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21: Disclosure Team #74, Dr David Clarke
525 Plays3 years ago
Dr David Clarke is one of the UK's leading authorities on contemporary legend and folklore. He is a co-founder of the Contemporary Legend research group at SHU and combines his interests in folklore with his teaching and research in journalism and media law. He is an experienced broadcaster and has acted as a consultant for The National Archives and the BBC.
On 13 August 1956, with the Suez crisis approaching and the Soviet threat at its height, the RAF launched waves of aircraft to intercept unidentified flying objects which penetrated the UK’s radar shield and were circling a nuclear-armed American airbase in Suffolk.
David has interviewed three RAF servicemen who were involved with the incident and in this video we will play some of the testimony for the first time ever.
Link to the full witness interviews: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
David's article on the Lakenheath 1956 UFO incident: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/radar-uap...
David Website: http://drdavidclarke.blogspot.com/
David Twitter: https://twitter.com/shuclarke
!! SUPPORT DISCLOSURE TEAM !!
Disclosure Team Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/disclosureteam
Disclosure Team PayPal: https://paypal.me/disclosureteam?coun...
Disclosure Team Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/disclosure_...
Discl
On 13 August 1956, with the Suez crisis approaching and the Soviet threat at its height, the RAF launched waves of aircraft to intercept unidentified flying objects which penetrated the UK’s radar shield and were circling a nuclear-armed American airbase in Suffolk.
David has interviewed three RAF servicemen who were involved with the incident and in this video we will play some of the testimony for the first time ever.
Link to the full witness interviews: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
David's article on the Lakenheath 1956 UFO incident: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/radar-uap...
David Website: http://drdavidclarke.blogspot.com/
David Twitter: https://twitter.com/shuclarke
!! SUPPORT DISCLOSURE TEAM !!
Disclosure Team Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/disclosureteam
Disclosure Team PayPal: https://paypal.me/disclosureteam?coun...
Disclosure Team Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/disclosure_...
Discl
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Transcript
Introduction to Anomalous Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
Welcome Back to Disclosure Team
00:00:39
Speaker
Hello, everyone. How's it going? And welcome back to Disclosure Team's YouTube channel. Good to see everybody here in the live chat. I really appreciate you all being here. I'm really excited for this one. I've been preparing for this one for a little while. And the case that we're going to be discussing mainly tonight is just absolutely fascinating. And I don't believe it gets talked about enough whatsoever.
00:01:02
Speaker
I'm just going to give a shout out to all the people that have become members on the channel. I really appreciate all of you. It just really does help the channel. So, you know, if you're considering it, check it out. If you want to support the channel, there's some links below, but you know, I don't really.
Introduction of Dr. David Clark and UK UFO Case
00:01:17
Speaker
shout that stuff around but you know i just wanted everyone to know that any support is really appreciated so uh let's jump straight into we've got um dr david clark here with us tonight we're gonna hear all about this case we've got some never before heard audio clips of interviews with raf servicemen who were involved with the case i've been going through and editing them out editing out clips from these interviews for anybody that does want to listen to the full interviews because one of them is like an hour and
00:01:46
Speaker
for 45 minutes, link below in the description to my Google Drive. You can download them, check them out for yourselves. I highly recommend it because it's amazing. So let's not waste any more time. I'd like to please put your hands together for Dr. David Clark. David, how are you doing? Good. Great to see everybody again. Great to see you, Vinny.
Bentwaters Lake and Heath Case Overview
00:02:08
Speaker
Yes, you're becoming quite the regular now. Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it. And yeah, I think last time we spoke a while back and I said to you what are the kind of cases that you think really do hold a lot of weight that probably don't really get talked about here in the UK. And this one, the sort of Bentwaters Lake and Heath was probably the first one that you mentioned. So I had to have you on to talk about it. And then when we found out or I found out that you'd done these interviews with the
00:02:34
Speaker
kind of people that were there and involved in it, you know, I knew it had to be talked about. So I'll kind of hand it over to you. And if you could just sort of go through the story and tell us about it, because like I said, it is absolutely fascinating. And then when you feel like I should play any clips or show any images and stuff, just let me know and we'll go from there.
00:02:55
Speaker
OK, thanks, Vinnie. Just to introduce this story or case, before Rendlesham came along, this is a long, long time ago now, this case, what was known as the Lake and Heath Bentwaters case, which happened in the same area of East Anglia as the Rendlesham,
00:03:14
Speaker
forest incident it was probably the best known or the most evidential UFO incident in the British sort of case list and it happened in 1956 at the height of the Cold War but the thing is it was it was effectively covered by official secrets act
00:03:33
Speaker
until the late 1960s. So no one actually knew it wasn't in the public domain until the end of the 1960s, which is when you'll know that the American Project Blue Book, the US Air Force, were running. They basically closed shop and they gave a contract to the University of Colorado to write a report. This became the infamous Condom Report.
00:03:58
Speaker
not Condein, Condeun, and they examined something like 12,000 separate UFO incidents reported to the US Air Force. And some of them were foreign, where, for example, there were US air bases in Europe and Far East. And the interesting thing is, out of those 12,000 cases, I think there was something like 700 that remained unexplained.
00:04:24
Speaker
And one of those was from Britain, and that was the Lake and Heath Bentwaters case. And no one in this country in Ufology knew anything about this story until the Americans published it in 1969. And unfortunately, if you believe what the British government tell us, their files on it, by that point, the late 1960s, had been destroyed.
Cold War Tensions and UFO Radar Evidence
00:04:51
Speaker
when this came out all the all the mod was saying the usual sort of thing sorry we can't tell you anything about it because we've destroyed our file on the kits so um as i say it was it's it is hugely evidential there was a lot of information in the american um files because um it was the american air force um bases at bentwaters and lake and heath in east anglia where um these objects the ufo's uap's whatever you want to call them were picked up first
00:05:19
Speaker
on radar. Now they alerted the Royal Air Force because they're sort of guests in the UK at that time. Right at the height of the Cold War it was just as the Suez Crisis was brewing in the Middle East. There was huge tensions with the Soviet Union which is there are some connections with what's going on today. I mean people thought at that time we were literally on the verge of the Third World War
00:05:47
Speaker
There was RAF aircraft that were poised on quick reaction alerts, those bases all around the east coast. They were in contact with radar stations, anything that was approaching the UK across the North Sea that was seen on radar. There would be an immediate scramble and aircraft would be sent off across the North Sea to investigate. And the Russians were probing our defenses probably two, three times every week.
00:06:16
Speaker
put UFOs or UAPs into that mix and you've got a real you've got the basis for an incredible story and on the top of that I mean when I looked into the background to this RAF Lake and Heath which is still tenanted by the US Air Force today was a base for nuclear weapons and again something that was covered up for many many years just before this UFO incident in June or July
00:06:42
Speaker
1956 there was a I think it was a b-56 bomber coming into land at lake and heath went out of control crashed into the nuclear weapons stall and very nearly triggered off a massive nuclear incident in east anglia that would have you know covered east anglia in in fallout narrowly avoided the detonator didn't go off and again this didn't emerge until something like 1980 and as american general mentioned it and it came out in parliament
00:07:11
Speaker
At the same time as well, just before the UFO incident, the CIA were flying what was then the brand new Black Project U2 spy plane from Lakenheath, and they had a contingent of these U2 spy planes that were being sent over the Soviet Union with the consent of our Prime Minister at the time, Harold Mike Milland.
00:07:35
Speaker
And the U2s were shipped into the UK in big wooden boxes disguised as bananas, big banana boxes. And apparently when some of the other politicians found out about it, they had to get rid of them, moved them off to Weisbaden in West Germany. But you can see, if you were an American officer or you were in the RAF and you were based in that area, you knew all this stuff was going on, you can imagine the tension there must have been.
00:08:05
Speaker
And then one night, the night of August the 13th, 14th, 1956, this is a really hot, steamy summer night, clear skies.
00:08:18
Speaker
calls start coming in to the RAF from the various air bases around the east coast. RAF bent waters, RAF lake and heath, all of them picking up weird objects on their ground control approach radars. So this is where it gets complicated because the American bases had radar but these were just airfield radars so they had a small radius they didn't sort of see very far.
00:08:42
Speaker
And they were seeing odd things on the radar and people were going outside and they were seeing lights in the sky That was streaming across the sky moving at incredible speeds something I think the some of the things that have been seen on radar are moving at some incredible speed 4,000 miles per hour was one of the things that were registered formations of objects as well that was sort of slowly moving and then others that were moving really fast and They were phoning this into the RAF That's the stage
Freddy Wimbledon's Radar Encounter and Secrecy
00:09:12
Speaker
which the RAF start to look on their radars. Now the RAF radar and you can see a picture of something like what was being used at the time. This is a Type 85 centimetric centimetric radar which is still on site. If you go to RAF Netishead, which is a radar museum in the Norfolk Broads, they've still got the radar from that era
00:09:36
Speaker
You can go and look at it. So this is like one of the control cabins that we're using and an RAF officer called Freddy Wimbledon, who I got to know really well. I was in lengthy communication with him about 20 years ago when he was in his late 80s, early 90s. He was the chief controller at RAF NITISED. So he started taking the calls from Bentwaters early in the evening
00:10:04
Speaker
and Lakenheath later on around midnight and he was quite skeptical as you can imagine and he would look on his radar picture and could not believe what he could see because he could see something that had apparently come across the North Sea that was moving in unlike any aircraft moving at fantastic speeds this was at quite a high altitude because
00:10:29
Speaker
The only way I can describe it, if you can imagine a radar doing this from a source, so you've got the ground control radars that are sort of spinning around like that and maybe seeing something and they're putting out pulses at a certain speed. Now the radar that Freddie Wimbledon had access to really high powered ground control interception radar, so much more powerful spanning out right across the North Sea. So he could see this thing zooming in
00:10:58
Speaker
moving at incredible speeds, stopping, stationary, unlike any aircraft movement. And you thought, is it the Russians? You know, if it is the Russians, it's too late to do anything about it because they're already here. Over Lake and Heath, nuclear armed air base where the U-2 spy plane was. So basically, perhaps we ought to play some of the tape of Freddie talking about this. It's about five or six minutes.
00:11:27
Speaker
I think this one's seven minutes. Seven minutes. Yeah, and for everyone that's watching live, the quality isn't great, so I've upped it. I've upped the gain and stuff when I was editing it. But if you could just let me know in the chat if you can hear it at least, because I know it's not going to be easy. So yeah, let's play it. I should just say, I made these recordings 22 years ago before we had digital technology. So they were made on C90 cassettes, and they've been transferred to MP3.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah, let's go for it. Let's see if people can hear it. On the night of the 13th, 14th August, 1956, I was a flight lieutenant on duty and chief interception controller at a radar station in East Angria. My function was to watch the radar picture as seen on our consoles.
00:12:26
Speaker
and if anything abnormal seemed to take what action was necessary. This involved scrambling fighter aircrafts which were on standby 24 hours a day. Not long after I went on duty,
00:12:55
Speaker
2330. We began to notice a return on Pomerain, which was acting rather strangely. It was going very, very fast.
00:13:23
Speaker
much faster than anything we've ever seen before. And then suddenly stopping and I see the apparent slowing down and then accelerating from that position at terrific speed straight away. I conferred with the sex controller and said I thought we ought to scramble
00:13:53
Speaker
at a flight, see what it was. So the ratified was scrambled. That consisted of two, a venom, an ant, two. Perhaps it was the Night Fighter version of the venom that carried a pilot and a navigator. A navigator sitting on the right-hand side, but otherwise for a more or less side by side. The navigator had his own radar.
00:14:24
Speaker
function being that when he was directed from the ground, he would at one step, he would search on his own radar until he found the object from the directions given from the ground. And from then on, he would watch the object if he had picked it up by that time.
00:14:54
Speaker
And subsequently, at a certain stage, he would take over the interception if ordered to. In this case, a contact was made on an aircraft which appeared to be, well, we didn't know it was an aircraft, it just appeared to be in a very bright light.
00:15:27
Speaker
The navigator thought he had it on his screen, but it kept disappearing. One said it appeared to be stationary, in which case we on the ground thought this object, which we had followed the whole time,
00:15:57
Speaker
was behaving rather erratically. So we had two choices there. Either this, whatever it was, had been able to loop and get behind the target aircraft, or target rather, or he had undershot the target, which later appeared to be the correct version.
00:16:32
Speaker
So I decided then to scramble another aircraft, and that was scrambled to join the chase. In the meantime, the target had shot up at a tremendous pace in the northeast of the direction, but at such a rate that our height, it was off our height console.
00:17:02
Speaker
before he would say Jack Robinson. That's terrific speed. We're all, I don't say shaken by this, but the experience was such that we'd never, something that we'd never encountered before. And the sheer speed, not only speed, but the new probability of this object, whatever it was,
00:17:31
Speaker
seemed so uncanny. The next day, we were visited by a group captain from Thai command, who wanted to know the story. And he told us, under no circumstances, were we to talk about it, or ourselves, or anybody else.
00:18:01
Speaker
and never let the press from the thing down. And it seemed very strange at the time, but he said, don't worry, you haven't seen something. These things are... They described as a bright light. They couldn't say anything else but a bright light. I think you've got a measure of it there.
00:18:31
Speaker
When you were packing this thing on the radar, what was it? A normal radar aircraft response, right? No bigger than any other aircraft, not much more. Just exactly the same as one of our own would have been. Right. But it would be behaving in a way that... But behaving in a way that no aircraft at that time or anything in business would be able to do. I mean, no aircraft could be doing
00:19:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I mean, Freddie was, I think he was in his late eighties when I interviewed him, and that would have been about 2000 2001.
00:19:14
Speaker
And I should say the reason why we knew he'd come forward, and it was willing to talk about it, was in 1978, I think it was shortly after Steven Spielberg's film had been released. Close encounters. Yeah, a skeptic called Ian Ridpath, who I know quite well, he wrote a piece for, I think it was the Sunday Times,
00:19:37
Speaker
based upon what had been in the condom report about the case and because it was only the American version it was all completely wrong and mixed up and this was in the Sunday Times and Freddie read it and he wrote into the Sunday Times and said what a load of nonsense that I was there why has no one asked me about this and that's how it came out that he
Discrepancies in Blue Book and Eyewitness Accounts
00:20:00
Speaker
was involved in this so managed to track him down and get him speaking he spoke to various other ufologists as well but as you can see quite an incredible story and the story that he told
00:20:12
Speaker
it's pretty much, it's pretty much the same story that's in the Blue Book records but there's a lot of inconsistencies which I don't think we need to sort of go into at the moment. It's sort of like, it's about the timings because the American timings seem to be earlier in the evening and he's talking about something that happened after midnight but there's a lot of things that could explain that because at the time we were subject to what was known as
00:20:41
Speaker
double british summertime so our time was two hours ahead of the american time so there's lots of sort of distortions going on like that but he was obviously he ordered the interceptors
00:20:53
Speaker
And it wasn't until I think the late 1990s that we actually tracked down the pilots and the navigators who were flying the venoms, the NF-10 venoms, and they were like, as Fedi had explained in that clip, they were like a double-seater interceptor aircraft that had forward-facing interception radars.
00:21:13
Speaker
So he scrambled them from the battle flight. So there was a group of Venoms that were on 24 hour call at a base called RAF Water Beach, which is near Cambridge, City of Cambridge. And there was a whole group of people. So this is where you get all these other names like Graham Schofield, John Brady, Ivan Logan. They were all sat around in this, you can imagine the Battle of Britain.
00:21:38
Speaker
similar sort of thing but Cold War they were waiting for the call they were expecting the Russians to come and they thought the Russians would be coming over the over the North Sea at very high altitude you know the Russian bears so when they got this call from
00:21:54
Speaker
from the RAF Niti said, they were absolutely amazed because they were being asked to go and intercept something that was at 4,000 feet above the East Anglian countryside. So if it was the Russians, it's far too late to do anything about it. So perhaps we ought to now play the description from John Brady, who was the navigator in the first venom. He was sent by Freddie Wimbledon to intercept
00:22:20
Speaker
This ufo that was on the raf neeti said radio radar and he was told to speak to the americans so the switch frequency to raf lakeney so that the americans were using the ground controlled approach radar because the object was so near the ground they couldn't see it on the interception radar it dropped.
00:22:39
Speaker
below the horizon that that Freddie could see. So they put patch them through to the Americans and perhaps we ought to let John tell the story what happened. Absolutely. And I'll just premise this by saying that these are clips from 45 minute interviews that the Freddie Wimbledon that we heard and this one from John Brady. They are in the description below if you want to hear the extended interviews. And I highly, highly recommend it. But let's go ahead and play this one. This is John Brady.
00:23:09
Speaker
Oops. Sorry, I need to help if I shared my screen, wouldn't it? Here we go. On the night in question, I can remember some chat immediately prior to Scramble with Neeta's head, and then they called for a venom. And I think it probably went by Water Beach. Water Beach here, one venom.
00:23:36
Speaker
scrambled vector, so-and-so-called, so-and-so-on, whatever ever frequency it was. Well, we were airborne probably within two minutes because the venom was a cartridge start. Start-ups is kind of just pressed the cartridge and you've got this terrific whoosh from the cartridge gases as it drove the turbine around all the starting mechanism now.
00:24:08
Speaker
But we had a vague idea that the Americans wanted us to go and look at something. Now where did that idea come from? Well it must have come from leadership, probably the chap saying the Americans want us to want you to go and look at something they've got. I can't remember
00:24:23
Speaker
very clearly, aren't they? Anyhow, off we went and called Lake Heath and they were directing us towards this thing at around 7,000 feet, but at first
Radar Balloons or Real UFOs?
00:24:34
Speaker
round we had at it, I saw nothing. The next time we went beyond, I can remember saying to David, contact, and he kept saying to me, what is it? I can't see it, as we rushed by on each pass and it would go down
00:24:50
Speaker
the right-hand side or left-hand side, depending which way we went at it. And there would be a little paint like that. And it was fairly obvious that whatever it was was stationary. There was no movement. And if you remember in that little film, they said, well, you're intersecting. And I have to say, you cannot intersect something that is stationary, which you just can't do.
00:25:15
Speaker
But there was something there. When we got back and landed, and when I was in Fraser Kirk came back, I had a little bit of iron, and he said, do you see something to do? I said, yes, so did I. And it was just this little faint paint. You wouldn't call it a real positive blip. It's the sort of thing I've seen met, but with a radar reflector on it before, on AI-21. And I reckon it was probably that
00:25:44
Speaker
or something like that. In the end, we just turned around, went back home when we were getting a bit low and had several runs at it. But each time I would say to David, it's out 45 star, but now at one mile he'd be looking at me and saying, what is it? I don't know. There it was. How many rooms did you have at the target? Three or four.
00:26:09
Speaker
Definitely. And what altitude? Around 7,000 feet and around 300 knots. 7,000 feet's quite low, really, isn't it? Oh, yes. Compared to a lot of the exceptions. Yes, of course. Our fuel consumption was in the eye of it. Which governed the sort of length, of course. We ended in about 50-55 minutes.
00:26:49
Speaker
So in that one he mentions he did at one point think it was this radar balloon thing.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yes. And the interesting thing about that was I did actually track down the the diary, the squadron diary number 23 squadron, which was their squadron. And there's an entry about the the case in there. And it basically said that there was all these aircraft were sent out looking for this mysterious object. And
00:27:20
Speaker
It was, they couldn't work out what it was. And eventually it was concluded. It was a balloon. That's all it says in the squadron diary. But obviously, um, there was something more than a balloon there. Um, because what Freddie saw clearly wasn't a balloon. And it's, I mean, it's like with a lot of UFO incidents, like Rendlesham and some of the others, it's not impossible that there was a number of different things going on.
00:27:47
Speaker
You know, that there wasn't just one thing, there may well have been a balloon floating around as well that caused some confusion, but clearly what was being seen earlier in the night.
00:27:56
Speaker
wasn't a balloon. And the interesting thing about it is if there's any astronomers or people interested in astronomy who are listening to this show, the 13th or the 14th of August should spark something off in your brain. And that is because that is the height of the Perseid meteor shower. That's the time when the Perseids are the most active.
00:28:23
Speaker
So there's a lot, if you read about the case, there's a lot of stories about people going outside and seeing lights streaking across the sky. So it's quite possible they were the Perseid meteors.
American and British Investigations into UFO Incident
00:28:35
Speaker
What happens with these cases, again like Rendlesham, I think once people get it in their heads that there's something out there, there's something flying around, they're sort of broken out of whatever miasma they're in. They might be reading the paper, they might be like sat in the crew room waiting for the call. Someone tells them there's a UFO, they go outside and maybe there's a balloon floating around or there's a meteor streaking overhead. That gets all roped into the story.
00:29:03
Speaker
And it's very easy then to sort of, for skeptics and debunkers to sort of like myself to say, what a waste of time, you know, that's obviously what it was. But the more you look into it, the more you look at the detail, it's clearly something more than that. And they obviously, the American Air Force and the British Air Ministry obviously investigated it in great depth.
00:29:24
Speaker
And I discovered that this is a really involved story. The chap who was the head of 23 Squadron at the time, his book called Tony Davis. He'd been a British spy working for MI6 in Budapest before he was captured by the Russians, exchanged, sent back to the UK, and they put him in charge
00:29:54
Speaker
of 23 Squadron running the QRA. And I looked into his background and he'd flown in the Second World War, he'd flown intruder missions into Germany, and he'd actually seen a Foo fighter during the Second World War. It's in one of his log books. And the bizarre thing was, and this still blows my brain when I
00:30:17
Speaker
think about this, in 1972 he became the head of the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk, Anthony Davis. What year was that? 1972, when he retired from military service, they brought him back, obviously because he knew something about UFOs.
00:30:38
Speaker
and they knew he'd been involved in this Wake and Heath case, and they gave him the job as head of the UFO desk at Whitehall. Is this the same level as Owen Harthold and Nick Pope kind of level? No, above that level. So more DI55 type. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you look at the files, as I have done for that period when he was running the desk, there were people who had obviously read about the case
00:31:05
Speaker
in the condom report that had been published by the Americans who were writing into the UFO desk at the time saying, what do you know about it? And in one of the letters he writes back, he says, well, I know about it because I was flying one of the aircraft. That's amazing. He doesn't say anymore. And it's so frustrating. And unfortunately, he died in 1988. So I was never able to speak to him because it was before I started looking into this. But he obviously knew an awful lot.
00:31:33
Speaker
about it and Graham Scofield who is the next person we need to play, he knew Tony Davis and he knew that Tony Davis had looked into the incident and investigated it and there was something definitely sort of unexplained about it. It wasn't a balloon basically and we should say that Graham Scofield was the navigator of another venom
00:31:58
Speaker
and quite early in the evening before Logan went out in his venom he'd been scrambled I think about half past nine when the first UFOs had been seen at bent waters and he went up in this venom from water beach and before they could get very far in the sky I think the wing fuel tank fell off
00:32:20
Speaker
and crash into a field near Cambridge. Again, all covered up. There was no sort of public story about this, but this is what he said. And they had to return to base so they couldn't actually get anywhere near this UFO that was being tracked half past nine. So he was really frustrated about this. And he ended up back in the guard room, I think it was, with all the other pilots and navigators gathered round a little radio set.
00:32:46
Speaker
And they were listening to the radio and listening to what was going on in the sky with all these other aircraft being scrambled one after the other by my nitty said to go and have a look. So perhaps we ought to play what Graham Scofield says. Let's get that one. I will just say I've got a few people who have asked questions and I've noted them. So when we finish watching this and we'll talk about it, I will get to your questions after that, guys. So let's get this playing.
00:33:18
Speaker
But I knew these guys very well, so they were okay. They knew their jobs. And the radar at that time was sufficiently good that if you got a blip, you knew what it was, so you could identify and you could see it was of a particular size. So you would not really be assuming it was something, some meteorological phenomena or something like that. And anything that could catch you might be a balloon or something like that, which is always the possibility.
00:33:47
Speaker
But I believe these guys did get the scramble, did get the inner set, did say what they said, and so on and so forth. And I still stick with that. So that's it.
00:34:02
Speaker
OK, well, the venom was a twin-seat aircraft where the pilot navigator sat side by side. And in the front of the seat, virtually the whole area was made up of a radome, which would have a radar unit, probably about 3 foot 6 wide, the
00:34:29
Speaker
diameter of the actual screen. And this was adjusted so they could move in every direction. So they could up, go up, go down, go left, go right. And that was connected to the radar equipment and a joystick which the navigator would work to position the radar in place. Now, in addition to that, obviously it had a
00:34:51
Speaker
a CRT display very similar to a television which would give you a probe of light which would go across. So the object of the exercise was to point your radar into the direction you thought the enemy aircraft would come and then by a series of calibrations you could measure its distance, its track, its position and things like that. It would appear on the screen as a very fine line.
00:35:17
Speaker
and you from the linings and the rest of it, you could determine broadly what its characteristics are, whether it was being fuzzy or whether it was very tiny.
00:35:30
Speaker
So we were not aware that we were other than just scrambled for either a trial or something like that, but we got off the ground. And immediately we would do a maximum rate climb away from base climbing turn and then onto your vector and go through. And this climb would take you all of 15 minutes, something like that.
00:35:51
Speaker
now we would be it was dark we were no navigation light so it would be very very quiet very still you know we would just be getting out to height and wondering what was going to happen now i can't remember i don't think they did more than one pass each but i think they were then they were then called off did this sound
Radar Challenges in Intercepting UFOs
00:36:21
Speaker
speaking very tensely. Well, partly because you're on a collision course, you can't sit in front of you. And what they hadn't figured was that the thing was stationary. It would be most unusual to have an aircraft, well, you could have an aircraft that was stationary. And therefore there were two things that were distinct. One is the rate of approach.
00:36:44
Speaker
Now the radio approach normally is exceedingly fast if you are on collision courses opposite direction so you can tell that reasonably clearly. You would normally
00:36:57
Speaker
expect therefore the aircraft in front of you to be moving in various directions and you would try to harmonize your speed with the speed of the aircraft. So one of the things which is exceedingly difficult, particularly for the navigator, is trying to define what the
00:37:17
Speaker
used to be sufficient to come in line because you don't want to come in like a train, you want to come in slowly and sit behind it, identify it and then if necessary shoot it down at that point. So the navigator's got a number of methods of doing that, one of which is to slap on your air brakes which is like
00:37:38
Speaker
But you've got to be very careful when you do that, because if you were for ships, you'd stop there in front of the money we're trying to catch. That's not very clever. But I didn't ever hear anything about air brakes. I didn't hear anything about controlling speeds or anything of that sort. And frankly, when you're looking to be expected onto a Russian
00:38:02
Speaker
The last thing you're expecting is something that's going to be stashed on the deck. So I suspect there was a mental process involved here that hadn't quite clicked into place. So it would have been obvious to you, wasn't it, that this wasn't your ordinary interception. Exactly. And I seem to remember, this is the bit where I may have made this up, but I seem to remember the pilot saying, the second pilot saying he is right behind us.
00:38:33
Speaker
because that's the thing that sent the shivers out their back. Because, you know, one thing is one thing to be attacking somebody else. They're right behind you, attacking you. You really begin to wonder. In order to say that, because they didn't have any radar looking behind, they must have just assumed that they must have assumed. Disappears in the radar. That's exactly right. So someone listening to that on the radio, on the ground,
00:39:04
Speaker
Exactly, yes, yes, yes. I mean, it would be the natural reaction. Who knows there was something there? The navigators told him it's just in front of you, and he's gone beyond it. And then he's saying, right, he's just behind me now. That's the bit that really fixed our minds. And then we started saying, what could this be? What is this likely to be? Is this a UFO? Is this something? And it was in our crew room that we would be discussing. So that would be the first time that UFO
00:39:34
Speaker
And, you know, that went on until such time as the cruise return, which was quite soon after these incidents. They didn't hang around. They were very, very busy.
00:39:46
Speaker
came out, came into the crew room, met a tremendous amount of banter and jibes, you know, what's happened to you, seen any little green man and all the usual, you know, jokes. But the serious content was something that actually happened. And all of us were thoughtful about quite what it was all about. But to be quite frank, it didn't register to the extent that we all thought we were part of a major incident.
00:40:14
Speaker
the Americans have been involved. To us it was something that happened on a particular night and tomorrow was another day we were going to get on with our lives. So that's really why our input is somewhat limited in terms of the overall scene. Yeah I mean that really brings it home in what he said at the end there Graham about how the fact that they were all operating in their own little bubbles
00:40:41
Speaker
And because of it being, everything was covered by the Official Secrets Act. No one was supposed to talk to anyone else. So the Americans knew their part of the story. The radar people knew part of their part of the story. And then the pilots knew their bits of the story.
00:41:00
Speaker
over the years, some of them have died, a lot of the records, the written records have been destroyed or dispersed. It's been like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and I spent literally, it must have been like 15 years working on this story from about 1995 to about
00:41:17
Speaker
2010, tracking people down, and they were literally in the last few years of their lives, some of them. But I do think it's an incredible story. And just to read, Gordon Thayer, who wrote this up for the Colorado University, the Condon study,
00:41:32
Speaker
He was a radar expert and he concluded the line in the study says the apparently rational intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation for this sighting now.
00:41:48
Speaker
When people think of the condom study, they tend to think this is a complete debunking exercise and we don't even need to think about it, but he does actually say that, and that is the one UK incident that's in that American study.
Destruction and Mystery of British UFO Records
00:42:04
Speaker
And clearly something must have gone on, because I've got to say, in all the work that I've done in the British archives,
00:42:13
Speaker
They have literally gone through and removed and destroyed every single trace of this incident. There is one single mention of it in a in a briefing from 1957 and this was simply because one of the defense ministers had asked the UFO desk at that time.
00:42:31
Speaker
to spell out the incidents from 1956 and they make a mention of there was this incident at Lake and Heath where an object was seen on radar at a high altitude, they sent an aircraft to investigate but nothing was seen by the aircraft which I suppose is true but it's the actual bare bones of what happened
00:42:52
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, one thing I wanted to show people is just to get an idea. We keep hearing about these different bases, Lake and Heath, Bentwaters and that. If I bring up a map and we can kind of get an idea of the kind of area of the UK, it's a bit blurry, but I'm sure we can do it. Yeah, that's pretty clear. So you can see here, if you can see my cursor, you've got Lake and Heath here.
00:43:14
Speaker
And then up to the right, we've got Neetu said near the coast. And then down in the right corner, we've got Bentwater. So this is the kind of the East Anglia area, really, isn't it, of the UK? Yeah. So Bentwater's and Ipswich is where people will be familiar with the Rendlesham. Bentwater's Woodbridge down in the southwest corner of East Anglia. So Neetu said where Freddie Wimbledon was is right up on the coast, on the flattest part of the coast, which is why the radar stations there.
00:43:41
Speaker
There's an actual radar museum there now. If you go there, you can actually go in the radar room as it was in the 1950s. So you can sort of imagine yourself as Freddie Wimbledon would have seen it at the time. Yeah, that's pretty interesting, but it just gives a good impression as to piece in the, like you said, the puzzles and the bases and stuff.
00:44:04
Speaker
Ah, Mr. Graham Rendell's in the chat. Lake and Heath and Mildenhall are pretty close to each other. Ben Waters and Woodbridge's circuits overlap. I see. I'm not sure what that means. I'm sure they explain. Yeah. Good to see you, Graham, anyway. Let's just say that one thing I thought might be good to go, and I'm not going to spend much time on it, is just to look at the Bluebook files on it. Just to show people that it was taken, you know,
00:44:32
Speaker
kind of seriously. So this is a, you know, these are, I'll scroll through. These are all documents, drawings of the radar, showing the path of the object. And a lot of this is Dr. J. Alan Heineck as well. He was asked to give an opinion on it. I think even Fred Whipple was at one of the famous astronomers at the time.
00:44:57
Speaker
was asked to give an opinion but this was all what you're seeing there was all top secret no one had access to it outside the US Air Force and these are a lot of these are or most of them are Air Force documents as well yeah so there you go
00:45:14
Speaker
Talking about meteors and space anomalies and all sorts of things, but yeah, like you said, these were all classified files that have obviously since become unclassified, but it just adds weight to the story. There we have another image of the radar tracks and things.
00:45:29
Speaker
I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense, really, to me. But it just adds to this weight of information and that. So I thought that would just be worth checking out. I haven't linked that anywhere yet. But what I'll do is, along with the full interviews, I'll link the Blue Book documents. I'll give a shout out to Sean Rash, Witness Citizen, for sending me those when he knew that I was going to be covering this case.
00:45:53
Speaker
What about the artist impressions? Shall we show that now as well? Do you want to talk about this? Yeah, Hilary Evans, who was very big in ufology in the 1980s and 90s, he ran a picture library in London called the Mary Evans Picture Library, which some people may have heard of, and he did a wonderful children's book on UFOs in the 1990s, which had these wonderful artist impressions. And there was a chapter on Lake and Eve Bentwaters where he'd got this, you can see there, it's sort of like a
00:46:23
Speaker
almost like a palimpsest where he's got lots of bits from the story. So he's got the radar people peering at the screen. He's got the blurry light in the sky. I think you can see a venom up there somewhere. Yeah, above the light. Yeah, yeah. And he's got the airman sort of pointing at the sky and the hangers. I just thought that really sums up the case really well. Yeah, absolutely.
00:46:46
Speaker
But the key, the main thing about the case that makes it stand out, I think, is the action bit that Brady and Scofield were talking about, you know, the bit where that bit where the tension was rising. And you can just imagine if you were in one of those venoms, there's no light, you've got your pilot who's sort of bombing along. In fact, the pilot
00:47:07
Speaker
David Brady was the pilot when Brady was... David Chambers was the pilot and he was called David Helfer-Leather Chambers, that was his nickname. So he was like bombing along and you can imagine Brady sat next to him peering at this radar screen and there's this thing about, you know, it's there in front of you and it's stationary and they're zooming past it.
00:47:29
Speaker
and then the getting the message from the ground it's behind you it's behind you and you can imagine that scofield and the others down on the ground listening to this and hearing this rising tension that's the bit of the story i think that really makes it interesting so it's almost like they're involved in this really long chase with this thing whatever it was
00:47:49
Speaker
i mean yeah i mean they're saying as well they were saying that you know at that time of night in those aircraft your vision your vision is limited to what 20 foot so your bait you are basing your rig it's the radar it's the the communications and things like that that you're relying on yeah to navigate around and and intercept it's not visual unless there's a light which you know some of them have said but it must be
00:48:15
Speaker
You know, I'd be shitting myself. It must have been terrifying. I think we were putting a bit of bravado on there, to be honest. And don't forget, this is Battle of Britain technology we're talking about. It's not much further advanced than what we were using during the 1940s. This is way before we had digital technology, which is what they use nowadays.
00:48:34
Speaker
And the interesting thing about it is the radars that we're using then were better for picking up UFOs than what we've got now, because the radars that they use for civil aviation now, they're computerized. And I mean, I've been around Manchester Airport. I've been around some of the big airport terminals.
00:48:54
Speaker
and actually had people show me how to use the radar. And I've sort of said to them, do you ever see UFOs? And they said, well, yeah, we see odd things all the time. But all we do is we just change the computer program so that we get rid of them. It's like, what? And it's it's like, well, we're not interested in things that aren't aircraft.
00:49:13
Speaker
You know so yeah there's birds there's insects there's unusual meteorological things, but as long as they don't collide with aircraft we don't want to see them so we basically change the way we.
00:49:24
Speaker
You know, we get the computers so it doesn't see them. So unless something is the size of an aircraft and is behaving like an aircraft, it won't show up on radar. But that's why we get more of these stories from the 1950s, because that was before they were computerized. So they were actually seeing things which might have been UFOs and scrambling aircraft to look at them.
00:49:47
Speaker
And I think what really stood out for me when going through everything you sent me and reading about it was this big ground control radar that we see behind us right now. But also those venom radar sounded pretty good as well. So if you've got corroborating data coming from both.
00:50:02
Speaker
You know, it's difficult to say that, you know, they're both messing up or. Exactly.
Lack of Media Attention and Record Keeping
00:50:08
Speaker
So here you've got at least five different radars all seeing the same thing. So you've got the ground the ground controlled approach radar, which is the American one at Lake and Heath. They were seeing it from the ground. All different frequencies. Don't forget these radars. Sure. You've got the ground control interception or GCI radar, which is the type 80 or type 85.
00:50:29
Speaker
the one you can see behind you again at different frequency seeing the same thing on radar at the same time you then send up the the aircraft they've got their airborne interception radar operating on a different frequency if you've got three radars seeing the same thing at the same time there's something there there's no doubt about it and you've got i think freddie mentioned there's the height finder radar which is a separate radar
00:50:53
Speaker
because he said at the end, it just zoomed off on the height finder. Yeah, and they couldn't get any readings from it. Yeah, that's incredible. And I think this was going on for hours. It started at sort of about half past nine and they didn't fade from the radar screens until half past three in the morning. So there were waves of wave of aircraft going up. And this sent some American aircraft up as well, some T-33s. I managed to track the pilot down from one of those and he remembered it as well.
00:51:22
Speaker
Wow. I think one thing that stood out for me was when the radars were tracking them coming in, you know, 30 miles, 20 miles, 10 miles. And, you know, they're getting the speed of this thing. So two, three, 4,000 miles an hour in 1956. Of course, they're going to be very confused and
00:51:41
Speaker
the tensions are going to rise, you know, at that point within the Cold War, it's going to be what the hell is going on. So all these things adding up is just a fascinating, fascinating UFO case. And it's just such a shame that it didn't manage to make it into the media like some of the other stories, you know, like the top cliff one from 1952 and some of the others from that period, because like people spoke out and spoke to the media. And then there were questions in parliament
00:52:10
Speaker
it basically created a bit of controversy and so some of the papers survived whereas with this one because they were able to keep it secret for so long they've managed to hide whatever there was about it and destroy it effectively why i don't know well yeah i was going to say here's you know we know that the mod a sly and they have been many times in the past do you think it was a simple case have they just destroyed them for
00:52:38
Speaker
purposes of hiding the case and a cover-up? Or do you think they said they destroyed them and kept them somewhere? I mean, this is obviously pure speculation on your heart, but if anybody knows the way the MOD and the archives and everything work, it's you. Do you think they've got a secret? I think they kept them for a while because I think they weren't able to explain it. But I think what you've got to understand here is there's a massive turnover of staff
00:53:02
Speaker
the MOD and you get people who are sympathetic towards this subject like the unique popes of the world and you get people who are just utter skeptics and I think what happened was and I suspect sometime in the 1970s maybe or even as late as the 1980s someone came across all this stuff and just said why are we keeping this and just all they've got to do is just say I think this is nonsense and it happened so long ago we don't need to worry about it so
00:53:33
Speaker
signed, all they need to do is sign a bit of paper destruction certificate and it goes in the incinerator and I think that's what's happened unfortunately. That's crazy. Let's get to some questions and statements. We'll start with this one here. Condein suggests an interest question mark. Well for me personally Condein
00:53:53
Speaker
You know, it mentioned a lot of cases that weren't explained, but it certainly didn't take it any further. No, I mean, Haddow, Ron Haddow wrote the Tondine report. He must know something about this case because he was based in that area. He sort of trained in East Anglia on radar. I'm sure he would know about it. And he mentions another incident in 1996 when something was seen, RAF NITIS, NITIS-ED radar again.
00:54:22
Speaker
in the Condign Report, it's one of the few specific incidents that he refers to. So there's obviously something about East Anglia that attracts these things, whatever they are. I'm going to bring up someone we talked about before we came on live, which was the
00:54:41
Speaker
the beach, the lighthouse beach near Orford Ness. And we always hear about nuclear things attracting UAP. And if you could just tell us a bit about that again, because that had all sorts going on there from the early 1900s. Yeah, Orford Ness is like a big long strip of shingle beach.
00:54:59
Speaker
And it's just off the coast, not far from Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge. And right from the First World War, they used it to test all kinds of nasty stuff. Mustard gas, I believe, in the First World War. And then in the Cold War, they were used... Well, before the Second World War, before we had radar, they were making the first radar tests there. And before we discovered radar, they were looking for a death ray, something that they could use to actually
00:55:28
Speaker
you know burn enemy pilots out of the sky you know like something from hg wells and it was whilst they were mucking about with that that they realized that if you send pulses of energy out and it hits things and bounces back you can actually see things before they reach the shore so that's how they discovered radar effectively when they were looking for a death ray
00:55:49
Speaker
And then they built these huge concrete pagodas where they were testing nuclear bombs basically underground. All of this going on on Orford Ness. And then the last thing there in the 1960s or 70s, the Americans spent billions on this top secret base called Cobra Mist.
00:56:09
Speaker
which has got a very evocative name and effectively it was a top secret over the horizon radar station that was built to detect Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles at great distance almost like you know to take over from Filingdales
00:56:26
Speaker
And they spent billions on it and the whole island was sort of off limits, no one could go there. But the thing is, it never worked because there was some kind of weird sort of noise that they couldn't get rid of that was sort of interfering with the radar. And they didn't know whether it was the Russians jamming it or what.
00:56:45
Speaker
So they shut this whole thing down about 1972 and it never went into operation.
Military Experiments and Secret Bases
00:56:51
Speaker
But that whole area and its proximity to Rendlesham Forest has led people like John Burroughs, one of the key witnesses from the Rendlesham incident. He's absolutely convinced that what he saw at RAF Woodbridge on that famous night was some kind of experiment
00:57:08
Speaker
some kind of experiment involving the British and the Americans and some kind of death ray that was being tested that he was exposed to, which is why he's had all this ill health. He blames it on that, not on aliens or extraterrestrials, but on some kind of experiment that went wrong. Maybe he's on to something there, I don't know.
00:57:29
Speaker
Maybe we'll never know. That's the thing. Benji asks, we know that Rendlesham in 1980 was related to US nukes being held at Bentwaters. Were the US nukes there as far back as 56? The answer is yes. Well, there certainly were nukes at Lake and Heath. I mean, Lake and Heath is some distance from Bentwaters, but they had some serious nuclear ordnance. In fact, on a level of like what they'd used at Nagasaki,
00:57:58
Speaker
in the second world war stood at Lakenheath and this is why when this B-52 crashed there in just before the UFO incident you know it didn't come out until the 1980s thank God but you know we were very close to having most of the east of England leveled that night in July 1956.
00:58:18
Speaker
There we go. Andre asks, if this is 1956, some of these are going back early on when I saved them. Why is the UK still silent on this subject? Well, I think the answer to that is simply they're embarrassed by it. And I think it sort of contradicts their standard line that these things don't exist, that they're not interested in them and they've never studied them, which is clearly a lie. Yeah. And they don't pose any kind of threat to national security. The same is what we hear.
00:58:47
Speaker
Yeah, there we go. Although, like I said, I've had to reluctantly sort of accept that I don't actually think they deliberately had a policy to destroy this stuff. I just think if you work in the civil service, particularly the MOD, there's such a huge turnover of people.
00:59:04
Speaker
and there's different policies coming in and different sort of regimes and and also there's the period in which things were stored on paper in filing cabinets remember that oh yeah oh yeah and people don't store things in filing cabinets anymore so so effectively during the 1980s and 1990s they literally went through all the past records at the ministry of defense
00:59:30
Speaker
when they were moving offices and things. And they basically must have come across mountains of stuff on these UFO incidents and just said, this happened 30 years ago. Do we need to keep it? If we do keep it, then people like us in the future might start asking awkward questions and asking to see what you've got on fire. What have we got to lose by just destroying the lot? And then we can say, oh, well, sorry, we don't keep records after such and such a date. And that's the policy they've adopted.
00:59:58
Speaker
It is true. Yeah, absolutely Um, but that kind of leads me into a question. There's something we spoke about very briefly I think one of the last times you join me is I think I asked you the question is If you believe they may still well have a kind of secret di 55 equivalent office happening now And yeah, I think you said you you kind of think they might do Can you expand on do you think you know where that might sit or anything like that?
01:00:27
Speaker
Yes, well, the I-55, who were basically the intelligence branch who were investigating UFOs from about 1960s, because when the Air Ministry became part of the MOD, the old sort of structure that existed at the time of the Lakenheath sighting, which was basically the old RAF Air Ministry intelligence who looked into these things, they passed their responsibility on to the I-55, I think about 1967.
01:00:56
Speaker
And Di 55, um, retain that interest and they retained access to the files up to about 2000, which was when Ron had completed that. Condign study. And effectively that study drew a line under their supposed interest in the subject. It's a bit like, um, you know, that there was that flying source of working party study in 1950 that basically said, we don't need to worry about this. Forget about it. Yeah.
01:01:24
Speaker
And then Winston Churchill in 1952, after the top cliff sighting said, you know, what's going on? And they had to then reinstate the UFO desk. And I think something like that will be in existence. It just won't use the word UFO. They might not even use the word UAP. Sorry. Yeah, I bet they don't.
01:01:45
Speaker
I think they'll have invented something else to describe ours, because Ron Haddow was a contractor. He was effectively a private defense contractor who they brought in, paid him to do the study so that they could then say, when they were asked in Parliament, we're not actually doing it ourselves, which is not a lie, because they were paying a private contractor.
01:02:07
Speaker
to do it and that means that if some if you ask for information the freedom of information they can say no we haven't got any information which is true because in public information that's subject to freedom of information so if if you employ a private contractor it's a bit like what happens with the NHS um you can ask for information from the NHS but anybody that the NHS employs privately is outside freedom of information so I my I suspect
01:02:34
Speaker
Whoever's taken over from Di-55 will be private defense contractors. They'll be based somewhere like Farnborough. There's a base in Bristol where I suspect this is going on or near Bristol. And I think that they will be keeping a very low profile. They'll be just interviewing people such as pilots, radar personnel, people who've seen things who are military, basically. They're not interested in civilian sightings anymore.
01:03:03
Speaker
And that does kind of fit in with what's happening in the US a lot as well.
Importance of Radar Documentation
01:03:07
Speaker
Here we go. How relevant, if any, do you see the 1956 incident with the 1980s or in the comparison of how do you weigh them up?
01:03:16
Speaker
Well, I think if we actually had some of the materials, because back then when they did the radar trackings, they actually had like tracing paper on the radar screens and we used to mark it with pencils so you could actually see where the object moved. And I know that Freddie kept a really detailed record. He had like a big thick logbook where he would have entered every single thing that happened during the night. What time he scrambled, what altitude the aircraft was.
01:03:45
Speaker
And he had all that, and he said that when this group captain from Fighter Command came, it took it, it removed the logbook. So somebody had all that stuff. And I think if we had access to it, it would be far more evidential than the Landelsheim incident, because you could add it all together. You could give it somebody with, you know, you could put it all together with what the pilot said, and it would be highly evidential. And obviously someone did that at the Air Ministry at the time.
01:04:12
Speaker
and reach whatever conclusions they reached. So I've always thought it's far more important and evidential than Rendlesham because the radar aspect of it is it's got the primacy whereas the radar aspect for Rendlesham I always thought was pretty weak actually. Right, fair enough.
01:04:34
Speaker
Graham asks what's the likelihood of secret files from the 50s and 60s actually surviving somewhere? Would duplicates be kept by other agencies such as DO55? I guess you kind of covered this but anything to add? Well some of the files from the 1950s have survived. I've got copies of them. There are some quite interesting ones.
01:04:53
Speaker
There was some parliamentary questions that were asked, I think about 1957, about a similar incident where javelins were scrambled and this did get into the news and there was another sighting at Westfraw, RAF Westfraw in Scotland.
01:05:09
Speaker
in April 1957 where three different radar stations on an RAF bombing range switched on at a certain time on a morning, I think it was early in the spring morning, and all of them at the same time saw this enormous object over the Irish Sea, like a huge object as big as a battleship with lots of other objects circling around it.
01:05:32
Speaker
and the Di-55 report, well sorry not Di-55, it was their predecessors. DIS was good. Yeah it was Air Intelligence I think they were called. Okay. DDI Tech, their report on that west floor infosome has survived, it did survive at the National Archives, I can
01:05:50
Speaker
send you copies of that and it's interesting because it does actually say we can't explain it and there was obviously some object in the sky that was seen on radar it wasn't seen visually but
01:06:04
Speaker
I think the phrase they use is, you know, there were four very large reflecting objects that weren't charged clouds and weren't sort of meteorological phenomena. And the reason that that file wasn't destroyed and it survived was because one of the radar operators talked to one of the Sunday tabloids about the Tadori. So it was front page headlines. And then there were questions asked in parliament and amazingly at the JIC,
01:06:30
Speaker
which is the Joint Intelligence Committee in London, which is like the absolute top intelligence, where you've got MI5, MI6, GCHQ. It's there in the minute, so they couldn't destroy the evidence for that one. And it's actually in the files. It's just such a pity that no one involved in Lake and Heath spoke to the media at the time, because if they had have done, they wouldn't have been able to destroy the material that they have destroyed.
UK's Lagging UFO Investigations and Records Neglect
01:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, Mr. Strafe Wilson, good to see you, Strafe. Does Dave have any comments on the current state of the UFO, UAP topic? Are we gaining ground? Oh, difficult one. I don't know, are we? We seem to be getting somewhere when the Pentagon published their report, and although people thought it was a bit of a dumb squib,
01:07:23
Speaker
I thought there were some quite interesting things in it. I think the idea that they had for doing like a real time radar study of some of the areas where these things have been seen, for example, in the southern Pacific Ocean, around the coast of California, rather than that they were basically saying, we're not going to get anywhere looking at historical cases, sadly, like Lake and Heath.
01:07:46
Speaker
because they happened so long ago however evidential we might think they are as ufologists from a military point of view people's stories without hard evidence like radar tapes and photographs and all the rest of it don't really amount to much so what they would seem to be suggesting and they may well be doing this now because they've asked for all this additional funding is to actually you know have
01:08:11
Speaker
real-time radars monitoring parts of the world where some of these strange UAPs have been seen, have aircraft ready to scramble, a bit like what we just heard at Lake and Heath, but when something happens, actually be monitoring the situation in real time. So you've got two or three different radars, you've got aircraft, you've got visual observers, that's what you need.
01:08:33
Speaker
And that's what we should be looking for. And sadly, we have had this in instances like Lake and Heathbend waters in the past. But sadly, they haven't kept the evidence or they haven't shared it.
01:08:45
Speaker
with the people they should have shared it with. So we can only hope that that's what they might do. But I've absolutely no doubt, I have no confidence, shall I say, that the British are doing anything remotely as comprehensive as this. I mean, I think they'll just be doing what they've always done and just said, well, the Americans have got more money and more resources than we have. Leave it to them.
01:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, David, we've just hit an hour and 10 minutes in. We're going to bring up another case, but my suggestion will be that we'll do with that case what we did with this one and maybe dedicate, you know, half an hour or at least an hour to it in the future. If you're okay with that, I think these cases do warrant looking back on because they're not heard of or spoken about as much as we'd probably like, especially when they've got that much evidence and data.
01:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, we've got a question here. I didn't notice the signal has joined us. Do you think details on big cases like Roswell could be lost due to poor record keeping?
01:09:42
Speaker
straight answer to that is definitely yes and I think sadly we've got to recognize that we might think this subject is interesting but there's an awful lot of people particularly in the military and government who think it's a complete waste of time and public money and sadly those that mindset has their influence and they've got a lot of influence they've destroyed
01:10:07
Speaker
a lot of this material. I mean, I should mention here, I mean, you know about this Vinnie, but a colleague of mine, Matthew Ealsley, recently put in a Freedom of Information Act request to try and find out what's happened to the unredacted version of the Condyne Report, which as you know, was only finished in 2000.
01:10:28
Speaker
And the one that was released, there's bits of it that were top secret. And I was told that this file, it had been preserved, it had been released at the National Archives. Well, Matthew sent a Freedom of Information request last year, I think he was. And after a long delay because of all the usual things, Covid, etc., someone came back to him and said, well, we've looked for it, but we think it's been accidentally destroyed.
01:10:54
Speaker
this is the condine report that's ridiculous i mean is that stupidity or just negligence i mean well again i just i just think they just they don't value it they don't value the subject they don't um
01:11:11
Speaker
They don't think it's important. They just think they just regard the likes of us as nuisance as a nuisance, basically. So anyway, this has got me on their back and I've raised it with my MP and put in a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner. So I think they'll be seeing a bit of heat over this one.
01:11:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Dan says, great answer, David. Thank you. We shall meet soon when I visit Vinny. Absolutely, man. If you're not aware, that's Dan who I went to Columbia with. Yes, I gathered all that. Yeah, excellent. Well, listen, David, let's leave it at that. We'll arrange to come back and talk about the top cliff case. If you don't mind hanging about, we'll have a little chat after this.
01:11:51
Speaker
after we end this I just want to say again thank you so much I found all the research that you've done fascinating and going through the interviews it was just shockingly interesting and you know I'm glad that we got to do this and put this case back out there for people to see like I said to everybody who is watching now or in the future or listening
01:12:13
Speaker
If you go to the YouTube video, look in the description below, you can download and listen to the full interviews from all of those guys that we played the clips from today. It is fascinating, you know, and I just can't recommend it enough. So yeah, go ahead and check it out. Yeah.
01:12:30
Speaker
I think that's it, guys. I'm going to be back tomorrow night. I'm not having a day off this week. Back tomorrow night with Cristina Gomez. So check in then. But for now, guys, we'll love you and leave you. Have a great rest of your day and we'll see you soon. Take care. Bye bye.