Perhaps the most eye-opening and revealing aspect of the RAF Shawbury encounter was the way in which the object made its exit
The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
“Even though it was fairly obvious to me that there were a number of things that this object was not, I still made the checks anyway to try and eliminate absolutely every possibility.” Pope also notes: “I had a feeling that this one was going to go right up the chain of command.” He was not wrong. “Checks were also made with various Air Traffic Control Centers, with Air Defense experts and Air Defense radar systems; and although at one point we thought we had caught the UFO on radar, it eventually turned out that there was nothing. After these checks were made and we were able to establish that the UFO hadn’t been caught on radar, the Royal Air Force was quite interested.
There isn’t really a corporate view on UFOs; it really does go down to the belief of the individual. But, enough people realized that there was something exciting and out of the ordinary going on and they, too, got caught up in all that excitement.” Initially, suggestions were put forward that all of the sightings were simply the result of a satellite reentering the Earth’s atmosphere: “I spoke to the Space Information Officer at RAF Fylingdales; this is the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Centre. They’ve got very powerful space tracking radar that can pick up and track all sorts of objects at orbital heights. Now, they raised the possibility that we were looking at the re-entry of one of the Russian Kosmos satellites.
“Contrary to what some people have said, however, Fylingdales were very unsure as to whether or not the satellite would even have been visible from the U.K. at all during that time. But even if there was a reentering satellite in the skies, it certainly couldn’t explain the very close encounter at RAF Shawbury. Don’t forget, too, that a satellite burn-up is very much like a meteor shower with a few tracks of light flashing across the sky. In this sighting, however, it was a case of one military base actually reporting to another and saying: ‘It’s coming your way.…’ So this rules out a satellite burn-out.”
Pope then took his investigation to another level
“My next step was to get a map and plot out the various locations where the UFO—or UFOs—had been seen. Well, that didn’t work out. I was confronted with a map of haphazard sightings all around the country. There was certainly a concentration of sightings in Devon, Cornwall, South Wales and the Midlands.
But there were also sightings from Southampton and Yorkshire; and I knew that there were reports from Ireland, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe. And these were just the tip of the iceberg. “One interesting point that then occurred to me was that we were dealing with activity on exactly the same night—but three years later—to a very famous wave of sightings of very similar craft seen over Belgium.
And my favorite theory about this or at least an idea I floated about—was that this was a deliberate move on the part of whoever was operating the craft.” Pope explains his line of thinking: “For example, if the media had got a hold of this, it would have been too late to get it in the newspapers on March 31; so, the earliest date that the story could have run would have been April 1— April Fools’ Day! Again, a little indicator, perhaps, of an intelligence and possibly even some form of humor.” Of course, it could be argued that this would serve as an excellent cover if the Flying Triangle that was seen near RAF Shawbury was a terrestrial aircraft (albeit a distinctly secret one) as opposed to something extraterrestrial.
Pope acknowledges this. “We decided that we couldn’t ignore the various rumors that were doing the rounds about a supposed Top Secret aircraft developed by the U.S. Government and called Aurora—or, indeed, any hypersonic and/or prototype aircraft operated by the Americans.