Phantoms of the Sky
RAF test pilots reveal their close encounters with UFOs
UFOs - or UAP - are a worldwide phenomenon. Since 2017 when new testimony from US Navy aircrew first emerged media attention has been focused on North America.
But British military pilots have reported close encounters with ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ since 1916.
During my research for the UK National Archives UFO project (2008-2013) I interviewed 25 retired and serving aircrew who flew with the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm. All had reported encounters with ‘aerial phenomena’ between 1944 and 1966, when such things were known as flying saucers or UFOs. An even larger number were ground based personnel who tracked anomalous phenomena on radar.
My cover story published in the June 2024 issue of Fortean Times (FT 445) draws on two of the most dramatic testimonies from archives - including an exclusive interview with the late Wing Commander Stan Hubbard - one of the RAF’s senior test pilots, who was involved in three separate UFO incidents during the early 1950s.
Hubbard’s daylight close encounter with a fast-moving disc-shaped object that appeared above the airfield at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, was the subject of a detailed investigation by the then Top Secret Flying Saucer Working Party. This committee was set up by the Scientific Intelligence section of the Ministry of Defence in 1950 at the insistence of Sir Henry Tizard, the MoD’s Chief Scientific Advisor who felt that sightings by trained aircrew should be taken seriously.
From the end of WW2 Wing Commander Hubbard (1921-2014) flew every type of experimental aircraft including the Heath-Robinson-like ‘Flying Bedstead’, an early prototype that paved the way for the Harrier jump jet and the Apollo Moon Lander.
When I first met fellow Yorkshireman Hubbard, then aged 80, at the RAF Club in London, he revealed that he had been warned by the Working Party not to talk about his sightings as the subject was ‘highly classified’.
But he decided to talk in 2001 when I sent him a copy of the Working Party’s final report that had been used to brief PM Winston Churchill in 1952. He had not been given access to their report and it had been lost in the MoD archives, until I unearthed a single surviving copy using the precursor to the Freedom of Information Act.
The report concluded the most likely explanation for Hubbard’s initial sighting was an optical illusion. The report also dismissed a second incident involving five other senior test pilots from Farnborough as ‘an interesting example of one report influencing another’.
Although ‘highly classified’ it became clear to him that his experiences had been shared and discussed by cabinet ministers. On one occasion at Tactical Air Command HQ in Langley, Virginia, in 1961, he was greeted by the visiting British Under Secretary of State for Air, Julian Amery MP, who shook his hand and said:
‘I know you. You are that flying saucer man!’
Taken aback, Hubbard said he had been warned not to talk about the subject with anyone. At which point Amery said:
‘Oh right, well, we’d better not say anymore then, jolly good’
Hubbard said the minister then walked away, leaving him dumbfounded
That moment was captured on camera in an image that Hubbard provided for my archive, published exclusively today.
Despite being prone to optical illusions Stan Hubbard had an illustrious career as one of the RAF’s most celebrated test pilots, according to his obituary in the Daily Telegraph.
My article also reveals that he was flying Meteor jets with 92 Squadron RAF in Yorkshire at the time of the famous Operation Mainbrace incident in September 1952. This was the occasion when ten senior officers and Shackleton aircrew saw a ‘flying saucer’ from the ground at RAF Topcliffe in North Yorkshire.
During the memorable day that I shared with Stan in 2002, I asked him what he thought it all meant.
‘I have no idea but looking back the whole series of events left me feeling like I was being haunted by some Thing,’ he said - with an emphasis on Thing. ‘I tried to make sense of it using my scientific training.
‘But it was so weird that it makes me question everything I know about the rules of physics’.
Read the full interview - and the stories of four other British military pilots - in my article for Fortean Times.
Great write up. Looking forward to reading this issue!