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One of the first books I wrote was about UFOs. Visitors From Outer Space was described by the publisher as “a balanced look at the history of UFOs” and that was certainly my aim. But that was 43 years ago (1976) when UFOs or flying saucers had been around for less than 30 years and it seemed to be just a matter of time before we would all know what they were and where they came from.
What my book did not reveal was that I had also been a UFO witness…
Back in 1956, while living in London, I had seen a red light moving slowly and silently across the night sky. Next day, the newspapers were full of eyewitness accounts from individuals describing exactly the same event.
What made the sighting more dramatic, however, was the news that a UFO had been detected by radar over southern England that same night and jets from RAF Odiham in Hampshire had been scrambled to intercept it. They failed.
The official explanation for the UFO chased by the RAF was that it was a French jet that had accidentally wandered into British air space and, when it realised its error, turned round and fled back home. That didn’t satisfy many people. Some, like me, didn’t buy the explanation at all. Others, who did, wanted to know why the French had fighter aircraft that were faster than ours.
It could have been that there was no link between my sighting and the UFO seen on radar but it does seem too much of a coincidence that I and many others saw an unusual aerial object – described by one as like a red golf ball – on the same night that the RAF was chasing something picked up on radar.
I’ll write more about this at some future time when I have had an opportunity to research the event in more detail.
I was already keenly interested in UFOs at the time of the sighting and went on to become one of the founders of the London UFO Research Association in 1959 which, three years later, was the instigator of an amalgamation between various UK societies investigating aerial phenomena, which ultimately became the British UFO Research Association – BUFORA – in January 1964. I am pleased to say it continues to thrive to this day.
I, on the other hand, dropped out of active UFO research in the 1970s having satisfied myself that various governments knew far more than they were prepared to say on the matter and that research by private individuals was unlikely to change matters. One of the chapters in Visitors From Outer Space is titled “Conspiracy of Silence” and it could easily be applied to the subject today, despite the release of many thousands of UFO sightings by some governments, but not the United States.
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