Case Closed: 30th anniversary of the Cosford UFO flap
How a classic UFO 'mystery' was solved by a cold case investigation
Three decades ago in the early hours of Wednesday, 31 March 1993 dozens of people across western Britain saw UAPs in the night sky.
‘It seems that an unidentified object of unknown origin was operating in the UK Air Defence Region without being detected on radar; this would appear to be of considerable defence significance, and I recommend that we investigate further, within MOD or with the US authorities.’ (DEFE 24/2086/1)
These were the words used by Nick Pope in the conclusion of a briefing for his superiors at the Ministry of Defence following the UFO flap. MoD records released at The National Archives reveal that his line manager – the head of Sec(AS) popularly known as the UFO desk – believed it was possible the US was secretly flying a ‘black’ project aircraft in UK airspace.
On 22 April 1993 he briefed the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (ACAS) that the sightings ‘match some of the reported characteristics of the so-called Aurora’.
Earlier rumours had swirled around Whitehall and the media that suggested this mysterious hypersonic spyplane had been operating from RAF Machrihanish in Scotland. The base, on the Mull of Kintyre, was used by US Navy Special Forces and had been linked with the earlier Calvine incident.
In April ACAS, Air Marshall Sir Anthony Bagnall, responded saying the British Air Attache in Washington had drawn a blank with his inquiries at the Pentagon.
Soon afterwards Pope was told ‘Thank you – I suggest you now drop this subject’.
To his credit he refused to drop the subject and during the past three decades has returned to the story again and again in tabloid newspaper interviews.
Nick Pope continues to claim that ‘no satisfactory explanation’ was ever found for the reports that reached his office from Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands and elsewhere that night.
He was particularly impressed by the story told by a MoD police patrol who saw two bright white lights with vapour trails from RAF Cosford, near Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. They rang ahead to alert the Meteorological Office observer at nearby RAF Shawbury that the UFO was coming his way.
The sighting by Met Office observer Wayne Elliott – coming from a credible witness familiar with military aircraft - was the most impressive of all. According to the summary briefed to ACAS in 1993 Elliott reported ‘seeing the object projecting a narrow beam of light at the ground at a height of 400-500 feet and estimated its size at somewhere between a C130 [RAF transport aircraft] and a B747 when it passed over his head at an estimated 4000 feet’.
As the weeks passed accounts of other observations arrived from parts of Ireland, northern France and Spain. One came from the crew of an Irish Defence Corps helicopter who reported two bright lights passing above them at a height they estimated as between 500-3000 feet. They assumed it was ‘some unusual type of aircraft’ but nothing was seen on Shannon radar.
Unlike many UFO stories, the core collection of sightings – timed between 1.10 and 1.15 am - tallied to a remarkable degree. Most described two bright white lights speeding towards the southeast horizon, leaving trails of luminous vapour in their wake. Some described a third light which gave the impression of triangular shape, but there were a few maverick reports from different times and places that did not fit the pattern.
For once, the MoD’s UFO desk had something they could investigate almost in ‘real time’ before the scent went cold. But checks ruled out the possibility that military or civilian aircraft could have caused the flap. Radar tapes were carefully scrutinised but drew a blank. No intruder had been detected by the UK’s air defences.
As a result Nick Pope cited this case as the turning point on his tour of duty – the big case that led him to believe that extraterrestrials really were able to penetrate Britain’s defences at will.
By this point the civilian UFO organisation BUFORA had quickly identified a simple explanation for the event. On the evening of 30 March 1993 Russia launched the Cosmos 2238 radio satellite into orbit. The Tsyklon rocket booster 22586U that propelled the satellite into space then later re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, breaking into two or more pieces as it decayed.
A US Space Command/NASA data computer simulation of its trajectory, obtained by BUFORA’s consultant astronomer Gary Anthony, shows it transit over Ireland at 1.07 am BST. From here it moved towards southwest England at imminent re-entry height
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The burning debris crossed Devon and Cornwall between 1.10 and 1.15 am – and was seen by police patrols who described ‘two very bright lights…hovering at about 2000ft (600m)’ – before it crossed the English Channel heading for continental Europe.
Around 70 astonished witnesses saw these lights and ion trails across the British mainland, including author and UFO writer Peter Brookesmith who observed them from the foothills of the Preseli Mountains in West Wales. Brookesmith initially believed they were fast-moving jets at 2000ft (600m) until he realised they could not be aircraft as they were silent
The NASA data simulation shows the flaming debris was visible to anyone in the British Isles with a view of the night sky during the time it incandesced. Experienced UFOlogists have found that in many similar cases, witnesses – even trained observers – often make fundamental errors when they try to estimate the direction and height of lights seen in the night sky, especially when they are visible only for a short period of time with few reference points.
Debris burning up high in the atmosphere can appear much closer, and where formations of lights appear the human mind can fill in the gaps to produce impressions of structured objects as witnessed in the diversity of the witness statements found in this case. Experience has shown that observers are also frequently mistaken about precise times sightings are made. This may explain the reports logged by Nick Pope clearly describing the same phenomenon but at wildly different times and even dates.
Two Ministry of Defence files were opened on the case now described as ‘The Cosford Incident investigation’. DEFE 24/2086/1 was compiled by Nick Pope who copied his work to his opposite number in DI55, a branch of the defence intelligence staff. The DIS file DEFE 23/254/1 was opened at The National Archives in 2019 but contains no evidence that further investigations were pursued after the intervention of ACAS.
Early in the investigation, the space tracking station RAF Fylingdales told Pope that a Russian rocket had re-entered the atmosphere around the relevant time. The files reveal they initially believed this occurred shortly after midnight, i.e. one hour before the main cluster of sightings.
But after a BUFORA investigator updated Pope on the Russian satellite theory, he contacted Fylingdales again. This time they reported back that the Tsyklon rocket had re-entered at 2.20am local ‘with an error margin of an hour either way’ (one hour was added to UK local time as BST from 1 AM on Sunday 28 March 1993). In hindsight, we now know from the catalogue of space debris maintained by US Space Command and NASA that the correct time for the decay was in fact 1.15am local time, leaving no doubt the rocket body was indeed the source of the UFO flap.
On 7 May 1993 Nick Pope wrote to DI55 with the comment:
‘Whilst the decay…might explain some of the high altitude sightings, it does not explain the low level sightings. It also fails to explain [the] report of a low hum, or the report from Mr Elliott, the Met Officer at RAF Shawbury. The spread of timings and bearings of the sightings also argues against this decay explaining all of them.’
But do the facts bear out this claim? The sighting by the Meteorological observer, Wayne Elliott, made a big impression on Nick Pope, coming as it did from a credible witness with considerable experience as an observer of military aircraft. In his 2005 re-telling of the story Pope implies that Elliott’s sighting occurred shortly after the sighting of the ‘two bright lights’ by the police patrol at RAF Cosford at 1.15 am (conclusively identified as an observation of the Russian rocket decay)
However, the file released under the FOIA reveals that Elliott’s sighting actually took place at 2.40 am BST after he left his office to take his weather observations. The Met Office log for the base, compiled by Wayne Elliott, confirms the timings for the sightings were recorded in GMT (as the Cosford report is logged as having been received by him at 0030Z and his own observation as 0140Z).
This detail places the Shawbury sighting at one hour and thirty minutes after the rocket decay. As RAF Shawbury is a mere 20 miles away from RAF Cosford, as the crow flies, this UFO was moving very slowly indeed!
Pope’s original file notes do not mention a ‘triangular shaped’ UFO but include a guesstimate of size ‘somewhere between a C130 and a 747 [jumbo-jet]’. The UFO carried three red lights ‘two side by side and one larger red light slightly behind’. This may be the source of the so-called triangular object
.In an article published by the Met Office magazine Mercury in July/August 1996 the details have changed slightly. In the Met OX-Files Elliott says he initially saw ‘a group of lights moving erratically…and then became stationary north of the airfield’ and below them was a beam of white light that appeared to be ‘scanning’ a nearby hill. As Elliott watched the beam ‘swept the countryside from left to right, as if looking for something in the fields and hedgerows’. This went on for several minutes, long enough for him to ‘estimate the size as that of a very large aircraft’
He was about to return to his office when the lights suddenly moved across the airfield ‘accompanied by a low humming noise, over his head at a fairly low level and at several hundred miles per hour’. Elliott told the Mercury interviewer:
‘I have worked at military fast jet and helicopter airfield and didn’t recognise the object as either of these kinds of aircraft. It was moving too quickly to be a helicopter, which seemed to be the obvious answer’ [my emphasis].
Elliott was indeed familiar with military aircraft and helicopters, as Shawbury was a base for Gazelles and other military helicopters.
Clearly the object seen by Wayne Elliott wasn’t the Russian Tsyklon rocket. But what else carries red lights, moves erratically at low altitude and uses a beam of light to search the ground late at night? The answer seems obvious. But it wasn’t until 2005 that an airman serving at RAF Shawbury read Nick Pope’s account of the sighting and decided it was time to speak out.
‘The UFO supposedly seen at RAF Shawbury was later identified as a Dyfed-Powys police helicopter following a stolen car down the A5 between the A49 junction. The observer was using his NiteSun to illuminate proceedings’ (Daily Mail 25 February 2005).
How could a meteorologist – a trained observer – be so mistaken? When I put this new evidence to Mr Elliott in March 2005 his reply was equally surprising. He confirmed that it was indeed the MoD police at Cosford who, having seen the rocket decay, phoned his station and suggested he look out for UFOs. When, over an hour later, he saw unfamiliar lights hovering near the airbase, he was primed to interpret what he saw as a UFO. Basic details of his sighting were passed by Cosford to Whitehall and Nick Pope rang to quiz him. Elliott said Pope assured him that checks had ruled out military or civilian aircraft. But had enquiries been made with local police forces?
At the time both the Dyfed-Powys and West Mercia police forces operated helicopters equipped with searchlights. Unfortunately flight logs are only kept for a short period before destruction. As a result, it is impossible to establish with certainty whether a helicopter was indeed responsible for Mr Elliot’s sighting.
‘At the time it did not strike me as being something familiar,’ he told me. ‘However, it’s clear in hindsight that what I saw was not the same object seen at Cosford as it was much later. I never made anything of it, I just reported what I had seen. Nick Pope was very excited about it and made a great deal of the fact that I was an official observer which was true. He assured me that he had checked with all the military sources for aircraft and ruled them out’. And he added: ‘I believed what I was told at the time, but now I’m convinced that what I saw has been explained. I have to accept that the noise like a humming and the beam of light are very similar to what you would expect of a police helicopter’.
In 2005 I spoke with Squadron Leader Martin Locke who was public relations officer at RAF Shawbury. He confirmed the base was closed for military traffic just before midnight on 30 March. But there was nothing to stop a police helicopter from flying low over the airfield. He added:
‘The police helicopter has a totally different engine signature and light configuration to the gazelles and Wessex. If someone like the Met Officer was used to seeing these, he might be caught on the hop if he saw a police machine in these circumstances. Particularly as the base was closed at the time and he was not expecting to see anything flying at that time in the morning’.
In his account Elliott says he initially thought the object was an aircraft rather than a helicopter. This raises another possibility. A memo in the MoD dated 19 April 1993 lists the results from the radar tape replay requested by Nick Pope. At point 9 it states:
As BUFORA’s Gary Anthony noted:
‘It’s an aircraft, transponding at 20,000 ft plus, directly over Shawbury, during the time of Mr Elliott’s sighting. The aircraft is at altitude with perhaps only lights visible. At this altitude some aircraft lights have a tendency to merge into singular form’.
In a Channel 5 TV documentary in 2006 Nick Pope dismissed this aircraft as a possible explanation for Elliott’s sighting. But a high altitude aircraft’s visibility at night is dependant upon its size, type, light configurations and whether any other non-routine lights were switched on – along with other factors such as atmospherics and weather.
If this aircraft was not the UFO then why was it not visible, and noted, by Wayne Elliott at the time we was observing the low-level object?
The Cosford case has become a classic in the UFO literature thanks to the publicity Nick Pope gave it in Open Skies Closed Minds. His book appeared in 1996 after he ‘came out’ as a believer in ET visitations. In the book he ponders on the significance of the date of the Cosford sightings. The Belgian flap involving triangular shaped UFOs had taken place on the same date in 1990. In that case was it just a coincidence that newspapers were likely to print reports of the UK sightings on 1 April – when many carry April Fool jokes? Could it be, he asked, that the date of the UFO visit had been ‘deliberately chosen and planned’ by ‘an intelligence fully familiar with human frailties?’
Was he joking or did he really believe this?
In March 1994, shortly before he left the UFO desk, Pope received a letter from Spanish UFOlogist Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos. VJ had collected reports of similar sightings from France and northeastern Spain in the early hours of 31 March 1993 and had followed these up with NASA and NORAD.
The agencies had confirmed ‘the three-country “wave” path correlates perfectly well with the Cosmos [2238] orbit…qualitatively speaking, the descriptions of the sightings fully match with this space debris re-entry too’. In his response Nick Pope said:
‘I think it is clear that most of the UFO sightings that occurred on the night in question can be attributed to this event’. [DEFE 24/1967/1]
These should have been the last words on this ‘classic’ case.
It is indeed a classic case: of misinterpretation, both of an initial phenomenon by the witnesses and later by a UFO proponent with a will to believe.
You can read more about the ‘cold case’ investigation of this story in two key online resources for the Cosford incident:
Gary Anthony’s webpage UFOs of March 30th/31sts 1993 Explained!
Joe McGonagle’s Cosford webpage: The MoD Investigation