A pair of General Dynamics’s F1-11 aircraft were shepherding a very strange-looking, completely black aircraft, and a Boeing KC- 135 Stratotanker seemed to be fueling it
The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
Gibson said: “We discussed what to do about it but decided that if it were reported through official channels, it would be at best rubbished, at worst lead to trouble.
Having signed the [British Government’s] Official Secrets Act I didn’t want to jeopardize my position in the recognition team [of the Royal Observer Corps], so I kept my mouth shut.” Gibson did, however, contact Bill Sweetman, who found the encounter to be of extreme interest. Gibson added: “It is the only aircraft I have ever seen that I could not identify.” The fact that the Aurora—which it almost certainly was—was seen over the North Sea, off the east coast of England, is intriguing because a series of encounters of a near-identical kind were reported over the mainland United Kingdom in March 1993.
In between the time that Gibson had his encounter midway through 1989 and then, the Aurora had a new nickname in the UFO research community: the Flying Triangle. Although it’s important to note that more than a few researchers believed that the FTs were extraterrestrial in origin, one thing that pretty much everyone was in accord with was that the Flying Triangles and the Aurora existed, but were they ours or “theirs”?
Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low, humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still classified aircraft, namely, the Aurora.
It was one single wave of encounters in the United Kingdom in early 1993 that ultimately led senior military and defense personnel to liaise with their American counterparts to try to determine, once and for all, if the FTs are the Aurora or if they have extraterrestrial origins. The story comes from one of those at the forefront of the study into the aforementioned sightings: Nick Pope, who, for three years (1991–1994), investigated—at an official level—UFO incidents on behalf of the Ministry of Defense.
Long since retired from the MoD, Pope reveals his role in—and his knowledge of—the March 1993 UFO encounters over the United Kingdom: “I arrived at the office at about 8.30 A.M. or 9.00 A.M. on the morning of March 31, 1993, and my telephone was ringing. I picked it up and there was a police officer on the other end making a UFO report. Now, he was based in Devon and told me an account of an incident that had taken place in the early hours of that particular day when he and a colleague who had been on night patrol saw a triangular- shaped UFO at fairly-high altitude. He said that the motion was fairly steady and that there were lights at the edges with a fainter light in the middle.
“To me, this was already a description that was becoming quite familiar both from one or two reports that I’d received at the Ministry of Defense over the years and from my own study and research into the UFO literature. In other words, I was aware that this was a commonly reported shape for a UFO.” Pope continues: “I was also quite pleased to get a report from a police officer. I won’t say that it was rare, but it was slightly unusual to have reports from trained observers like police and military. I would say that, of the reports I received in my time at the UFO desk, less than 5 percent came from, collectively, pilots, military officers and the police. I had spoken, socially, to numerous Royal Air Force pilots who’d had personal sightings, but who had never reported them for fear of ridicule. “But that police report was very much the first of many that came in that day and over the next week or so. When taken together, the sightings described took place in a range of times—the earliest was about 11–11.30 P.M. on the evening of the 30th and the latest was about 1.45 A.M. in the early hours of the 31st.”
What was it precisely that made the police officer’s report stand out? “He said to me: ‘I’ve been on night patrols for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.’ Well, reports such as this came through thick and fast over the course of the next week or so; more and more reports came in from police stations, the public and local RAF stations. In fact, I would say that the total number of reports easily exceeded one hundred.” It is clear from what Pope has to say that three reports in particular stood out more than any other—the first of which concerned a family based in Rugeley, Staffordshire, England, who had viewed a remarkable aerial vehicle near the sprawling forest that is Cannock Chase.