the Topcliffe UFO. It also included the intriguing detail that ‘three aircraft captains with many years flying experience all saw the object’. This may suggest the object was also observed from the air, possibly by the pilot of the Meteor, in addition to the Shackleton crews on the ground. The sparse records that have survived do not throw any light on this intriguing admission – except for one item.
The single surviving reference to the Air Intelligence study of the Topcliffe sighting emerged in 1998 when MoD UFO records from 1967 were opened at The National Archives under the old 30 year rule.
One file contains a memo from a desk officer, John Dickison, who worked for the Defence Intelligence branch DI55. Dickison was based at RAE Farnborough and he that took over responsibility for UFO investigations from former Air Ministry tech intelligence branch earlier that year.
He had been asked to examine surviving intelligence files on UFOs from 1950-52 following a Parliamentary Question about UFOs from a former RAF pilot turned MP.
Dickison reported back that the ‘Topcliffe-Meteor incident, which occurred during the NATO Exercise Mainbrace’ was ‘typical of reports about such aircraft at that time’. He continued:
RAF 269 Squadron insignia.‘As regards the particular incident the “object” only appeared to come from the aircraft [Meteor jet]. There is no specific evidence from the files examined so far, that the object tracked or came from the aircraft. In fact, the trajectory of the apparent object was not established in absolute terms and thus typical questions such as true range have not been answered’. (TNA AIR 2/18117)
Since the early 1960s questions about the contents of these early intelligence files on UFOs, have been swatted away by MoD. The standard response is that, since 1967, records on UFOs were destroyed at five yearly intervals so nothing before 1962 had survived.
But as Dickison’s memo was written in 1967 and was based upon recently retrieved intelligence files dating from 1951-52, it would seem MoD was either being economical with the truth or it has been extremely careless with its record keeping.
The Operations Record Book of 269 Squadron throws no light on the UFO incident. But it does add a wry comment on its officer’s new found fame:
‘On the squadron’s arrival back to Ballykelly pinned up in the crew room was a very neat sketch of the squadron badge of arms. In the place of the contact charge – a galleon in full rig – an airborne NAAFI saucer was embellished and the motto added to – Omnia Videmus – We See Everything – even Flying Saucers…this was a small endowment left to the squadron by 209 Squadron who had used our buildings during Mainbrace. It referred to the memorable morning when six “reliable witnesses” of the squadron saw an airborne saucer over Topcliffe” (TNA AIR 27/2674).
