BRITAIN’S ballistic missile early warning base in Yorkshire tracked a UFO sparking a top-secret probe, it has been revealed.
Top brass at RAF Fylingdales, near Whitby, were baffled by the ‘unknown target’ and ordered an investigation.
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The BMEWS base – part of the NORAD missile defence system – was famous for its three ‘golfball’ shaped radomes during the Cold War that were used to track missiles fired from the Soviet Union.
They would give a dreaded ‘four-minute warning’ of any incoming attack.
But UFOs often popped up on the radar screens, it can be revealed.
RAF Group Captain David Todd, the Senior Duty Officer at the base, ordered a secret inquiry into an incident in 1981/82.
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He later revealed the incident to British UFO expert Dr David Clarke.
Todd said: “Unknowns came up on the radars at regular intervals for all sorts of reasons.
“At that time if the radar had sufficient capacity spare, it was told to go track them.
«That was because we are interested in unknowns and some times we needed to find out what it is, where it is and most importantly what it might run into during its orbit such as spy satellites.
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“I remember this [incident] particularly clearly. It came up as an unknown and [Fylingdales] radar tracked it.
«We could not match it up with anything on our computers. And radar tracked it for quite a long time.
«We had quite a lot of information on it. It appeared to be in Earth’s orbit and we waited for it to come around again but it did not return.
«So that got us really interested, because people started saying ‘ooh, is it a UFO?’.»
The ‘unknown’ did not reappear but Todd decided it could not be ignored so he tasked the defence contractor SERCO, who designed and maintained the radars, to dig further.
He said: “We were duty bound to do so, because this was an unknown object. They did a hell of a lot of work on it and came up with various theories. One of which was ‘an unidentified flying object with little green men inside!’
“Well, you have got to be open minded about this stuff, you can’t discount that possibility.”
They concluded the object was a meteor in Earth’s orbit.
The RAF captain said: “We decided the most likely explanation was a meteorite that was rotating in the same direction as the Earth.”
Todd returned as commander of the base in the 1990s after a spell at HQ Strike Command when his work ‘included review of UFO reports and advice to MoD Secretariat Air Staff’ – the so called ‘UFO desk’.
No official record of the incident exists in the official records released by the Ministry of Defence.
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However, a letter sent by MoD UFO desk officer Peter Watkins to a member of the public in 1982 stated: “It is conceivable that Fylingdales might pick up an “alien spacecraft”, but only if it happened to be within the parameters of the radars.
There is every chance, therefore, that an “alien invasion” would be as unannounced as that in [H.G.] Well’s War of the Worlds.”
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