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
Pope reveals the facts: “This report was brought to my attention by the Community Relations Office at RAF Cosford [Shropshire]. The report had come direct from the family and sounded particularly interesting because, unlike some of the other sightings, this one was of an object flying at very low level. There had been a family gathering and several members of the family were out on the drive—really just saying goodbye to their relatives who were about to drive off. Suddenly, this large, triangular- shaped craft flew over them very, very slowly. This was a flat triangle, with a light in each corner and a larger light in the direct centre of the underside of the craft.” Was this, in fact, not unlike the report filed by the police reports from Devon?
“Exactly. But there was something else that I’d come across in my investigations that was also present in the Rugeley case,” says Pope. “This was a low-frequency humming sound coming from the UFO; a humming that they actually described as being quite unpleasant. Imagine standing in front of the speakers at a pop concert and almost feeling the sound as well as hearing it—that was the effect that they reported. Well, they were so excited and overwhelmed that two of them leapt into the car to give chase! “As they did so, they came to a point where they thought the UFO was so low that it must have come down in a nearby field. Well, they parked the car, jumped out and looked around. But there was absolutely nothing there; the UFO had gone.”
The night’s activities had barely begun: “The two most significant reports began at RAF Cosford shortly after the encounter at Rugeley. This was definitely the highlight and was one of the best sighting reports I received in my entire posting. The report itself came from a guard patrol at Cosford. They were on duty manning entrance points, checking the perimeter fence and such like. All the members of the patrol saw the UFO and, again, the description was pretty much the same as most of the others. In this case, though, the UFO was at medium-to-high altitude.” Pope makes an important observation: “Remember that these witnesses were people who see in a normal course of business all sorts of aircraft activity, meteorites, fireballs and so on, and they considered it absolutely out of the ordinary.
“They didn’t make a standard report: what they did was to submit an actual 2–3 page report that went up their chain of command and then the report was forwarded on to me. In that report, they stated that the UFO passed directly over the base and that this was of particular concern to them. They made immediate checks with various Air Traffic Control radar centres but nothing appeared on the screens. It was this factor that made them particularly keen to make an official report. This was at around 1.00 A.M.” Whatever the origin of the unknown vehicle, it appeared that its activities were far from over. “They noticed that this Flying Triangle was heading on a direct line for RAF Shawbury, which is some twelve to fifteen miles on. Now, the main concern of the Cosford patrol was to alert Shawbury that the UFO was coming their way; but they also wanted confirmation that they weren’t having a mass hallucination. “They took a decision to call Shawbury and this was answered by the Meteorological Officer. You have to realize that at that time there was literally just a skeleton staff operating, so the Met. Officer was, essentially, on his own.
So, he took a decision to go outside, look in the direction of RAF Cosford and see what he could see. “Sure enough, he could see this light coming towards him and it got closer and closer and lower and lower. Next thing, he was looking at this massive, triangular-shaped craft flying at what was a height of no more than two hundred feet, just to the side of the base and only about two hundred feet from the perimeter fence.” Bearing in mind the fact that the meteorological officer at RAF Shawbury could be considered a reliable witness and someone well trained in recognizing numerous types of aerial phenomena, was he able to gauge the size of the object? Pope says: “Very much so: military officers are very good at gauging sizes of aircraft and they’re very precise. His quote to me was that the UFO’s size was midway between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Now, he had eight years’ worth of experience with the Royal Air Force, and a Met. Officer is generally much better qualified than most for looking at things in the night sky.
And there were other factors too: like the family in Rugeley, he heard this most unpleasant low-frequency hum; but unlike their experience, he saw the craft fire a beam of light down to the ground. He felt that it was something like a laser beam or a searchlight. The light was tracking very rapidly back and forth and sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base. “He also said—and he admitted this was speculation—that it was as if the UFO was looking for something. Now, the speed of the UFO was extremely slow—no more than twenty or thirty miles per hour, which in itself is quite extraordinary. As far as the description is concerned, he said that it was fairly feature-less—a sort of flat, triangular-shaped craft, or possibly a bit more diamond-shaped. But if all the descriptions had been identical I would have been surprised.”
Perhaps the most eye-opening and revealing aspect of the RAF Shawbury encounter was the way in which the object made its exit, as Nick Pope reveals: “He said that the beam of light retracted into the craft, which then seemed to gain a little bit of height. But then, in an absolute instant, the UFO moved from a speed of about twenty or thirty miles per hour to a speed of several hundreds of miles per hour—if not thousands! It just suddenly moved off to the horizon and then out of sight in no more than a second or so—and there was no sonic boom.
Well, of course, when I received this report and the one from Cosford, I launched as full an investigation as I possibly could.” As Nick Pope now makes abundantly clear, that investigation proved to be extraordinary, to say the least.