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).

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”‘.

Nevetheless the signal, preserved at the UK National Archives, contains a hand-written instruction from the Wing Commander in charge of Ops (Air Defece) 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 Ed 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’.

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:

‘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).

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Search for the Unknown: Canada’s UFO files and the rise of conspiracy theory. Matthew Hayes. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Illustrated, index, 210 pages.

A readable academic summary of the highlights of the little-known Canadian government UFO archive that includes some unique insights into the origins of UFO-related conspiracy theories.

Matthew Hayes was inspired to write this book after visiting a virtual exhibition titled Search for the Unknown that was curated by Library and Archives Canada in 2005. This online resource appeared three years before the UK National Archives first began to make its own large collection of MoD UFO documents available online. It was one of the first that took advantage of what were at that time pioneering web-based technologies that allow remote users access and download original archive documents.

The Canadian UFO files include thousands of documents created by government agencies between 1950 and 1995. During those four decades responsibility for logging sighting reports was passed backwards and forwards among largely disinterested officials in the Department of National Defence and Transport, National Research Council and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In total the archive contains 4,500 sighting reports and more than 15,000 pages of related documents covering the four decades.

These figures are roughly half the number collected by the UK MoD for the same period, but Canada is a huge country and the geographical spread of reports reflect the fact that its population is concentrated in the large cities. Much like the UK the Canadians deferred to the United States who were investigating UFO reports via Project Blue Book. During the early part of the Cold War, Canada launched two overlapping UFO investigations, Project Magnet (1950-54) and Project Second Storey (1952-54). Few if any of the sightings examined by these projects appear to have been made by military sources and the vast majority originated from members of the public.

This book includes 21 examples of black and white UFO drawings from the files that Hayes compares these unfavourably with those I curated in 2017 for my book UFO Drawings from the National Archives. He says the UK drawings are ‘colourful, full of life and energy’ and powerfully communicate contrasting feelings such as fear and hope. But their North American counterparts are simply ‘interesting [and] serve more as accompaniments to the sighting reports’.

That is not to say the Canadian UFO files are dull compared to their UK collection. Indeed one chapter includes accounts of three ‘high strangeness’ cases reported during 1967 when the number of sightings tripled from 55 in the previous year to 169. This flap coincided with the country’s centennial year that saw the launch of a UFO landing pad in St Paul, a small town in Alberta. It was opened by the former Canadian Defence Minister, Paul Hellyer, who in retirement joined the UK’s Lord Hill Norton in the elite group of high profile advocates for ‘disclosure’ of what governments know about the UFO phenomenon. As defence minister Hellyer should have been aware his government was as clueless as to the nature of the elusive phenomenon as any other.

Nevertheless, the Canadian government had its own modest cast of believers in extra-terrestrial visitations. The best known of these was Wilbert Smith, an electrical engineer employed by the Department of Transport who for a short period in the 1950s managed to purloin funds for Project Magnet complete with a rudimentary observatory designed to track objects in the near atmosphere. Smith’s personal belief in a ET origin for UFOs aroused alarm and suspicion among his superiors who eventually shut down Magnet in 1954. But Smith’s most notable achievement was his contact with Dr Robert Sarbacher, a US physicist and defence consultant whom he met at a radio conference in 1950. Sarbacher allegedly told him that UFOs were real and that ‘the matter is the most highly classified subject in the [US] Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb’, a comment that became author and UFO advocate Timothy Good’s favourite quote. But as Hayes points out, details of the meeting are unclear and the ‘document’ used as evidence is actually a recollection of Smith’s interview with Sarbacher and therefore just an anecdote.

In summary, the Canadian UFO files are much like others that have been gradually opened to public scrutiny as a result of open government and FOI initiatives across the world. They contain many examples of low quality ‘lights in the sky’ and convoluted correspondence between persistent UFO enthusiasts, who believed the authorities were hiding something, and exasperated officials who tried their best to ignore and debunk claims as either hoaxes or misinterpretations of natural and man-made phenomena. When officials failed to provide satisfying answers this created an attitude of mutual distrust that created fertile conditions for anti-authoritarian attitudes and the creation of conspiracy theories.

Some readers may find this book plodding in places as the author (who teaches English and philosophy at a Canadian college) tries his best to negotiate the fine line between a popular subject and academic credibility. But those who stick with it will find much of interest in the chapter on close encounter cases. These include the baffling Falcon Lake incident from 1967 in which a metal prospector, Stefan Michalak, suffered what may have been burns to his stomach after he approached a landed cigar-shaped UFO near a remote lake in Manitoba. That year also saw Canada’s first recorded examples of crop circles, a decade before they arrived in the UK, when a series of four appeared in a cattle pasture in Alberta.

The third equally bizarre case is the Shag Harbour incident from Nova Scotia of 4 October 1967 that is often called Canada’s Roswell. This differs from most of the others as it was corroborated by members of the local Mounty detachment. They were inundated with reports of a lighted object that fell into the harbour near the small fishing community and, on reaching the site, saw a ‘dark object’ floating in the water. Searches were carried out by boat and helicopter but as no hard evidence was found the case remains unsolved. As in the UK and US the authorities, presented with physical evidence of something unknown, were left with no option but to investigate as best they could. But far from providing any smoking gun, the surviving papers reveal inertia and a failure to analyse hard evidence such as potential radiation traces left at the Falcon Lake UFO encounter.

To his credit, Hayes makes a serious effort to move the spotlight away from those who see and believe in UFOs to examine the motivations and reactions such experiences generated among the general public and the officials whose job it was to respond to their concerns. One striking outcome of these interactions is the emergence of a conspiracy-theory driven mindset that has become stereotypical of the modern UFO phenomenon.