The early hours of 13/14 August mark the 70th anniversary of the RAF’s closest encounter with UFOs over East Anglia.
In 1956 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept an unidentified flying object that was circling the nuclear-armed American airbase at Lakenheath in Suffolk
The sensational story has similarities with events late in 2025 when a fleet of mystery drones was spotted over Lakenheath, and nearby RAF Mildenhall, soon after tactical nuclear weapons returned to the US-tenanted base.
A joint MoD Police and US Air Force investigation later failed to identify any culprits, but it is widely suspected the drones were part of a co-ordinated Russian intelligence surveillance campaign.
The 1956 UFO alert happened two weeks after a huge B-47 bomber crashed into a storage silo at Lakenheath that contained three nuclear weapons. This caused an explosion that spread burning fuel over the bombs. General Curtis LeMay later admitted it was ‘a miracle’ that exposed detonators did not explode, as it would have destroyed the base and spread nuclear fallout across East Anglia.
With the Suez crisis building in the Middle East and the threat from the Soviet Union at its Cold War height the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was keen to conceal the presence of the CIA’s secret U2 spyplane on British soil. Earlier that year he had given the Americans permission for it to fly missions over the Soviet Union from the US-tenanted Suffolk base. In April 1956 parts of the aircraft had been secretly shipped to Lakenheath in banana boxes to avoid prying eyes
Files released by the US Air Force’s UFO project Blue Book reveal that alarms were triggered late on the evening of 13 August 1956 after airfield radars at Lakenheath detected UFOs moving at high speed. Earlier American personnel at RAF Bentwaters, 43 miles to the southeast, detected formations of slow-moving UFOs on their radars. They also saw bright lights whizzing across the night sky. The pilot of a C-47 transport en route to the base also saw a blurry light beneath his plane ‘travelling east to west at terrific speed’.
Near midnight, American radar staff at Lakenheath alerted the air defence base at RAF Neatishead on the Norfolk broads where radars looked out towards the North Atlantic. In 2001 fighter controller Freddie Wimbledon told me that he saw a target on his screen that behaved unlike anything he had seen before.
‘It travelled at tremendous speeds at an altitude of between 10 and 20,000 feet and then suddenly stopped,’ he recalled. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing’.
Another senior aircraftman, James Mills, recalled how ‘the “object”, after being still, would alter its height, going up and down several times, before accelerating away at great speed’.
Freddie Wimbledon said: ‘Immediately, I ordered the Battle Flight to scramble and set up an interception team crewed by four and another four airmen to monitor the action’.
Wimbledon, who died 2004 at the age of 94, revealed that as the events unfolded into the early hours of 14 August, he was in direct radio contact with the crews of RAF Venom jets that were sent to intercept the UFO
Twenty years ago, I traced and interviewed the pilots and navigators of a number of these aircraft and checked their accounts against entries in squadron logbooks.
23 Squadron navigator John Brady revealed it was the strangest incident in his Cold War career with the RAF. ‘The USAF at Lakenheath were directing us towards this thing at around 7,000 feet which was most unusual as we were used to being scrambled to intercept Russian intruders much higher over the North Sea.
‘The first run we had at it we saw nothing but the next time I obtained a contact on my radar dead ahead and it raced down the tube at high speed.
‘We were flying at around 350-400 mph and I remember saying to the pilot “CONTACT…there, it’s out 45 starboard now at one mile” and he kept saying to me “Where is it? Where is it? I can’t see it!” as we rushed past.
‘My radar contact was firm but messy but there was something there!
His colleague, navigator Graham Schofield, recalled how he listened to the distinctive voices of his friends as they followed the directions given by the USAF at Lakenheath and Wimbledon’s interception team. He and other aircrew had gathered around a radio receiver in their crewroom at RAF Waterbeach, near Cambridge.
‘I heard them instructed to intercept the target over East Anglia,’ he told me. ‘The first crew made radar contact with the UFO and closed rapidly on the target.
‘They tracked it down to within three miles and then lost contact. This was because the object was stationary. It was a dark night, and the target appeared to be in darkness.’
‘They were called off and a second crew were instructed to make an intercept. They also reported contact at about ten miles dead ahead. The navigator called off the distance as the target rapidly closed.
‘At one mile there was a shout of confusion from the pilot who had seen nothing. We then heard “I think they are now on our tail!”.
Wimbledon recalled how:
‘….after being vectored onto the tail of the object, the pilot called “CONTACT”, then a short time later “JUDY”, which meant the navigator had it [the UFO] on his own radar screen [but] in a few seconds, the object appeared behind our fighter and the pilot called “Lost contact, more help!”’
At that point Fighter Command ordered the Venom crews to break off and return to Waterbeach, as the two-crewed fighter jets were by then running low on fuel.
In 2002 Brady and his pilot David Chambers, along with Ivan Logan, the navigator from the second Venom, confirmed they saw nothing during their close encounter with the UFO. Graham Scofield recalled the hardened front-line crews were left ‘shaken up by the whole episode’. And he said ‘we all had a distinct feeling that something unusual had happened’
Freddie Wimbledon confirmed that his fighter controller logbook was impounded when RAF top brass visited Neatishead shortly afterwards. He was told it was a national security matter and must not be discussed in public.
Although dozens of American and British military personnel took part in what became known as the Lakenheath-Bentwaters UFO incident the British government has never offered an explanation. In 1972 the head of the MoD’s UFO desk was quizzed during a live TV debate on BBC2. Retired Air Commodore Anthony Davis, who commanded 23 Squadron during 1956, said he could not comment because all the papers had been ‘accidentally destroyed’.
By then details of the dramatic incident had leaked out when the US Air Force opened the files of its UFO investigation Project Blue Book to scientists at the University of Colorado. What became known as the Condon committee won a contract from the US Government to review USAF reports that dated back to 1947. In their 1969 report radar expert Gordon Thayer said that ‘the apparently rational, intelligent behaviour of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation’.
The University of Colorado team listed the Lakenheath incident as ‘the most puzzling and unusual case’ involving UFOs on radar ever reported to the US Air Force.
Freddie Wimbledon broke his silence after British newspapers published details of the American findings. The Venom crews were traced in 1996 but all the RAF and Air Ministry records of the incident had been shredded.
In the same year Ralph Noyes, who served as a Under Secretary of State in the Air Ministry, confirmed ‘we had no explanation’ for this and other unexplained UFO sightings made by military personnel at the time. As a result, he said the government decided to say nothing publicly about them.
Between 1969 and 1972 Noyes was head of DS8, a MoD department that was responsible for evaluating UFOs reports from military sources. He was a RAF navigator in the Far East during the Second World War and became interested in UFOs following his retirement in 1977
Referring to the Lakenheath incident, he said: ‘Here we had a number of objects seen coming in across the North Sea on radar and it looked like a Russian mistake. Jet aircraft were scrambled [but] the objects simply made rings around them.
‘Inevitably this led to the sort of enquiry which you would put in hand if you had any military responsibilities. Had something gone wrong with ground radar or aircraft radar? Were experienced pilots going out of their minds? Were people having fantasies?’
And, in a letter sent to MoD in 1994, Noyes revealed that he had seen brief film clips ‘of what I understood to be gun-camera material’ that had been captured by RAF fighter pilots during the Lakenheath incident.
Noyes said that he and other MoD officials were invited to watch film clips in a small cinema at MoD Main Building one day in 1970. ‘The material [included] fuzzy greyish blobs in the daylight shots [and] small glowing globular objects in the night films,’ he recalled.
The screening, organised by the RAF, was to invite comment on what they described as ‘interesting atmospheric effects’ that had been detected by both ground radar and radars in fighter interceptors such as the Hawker Hunter.
In his letter, released during the UFO files project that I oversaw at The National Archives from 2008-13, Noyes asked DS8 to search their records for the footage and urged them to release it. In 2020 the US Department of Defence confirmed that similar grainy footage, captured by forward-facing cockpit cameras in US Navy F-18 jets, was genuine and could not be explained.
Ralph Noyes, who died age 74 in 1998, told me Air Ministry reached similar conclusions. But in their reply to Noyes, MoD said no trace of the films could be found and they must have either been lost or destroyed. He concluded:
‘Over the years there were a sufficient number of cases like Lakenheath-Bentwaters to persuade me, and a number of my air staff friends, that something was going on, sporadically, in British airspace which we could not explain’.
Too bad they didn't come up with that footage. Great write up!