American Airmen, Airbases and Alien Encounters
Part 1
I still don’t know what it was. I have no idea where it came from, what it was doing here or where it went. All that I do know is that it wasn’t like anything I had seen before or, for that matter, anything I’ve seen since.
It was in the mid-nineties, when I lived in a house which had, until just a few years before, housed members of the United States Air Force serving at Royal Air Force Bentwaters. The back of my house looked out in the direction of the entrance to the old base; the main runway; Cold War hardened aircraft shelters; and, in the far distance, the old top secret site on Orfordness and the antenna arrays of the abandoned Cobra Mist Top Secret over-the-horizon radar experiment (more of which we’ll talk about in the summer). From my garden, though, all that I could see was trees, the tops of trees.
One night between Christmas and New Year, I stepped out into my back garden to smoke a last cigarette before going to bed. The sky that night was half-covered by cloud with stars visible through the gaps. Over the trees I saw two white lights. It looked as though someone had parked a car a few feet above the forest. Slowly, very slowly, the lights moved further apart. Eventually it became apparent that the lights were attached to something which was getting nearer and nearer, flying in a straight line from over the base to my house. Eventually, whatever it was flew over my head.
Of course, it’s not really possible to say if it was a big aircraft low down or an absolutely huge one much higher up because there was nothing to give it scale. The impression I had, though, was of a B-52 bomber on final approach; a B-52 has a wingspan of 56 metres.
This wasn’t a B-52. It was a dark, kite-shaped aircraft with the blunter end moving forward with a white light on each, for want of a better description, wing-tip. It flew over the top of my house but made no sound. None at all. Not even the sound a glider would make rushing over your head. It moved very slowly, like an aeroplane does when approaching a runway. I ran to the front window and watched it carry on in a roughly north-westerly direction until it just disappeared from sight as it got further away, never deviating from its course or, apparently, changing speed. I have no idea what it was. It was an object, it was flying, I can’t identify it. Therefore, it was a UFO.
Beyond saying that it was a UFO, I have no real idea. My very best guess would be that an American pilot, who had previously been stationed at RAF Bentwaters, was flying some kind of experimental aircraft, details of which have still not been released. I presume that he came to have a look at his old base. But who knows?
All I know is that I’ve been mad about aeroplanes since I was seven, I spent hours at airshows and peeping through the wire at airbases as a teenager; I learned to fly at seventeen and joined the Royal Air Force as aircrew at eighteen, I spent twelve years as an Observer flying on police helicopters and have spent a fair chunk of my life airborne and around aircraft; but I’ve never seen one like that.
The modern UFO phenomena started on 24th June 1947 when American pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a long line of bright objects in the skies above the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. At first he thought that they were geese but ruled that idea out because he was flying at 9,200 feet and thought that geese would not fly that high.
Geese have since been recorded at heights of around 24,000 feet. Pelicans, another possible source of the Arnold sighting and, therefore, the whole UFO phenomena, can reach 10,000 feet. Think about that. At first he thought they were geese. He only discounted that - and sparked the last seventy odd years of ufology - because he was unaware that geese actually flew that high.
I am sure that there are very simple explanations for vast majority of UFO sightings; like mine possibly being a returning American pilot in an experimental aircraft. It is probably the case that most can be explained away as perfectly normal aircraft misinterpreted by people; stars or planets; meteorological conditions that people hadn’t seen before; hoaxes; satellites; meteors or meteorites; weather balloons; flocks of birds; or experimental aircraft of a type not seen before or admitted to. That’s only most, though, not all.
There are so many reports from so many places all over the world, often by truly credible witnesses, that there is clearly something else happening which needs to be explained. Something we just don’t yet have the ability to comprehend. In the same way as the ancient Greeks explained the movement of the Sun as the god Helios riding his fiery chariot across the skies or Norse mythology said that lightning was created by the hammer of Thor, we say that UFOs are aliens from other worlds and write countless books on that subject. It really is probably the least likely explanation.
Even though I have seen an object that was flying and which I could not identify, I don’t make the huge leap to imagining that they must be little green men from outer space. It has always struck me as odd that this is the first explanation that many people go for. I saw something in the sky which I couldn’t explain, something which we called a UFO, something which is now called UAP - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Why would I immediately assume it’s aliens from the planet Zog?
However, that said, there are clearly things going on out there - such as the footage captured by the United States Navy (above) - which are inexplicable to our twenty-first century brains. The most fascinating thing about UFOs or UAPs to me is the fact that there are still plenty of things out there which we simply don’t understand. We’re not far removed from Norse mythology and Greek gods.
Next week I’ll be looking at an encounter which involved not the United States Navy but the United States Air Force and took place very close to my sighting.