Lakenheath/ Bentwaters UFO Incident 1956 - Dr. David Clarke

0:04 Dr David Clark David how you doing good great to see everybody again oh great to see you Vinnie yes you're becoming quite the regular now yeah absolutely I really appreciate it and uh yeah I think last time or we spoke a while back and I said to you what are the 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 lak 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 kind of people that were there and involved in it you know I knew it 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 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 okay thanks Vinnie um just to introduce this um this story or case um before rendlesham came along um this is

1:06 a long long time ago now um this case the what was known as the lake and Heath bentwaters case which happened in the same area of East Anglia um as the renam forest incident it was probably the best known or the be most evidential um UFO incident in the um in the British sort of case list and um it happened in 1956 at the of the Cold War um but the thing is it was it was effectively covered by official Secrets act 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 if so you you'll know that the American um Project Blue Book that the US Air Force um were running they they basically closed shop and they gave a contract to the University of Colorado to write a report this became the infamous condom report not conine Condon um and um they examined something like 12,000 um

2:07 separate UFO incidents reported to the US Air Force and some of them were foreign where where for example um there were US Air bases in in Europe and Far East and the interesting thing is out of those 12,000 cases um I think there was something like 700 that remained unexplained and one of those was from Britain and that was the Heath bentwaters case and no one in this country in euphology knew anything about this story until the Americans published it in 1969 and and unfortunately the if you believe what the British government tell us um their files on it by that point the late 1960s had been destroyed so 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 file on the case so um as I say it was it's it is hugely evidential there was a lot of information in the

3:08 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 UFOs uaps whatever you want to call them were picked up first 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 sez crisis was was brewing in the in the um in the Middle East um 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 um there was there was RAF um aircraft that were poised on quick reaction alert b bases all around the East Coast um they were in contact with radar stations anything that was approaching the UK across the North Sea um that was colle that was um seen on radar there would be an immediate

4:08 scramble an aircraft would be sent off across the North Sea to investigate and the Russians were probing our defenses probably two three times every week so put UFOs or uaps into that mix uh 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 in to the background to this RAF Laken 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 1956 there was a I think it was a b-56 bomber coming into land at Laken Heath went out of control crashed into the nuclear weapon store and very nearly triggered off a massive nuclear incident in East Anglia that would have you know East Anglia in in Fallout narrowly avoided the Detonator didn't go off and again this didn't emerge until something like 1980

5:08 and as American General mentioned it and it came out in Parliament um at the same time as well just before the UFO incident the the CIA were flying the what was then the brand new Black Project U2 spy plane from Laken Heath uh and and they had a contingent of these UT two spy planes that that were being sent over the Soviet Union with the consent of our prime minister at the time Harold mik Millan and the the um the u2s were shipped into the UK in big wooden boxes disguised as bananas big banana boxes and uh apparently when some of the other politicians found out about it they had to get rid of them moved them off to Vice Barden in West Germany but you can see if you were an American officer or you were in the 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 and then one

6:08 night August the night of August the 13th 14th 1956 this is a really hot steamy Summer Night clear skies um calls start coming in to the RAF from the various air bases around the East Coast RF bent Waters um RF lak 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 um and they were seeing odd things on the radar and people were going outside and they were seeing lights in the sky that were streaming across the sky moving at incredible speed something up I think the some of the things that have been seeing on radar were moving at some incredible speed 4 miles hour was one of the things that were registered formations of objects as well that were sort of slowly moving and then others that were moving really fast and they were phoning this

7:10 into to the RAF um that's the stage at which the RAF start to 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 a type um 85 centimetric centimetric radar which is um still on site if you go to RF Ned which is a radar Museum in the norol broads they've still got the radar from that era you can go and look at it so this this is like one of the control cabins that were using and a um an RAF um uh officer called Freddy Wimbledon who I got to know really well uh was in lengthy communication with him about 20 years ago when he was in his late 80s early 90s he was the Chief controller RF NE said so he started taking the calls from bentwaters early in the evening and Laken Heath quite later on around midnight and he was quite skeptical as

8:12 you can imagine um and he would looked 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 that was moving in unlike any aircraft moving at Fantastic speeds this was at quite a high altitude because 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 the the radar that Freddy Wimbledon had access to really high powerered Ground Control interception radar so much more powerful spanning out right across the North Sea so he could see this thing zooming in moving at incredible speed 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

9:12 because they're already here yeah over Leen Heath nuclear armed Air Base uh where this where the U2 spy plane was um so basically um perhaps we ought to um play some of the tape of Freddy um talking about this it's about five or six minutes I think this one's seven minutes seven minutes I should just say I 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 uh on the night of the 13th 14th of 19566 I would a flight liant on duer Chief interception controller at a radar station in East my function was to watch the radar picture as seen on our consoles and if any anything abnormal seen to take what action was

10:13 necessary this involves scrambling fighter aircraft which were on standby 24 hours a um not last after I went on duty 233 before midnight Zulu time me time um we began to notice um a return on on our right which was acting rather strangely Al suddenly going very very fast much faster than anything we'd ever seen before and then suddenly stopping and I did the parent slowing down and then

11:13 accelerating from that position um that terrific speed straight um but I conferred with the sex controller and and uh said I thought we ought to scramble the battle flight see what it was so the gratified scramble that consisted of two Venom to theight fighter version of the Venom that carried a pilot from the navigator navigator sitting on the right hand side but otherwise more or less side by side the Navigator had his own radar function being that when he was directed from the ground um he would at one state had he

12:15 would search on his own radar until he found the object from the directions given from the and from then on um he would watch the object if he had picked it up by that time and um subsequently at a certain stage he would take over the interception if ordered to in this case um a contact was made on an aircraft which appeared to be well didn't know it was an aircraft it was appeared to be a very bright light and the Navigator thought he had it on his screen but it kept

13:15 disappearing and one at that one stage it appeared to be stationary in which case um we on the ground uh thought this object which we have followed the um was behaving rather erratically so we had two choices there either this whatever it was um had been able to Loop and get behind by the Target aircraft or Target rather or the he had undershot the target which later appeared to be the version so I decided then to scramble

14:17 aircraft and that was scrambled to join the chase in the meantime the target had shut up at a tremendous Pace the northeasterly direction but at such a rate that uh height it was off our height um consoles before you could say chck Robinson at terrific all I don't say shaken by this but um the experience was such that we've never something that we'd never encountered before and the share speed not only speed but maneu maneuverability of this object whatever was um seemed so uncanny the next day we were

15:19 visited by a group captain from hi command who wanted to the story and um he told us under no circumstances where we to talk about it about s or anybody else and never let the press now and um it seemed very strange at the time but he says don't worry you haven't seen something these things are they described as a bright light they couldn't see anything else but a bright I think you've got the measure of it there when you were tring thing on the a normal ra aircraft response right no bigger than any

16:21 other just exactly the same as one of our own would have been right but behaving in a way behaving in a way that no aircraft at that time or anything invisors would be able to do I mean no aircraft can be doing two or 3,000 miles hour and stop like that yeah wow I mean I mean Freddy was I think he was in his late 80s when I interviewed him and that would have been about 2000 2001 and I should say the reason why um we knew he' come forward and he was willing to talk about it was 1978 I think it was shortly after Steven Spielberg's film had been released um encounters yeah a skeptic called Ian ridpath who I know quite well he wrote a piece for I think it was the Sunday Times um based upon what had been in the cond condom report about the case and it

17:23 and because it it was only the American version it was all completely wrong and mixed up and this was and fredd read it and he wrote Into the sundaytimes 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 was involved in this so managed to track him down and get him speaking he spoke to various other ethologists as well but as you can see quite an incredible story and the story that he told is pretty much um it's it's um it's 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 it's sort of like sure um it's it's about the timings because the American timings um seem to be earlier in the evening and he's talking about something that happened after midnight but yeah there's a lot there's a lot of things that could explain that because at the time we were subject to what what was known as Brit double British summertime so our time

18:24 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 and 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 nf4 nf10 Venoms and they were like as fedy had explained In that clip they were like a double cater um Interceptor aircraft that had forward-facing interception Radars so he SC he scrambled them from the battle flight so that so there was a group of venom that were on 24 24hour call at a base called RAF water beach which is near Cambridge Cambridge City of Cambridge and there was a whole group of people so this is where you get all these other names like gram scoffield uh John Brady Ivan Logan they were all sat around in this you know you can imagine the Battle of Britain yeah similar sort of thing but cold war they were waiting for the call they were expecting the Russians to

19:24 come and they thought the Russians would be coming over the over the the North see a very high altitude you know the Russian bears so when we got this call from um from the ARF ni said um they were absolutely amazed because they were being asked to go and intercept something that was at 4,000 feet above the East anglian Country 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 the the description from John Brady who was a navigator in the first Venom he he was sent by um Freddy Wimbledon to intercept um this UFO that was on the RAF nstead Rad Radar and he was told to speak to the Americans so they switch frequency to RF Laken e 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 below the Horizon that that Freddy could see so they put patched them through to the

20:25 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 the the Freddy wimon that we heard and this one from John Brady on the night in question I can remember some chat immediately prior to scramble with n head and they then they called for a Venom and um I think he probably went like water beach be here one V scramble Vector so and so call so and so on what ever frequency it was well we were Airborne probably within two minutes because the uh Venom was a um startups his Pilot just pressed cartridge and he this terrific whoo from the cartridge gases as it drove the turbine around the start mechanism around and there's no war up in a jet we just roared off and we think whats is

21:26 this but we had a idea that the Americans wanted us to go and look at same thing now where did that idea come from well it must have come from n probably the chat saying the Americans want us to want you to go and look at something theyve got I can't remember very clearly on that anyhow of we went and called Lake pce and they were directing us uh towards this thing at around 7,000 ft the first run we had at it I saw nothing the next time we went beond um I I can remember saying to David contact and he get say me what is it I can't see it as we rush by on each pass and it would go down 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 moving and if you remember in that little film they said well couldn't you intercept it and I had to say you cannot intercept

22:28 something that is stationary which you just can't do um but there was something there and when we got back and landed and when Ian in phas of K came back I had work with Ian and he said do you see something did you 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 seen a me balloon with a radar reflector on it before on AI 21 and I reckon it was probably that or something like that right um in the end we just turned around went back home when we were getting a bit low and had several runs at it but uh each time I would say to David there it's out 45 starbo now at one mile he'd be looking out' see nothing what is it what is it I don't know there there it was how many rooms did you have at the Target three or four just so what altitude around 7,000 ft

23:32 and around 300 knots 7,000 ft is quite low really is compared to lot of intercep yes of course our inter our fuel consumption pretty which governed the salty length of course we only do that 50 55 minutes see we for what about 55 minutes minutes you can check it in my Lo great stuff so in that one he mentions he did at one point think it was this radar balloon thing yes and um 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 um the case in there and it basically said that there was all these aircraft were sent out looking for this object um and and um it was they couldn't work out what it was and

24:32 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 Freddy 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 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 what was being seen earlier in the night wasn't a balloon and um um the the the interesting thing about it is if if there's any astronomers or people interested in astronomy um who um are listening to this show um the 13th or the 14th of August should spark um something off in your brain and that is because that is the height of the perad meteor shower that that's the time when the pads are

25:32 the most active 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 perc and meteors and what happens with these cases again like renam I think it once people get it in their heads that there's something out there there's something flying around uh they're sort of broken out of whatever my Asma they're in you know they might reading the paper they might be you know wait like 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 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 the air for American Air Force and the British Air Ministry obviously investigated it in Great depth and I

26:35 discovered um that the this is a really involved story The Chap who was the head of 23 squadron at the time um his book called um Tony Davis um he um was EXT he he'd been a Russ he'd been a British spy working for MI6 in Budapest before he was he was he was captured by the Russians exchanged sent back to the UK and they put him in charge of um 23 Squadron um running the qra and I looked into his background and he'd um 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 is still blows my brain when I find when I when I think about this in 1972 he became the head of the ministry of defense's UFO desk Anthony Davis what

27:37 year was that 1972 when when he' retired from sort of military service they brought him back obviously because he knew something about UFOs and about he'd been they knew he'd been involved in this Laken Heath case and they gave him the job as as head of the UFO desk at level as Owen har and Nick Pope kind of level above that level so more 55 type yeah yeah yeah yeah W and and when you look at the files as I have done for that period when he was um running the desk there were people who had obviously read about the case uh in the Condon report that had been published by the Americans who were writing in to 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 so 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 um speak to him because it

28:38 was before I started looking into this but he obviously knew an awful lot about it and Graeme scoffield who is the next person we um um we need to play he he knew Tony Davis and he he knew that Tony Davis had looked into the incident and investigated it and that there was something uh definitely of unexplained about it it wasn't a balloon basically um and we should say that um Graeme scoffield was the Navigator of another Venom and quite early in the evening before um Logan went out in his Venom he'd been scrambled I think about halfast N9 when the first UFOs had been seen at bentwaters and he went up um in this um Venom from water beach and before they could get very far in the sky I think they Wing fuel tank fell off 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

29:39 base so they couldn't actually get anywhere near this UFO that was being tracked at halfast n so quite he was really frustrated about this and he ended up back in the um in the guard room I think it was with all the other pilots and Navigators gathered around a little radio set 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 um my niy said to go and have a look so perhaps we ought to play what gra Scofield says let's get that one up I will just say I've got a few people who have asked questions and I've 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 I mean I knew these guys very well so they they were okay you know their jobs and the um the radar at that time was sufficiently good that if you got a blip you knew what it was you could identified you could see it you know it was of a particular yeah size so

30:39 you you would not really be um assuming it was something you know some meterological phenomenal or something like that and anything that could catch you might be a balloon or something of that sort which is always the possibility but um but I believe these guys did get the scram did get intercept did say what they said and so on and so forth Still Still stick stick with that that okay well the the Venom would it was a um a twin seat aircraft where the pilot Navigator set 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 uh uh unit probably about um three and a 3 foot6 wide the um the the the the um diameter of the uh of of the actual screen and this was uh adjusted so it

31:39 could move in every every direction so it could up go up go down go left go right and that was connected to the radar equipment and and a joystick which the Navigator would work to position the uh the radar in in place now in addition to that obviously it had a um a see display very similar to a television which would give you a um 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 it track its positioning things like that it would appear on the on the screen as a very fine line and you from the line the race where you could determine you know broadly what its characteristics are whether it was big fuzzy or whether it was very tiny um so we were not aware that we were other than just scrambled for either a trial or something like that

32:41 that we' got off the ground and immediately we would do a a maximum rate uh climb away from Bas climbing turn and then onto your vctor and go through um and this this climb would take you all a 15 15 minutes something like that now we would be it was dark we were um no navigation lights 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 going to happen now uh I can't remember I don't think they did more than one pass each right I think they were then they were then then called off um did they sound excited or oh yes or yeah yeah they were they were speaking very tensely well partly because you're on a collision course tell you can't see in front of you and what they hadn't figured was that the thing was stationary you it would be most unusual to have an aircraft well it could have

33:41 an aircraft it was stationary right and therefore there were two things that that were distinct uh one is the rate of of approach now the rate of approach normally is exceedingly fast if you are on collision courses opposite direction so you can tell reasonably clearly uh you would normally um expect therefore the aircraft in front of you to be moving in you know various directions and you would try to harmonize your speed with the speed of the aircraft yeah you see so one of the things which uh is exceedingly difficult particular for the Navigator is trying to Define what the speed is so he can get the the pilot to reduce speed sufficient to 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 um uh methods of doing that one of which is to slap on your air brakes which is like

34:42 stopping you dead dead in the air right but you've got to be very careful where you do that because if you ever shoot you stop then in front of the one you were trying to skatch 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 um and frankly when you're looking to be spected on to um a Russian bom of like 600 knots the last thing you're expecting is s is going to be stationary almost on the deck so I suspect there was a mental process involved here that that hadn't quite clicked into place so it would have been obvious to you wiening that this wasn't your ordinary yes interception something odd was going on yes yes and I I seem to remember this is the bit where I may made this up but I seem to remember the pilot saying the second pilot saying he is right behind us right that's a crucial that's that's what I what I have in mind because that's the thing that sent the Shivers up her back because you

35:44 know one thing is one thing to be attacking somebody else but if they're right behind you attacking you you really begin to wonder in order to say that because they didn't have any rear R radar that was looking behind they must have just assumed that because they must have assumed disae that's exactly right yes so someone over listening to that on the radio on the ground would may have jumped to the conclusion that perhaps it circled around the back rather than the over sh exactly yeah yes yes I mean it would be the natural reaction to very tense who knows there was something there Navigator 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 though so that's that's the bit that really fixed our mind and then we started saying what could this be what is this likely to be uh is this a UFO is this a something and it was in our crew room that we would be discussing so that would be the first time that UFO yeah we never knew any yeah anywhere else yeah and uh you know that went on until such time as the

36:45 crews returned which was quite soon after these incidents they didn't hang about they were Vector straight back to base they landed they came out came into the crew room tremendous amount of bantering Jes you know Happ to you seen any little green man and all all the usual you know jokes but the serious content was was something that actually happened and all of us were thoughtful about um 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 a major incident we had not at that time been aware that the Americans have been involved uh to us it was something that happened on a particular night tomorrow was another day and we were going to get on do the various things so that's really why our import is is somewhat Limited in terms of the the overall scene I mean yeah I mean that that really brings it home in what he said at the end there gram about how the fact that they were all operating in their

37:46 own little Bubbles 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 uh the the the radar people knew part of that their part of the story and then the pilots knew their bits of the story and because over the years um some of them have died um a lot of the records the written records have been destroyed or dispersed it's been like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and I I spent literally it must have been like 15 years working on this story from about 1995 to about uh 2010 tracking people down and they were literally in the last few years of the some of them but I do think it's an incredible story and just just to read Gordon Feer who wrote this up for the Colorado um university the the the the condom study he was a radar expert and he concluded what the line in the study says the Apparently rational intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a

38:48 mechanical device of Unknown Origin as the most probable explanation for this sighting now when people think of con the condom study they tend to think this is a complete debunking exercise and you know we don't even need to think about it but he does actually say that and that is the one UK Incident That's that that's in that American study and clearly something must have gone on because I I've got to say I have I in all the work that I've done in the archives they have literally gone through and removed and destroyed every single trace um 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 UF oesk at that time um to spell out the incidents from 1956 and they make a mention of there was this incident at Laken Heath where an object was seen on radar at a high altitude they sent an aircraft to investigate but

39:48 nothing was seen by the aircraft which I suppose is true but it's the actual Bare Bones of what happened 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 bent Waters and that if I bring up a map and we can kind of get an idea of the kind of area of of the UK it's a bit blurry but I'm sure we can 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 and then up to the right we've got knas head near the coast and then down in the right corner we got bent water so this is the kind of the East angle area really isn't it of the UK yeah so bentwaters and nips which is where people will be familiar with the renam bentwaters Wood Bridge down in the southwest corner of East Anglia so niy said where Freddy Wimbledon was um is right up on the coast on the flattest part of the coast which is why the radar station's there and there's there's an

40:48 actual radar Museum there now if you if you go there it's actually you can actually go in the radar room as as it was in the 1950s so you can sort of imagine yourself um as Freddy Wimbledon would have seen it at the time yeah that's pretty interesting but it just gives a good impression as to piec in the like you said the puzzles you know and the bases and stuff ah Mr Graham randell's in the chat Lake and Heath and milden Hall are pretty close to each other bent Waters and wood bridges circuits overlap IR RC I'm not sure what that means I'm sure they explain yeah good to see you grae anyway um 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 Blue Book files on it just to show people that it was taken you know kind of seriously so this is a you know these are I I'll scroll through these are all documents drawings of the radar y

41:50 showing the path of the object and a lot of this is Dr J Allen heck as well yeah you know he was asked to give an opinion on it I think even Fred Whipple was was one of the famous astronomers at the time 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 yeah and these are a lot of these are or most of them are Air Force documents as well yeah so there you go 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 yeah it just adds weight to the story there we have another image of the radar tracks and things I mean it doesn't make a lot of sense really to me um but it's just adds to this weight of information and that so ah what about the artist Impressions should we show that now as well do you want to talk about this quite good um yeah Hillary Evans um who was very big in youology in the 1980s

42:52 and 90s he 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 um in the 1990s which had these wonderful artists Impressions and there was a a chapter on lake and Heath bentwaters where he'd got this you can see there it's sort of like a almost like a palest where he's got lots of bits from the story so he's got the um he's got the radar people peering at the screen he's got the blurry light in the sky you I think you can see a a Venom up there somewhere yeah above the light yeah yeah and it's got and sort of pointing at the sky and the hangers I just thought that really sums up the case really well yeah absolutely but the key the main the main thing about the case that makes it stand out I think is the action bit that Brady and scoffield 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 you there's no light you you you've got your pilot who's sort of

43:52 bombing along um in fact the pilot um David Brady was the pilot when um Brady was um David Chambers was the pilot and he was called David hell for 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 and and there's this thing about you know it's it's there in front of you and it's stationary and they're zooming past it and then they're getting the message from the ground it's behind you it's behind you and you can imagine that scoffield 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 I 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's limited to what 20 foot so you're ba you are basing you're it's the radar it's the the communications and

44:54 things like that that you're relying on yeah to navigate around and intercept it's not visual unless there's a light which you know some of them have said but it must be you know I'd be myself it must have been terrifying I think they were putting a bit of bravado on there to be honest um 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 what they use nowadays and and the interesting thing about it is The Radars they were using then were better for picking up UFOs than what we've got now because the the The Radars that they use for civil civil aviation now they're computerized and I mean I've been around Manchester Airport I've been around some of the big airport um Terminals 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 it we get rid of them

45:55 it's like what and it's it's like well we're not interested in things that aren't aircraft 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 we we we we um you know we we get the computer so it 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 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 raadar that we see behind us right now but also those Venom Radars sounded pretty good as well so if you've got corroborating data coming from both you know it's difficult to say that you know they're both messing up or EX l so here you've

46:58 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 you've got the ground control interception or GCI radar which is the type 80 or type 85 the one you can see behind you again different frequency seeing the same thing on radar at the same time you then send up the um the air 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 Freddy mentioned there's the height finder radar which is a separate radar because he said at the end it just zoomed off on the hyf finder yeah and they couldn't incredible speed get any readings from it yeah that's incredible and I think this was going on for hours it started at sort of about halfast 9 and they didn't fade from from the radar screens until half 3 in the morning so

47:59 they were wave after wave of aircraft going up they 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 wow yeah I think one thing that stood out for me was when the 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 2 3 4,000 miles an hour in 1956 of course they're going to be very confused and the tensions are going to rise you know at that point within the Cold War it's going to be what the hell's going on so all these things adding up is just a a fascinating fascinating UFO case so it's just such a shame that it 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 um and then there were questions in Parliament it

49:00 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 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 of they just destroyed them for purposes of hiding the case and a cover up or do you think they said they destroyed them and kept some somewhere I mean this is obviously pure speculation on your half but if anybody knows the way the mod and the archives and everything work it's you you think got 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 at the mod and you get people who are sympathetic towards this subject like like the unique popes of the world and you get people who are just utter Skeptics and

50:02 um 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 uh we don't need to worry about it so sign 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 uh let's get to some questions and and and statements for we'll start with this one here conine suggests an interest question mark well for me personally conine you know it mentioned a lot of cases that were unexplained but it certainly didn't take it any further no I mean um had Ron had wrote the conine report he must know something about this case uh because he was was based in that area he's sort of trained in East Anglia on on radar um I'm sure

51:02 he would know about it and he mentions another incident in 1996 when something was seen on RF need needy said radar again in the condone report it's one of the few specific incidents he that he refers to um so there's obviously something about East Anglia that attracts these things this whatever they are I'm GNA I'm going to bring up some we talked about before we came on live which was the the beach the lighthouse beach near oh offord Ness yeah and we always hear about nuclear things attracting UAP and if if you could just tell us a bit about that again because that are all sorts going on there from the early 1900s yeah Orford Nest is like a big long strip of shingle Beach um and it's just off the coast not far from um um bentwaters and RF Woodbridge and right from the first World War they used it to to test all kinds of nasty stuff um mustard gas I believe in the first world war and then in the Cold War um

52:05 they were us well before before the second world war before we had radar they were using the making the first radar tests there and before we discovered radar they were looking for a death rake something that they could use to actually you know burn enemy Pilots out of the sky you know like something from HG Wells and it was whilst they were mocking 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 um um and then they they they built these huge Concrete pagodas where they you where they were testing nuclear bombs basically underground all of this going on on offord Ness and then the last thing there in the 1960s or 70s the the Americans spent billions on this on this top secret Base called Cobra Mist um which has got a very evocative name and effectively it was a top secret Over the Horizon radar station um that was

53:06 built to detect um Soviet um inter intercontinental ballistic missiles at Great distance almost like you know to take over from filing Dales yeah and they spent billions on it and it was the whole island was sort of off limits no one could go there but the 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 um so they shut this whole thing down about 1972 and it never it never went into operation but that whole area and its proximity to renam Forest has led people like John burrow the the one of the key Witnesses from the rendlesham incident he's absolutely convinced that that what he saw um at RF Woodbridge um on that famous night was some kind of experiment expent this this 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 um you know he's had all

54:07 this ill health he blames it on on that not on not on sort of aliens or extraterrestrials but on some kind of experiment that went wrong maybe he's on to something there I don't know maybe we'll never know that's the thing um Benji asks we know that rendam in 1980 was related us nukes being held at bentwaters were the US nukes there as far back as 56 the answer is yes well they certainly were nukes at Laken Heath I mean Laken Heath is some distance from bentwaters but they had um some serious um nuclear ordinance in fact on a level of like what they'd used at Nagasaki uh in the second world war stored at Laken Heath and this is why when this B52 crash there in just before the UFO incident you know it it didn't come out until the 1980s thank God but you know we were very close to um having most of the east of England leveled that that night in July 1956 there we go uh Andre asks if this

55:10 is 1956 some of these are going back earlier on when I saved them yeah 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 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 as what we hear yeah there we go although although like I said I've had to reluctantly sort of accept that I I don't actually think deliberately had a policy to destroy this stuff I just think if you if you work in the Civil Service particularly the mod there's such a huge turnover of people 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

56:11 filing cabinets anymore so so effectively during the 1980s and 1990s they literally went through all the past records at the ministry of Defense 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 what 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 file what 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 it is true yeah absolutely um but that kind of leads me into a question something we spoke about very briefly on I think one of the last times you joined me as I think I asked you the question as if you believe they may still well have a kind of secret d55 equivalent office happening now and I think you said you you kind of think they might do could you expand on

57:12 do do you think you know where that might sit or anything like that yes well di 55 who were basically the intelligence Branch who were investigated UFOs from about 1960s because when the air min became part of the mod um the old sort of structure that existed at the time of the Laken Heath sighting which was basically the old RAF stroke air Ministry intelligence who looked into these things they passed their responsibility on to d55 I think about 1967 and d55 um retain that interest and they retained access to the files up to about 2000 which was when Ron had completed that conine study and effectively that study drew a line under their supposed interest in the subject now it's a bit like um you know that there was that fly sourer working party study in 1950 that basically said we don't need to worry about this forget about it yeah um and then Winston

58:14 Churchill in 1952 after the top Cliff sighting said you know what's going on and they had to then reinstate the the UFO desk and I think something like that will be in existence it just they won't use the word UFO they might not even use the word UAP sorry ACC UAP yeah I bet they don't I think they'll they'll have invented something else to describe it as and they'll probably because Ron hadu was a contractor he was 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 to do it and that means that if some if you ask for information under Freedom of Information they can say no we haven't got any information which is true because it's 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

59:15 the NHS but anybody that the NHS employs privately is outside Freedom of Information so I my I suspect whoever's taken over from d55 will be private defense contractors there'll be base somewhere like farra there's a base in Bristol where I suspect this is going on um or near Bristol and I think that they will be um keeping a very low profile they'll be just interviewing um people such as Pilots radar Personnel people who've seen things who are who are military basically they're not interested in civilian sightings anymore and that does kind of fit in with what's happening in the US a lot as well it does um here we go how relevant if any do you see the 1956 incident with the 1980 So In the comparison of how did you weigh them up um well I think if we had actually had some of the some of the materials um because back then when they did the radar tracking they actually had like tracing paper on the radar screens

1:00:17 and they used to mark it with pencils so you could actually see where the object moved and I know that Freddy kept a really detailed record he had like a big thick log book where he he he would have entered every single thing that happened during the night what time he scrambled what altitude the aircraft was and he had all that and he said that when this group captain from fighter command came they took it they removed the log book so somebody had all that stuff and I think if we had access to it it would be far more evidential than the rendlesham incident because you could add it all together you could give it um somebody with you know who could put it all together with what the pilot said and it would be highly evidential and obviously someone did that um at the air Ministry at the time and reach whatever conclusions they reached so I I I've always thought it's far more uh important and evidential than Rendon because the the radar aspect of it is has got the Primacy whereas the radar aspect for rendam I always thought was pretty weak actually right yeah fair

1:01:22 um uh gram 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 do 55 I guess you kind of covered this but anything to add well the some of the files from the 1950s have survived I've got copi of copies of them there are some quite interesting ones um there was some um 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 West fra RF westro in Scotland in April 1957 where three different radar set um stations on a an RAF bombing range switched on at a certain time on a morning I think it was early in a spring morning and all of them at the same time saw this enormous object over the over the Irish sea like a huge object as big as a battleship with lots of other objects circling around it and um the d55 report well

1:02:24 sorry not d55 it's their predecessors yeah it was air intelligence I think they were called okay DDI Tech their report on that West FL INF has survived it's in it did survive at the National Archives I I can 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 uh it wasn't seen visually but 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 meterological phenomena and the reason that that file wasn't destroyed and it survived was because the one of the radar operators talked to one of the Sunday tabloids about the story so it was front page headlines and then there were questions asked in Parliament and amazingly at the jic which is the joint intelligence Committee in London which is like the absolute top intelligence um

1:03:26 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 Laken 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 yeah absolutely uh oh Mr strafe Wilson good to see you strafe uh does d Dave have any comments on the current state of the UFO UAP topic are we gaining yeah 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 damp squib I thought there were some um quite interesting things in it I think the idea that they had for doing like a realtime 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

1:04:26 that rather than they were basically saying we're not going to get anywhere looking at historical cases sadly like Lake and Heath because they happened so long ago however evidential we might think they are as ethologists 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 this additional funding is to actually you know have realtime Radars monitoring parts of the world worth some of these um strange uaps have been seen have aircraft ready to scramble a bit like what we've just heard at lak and Heath yeah but when something happens H 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 and that's what they should be looking for and sadly we have had this

1:05:27 in instances like Lake and Heath bent Waters in the past but sadly they haven't kept the evidence or they haven't shared it 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've 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 yeah oh we've got a question here I didn't notice the zal has joined us uh do you think details on big cases like Roswell could be lost due to poor record keeping straight answer to that is definitely yes and I think sadly we've got to recognize that um 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 th that mindset has has just has their influence and they've got a lot of influence they've

1:06:28 destroyed a lot of this material I mean I should mention here I mean you know about this Vinnie but um a colleague of mine um Matthew illey um recently um put in a Freedom of Information Act request um to try and find out what's happened to the unredacted version of the conine report which as you know was only finished in 2000 and the one that was released there's bits of it that were top secret and I was told that this file it would be preserved it would be released at the National Archives well Matthew um 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 um we think it's been accidentally destroyed this is the condone report that's ridiculous I mean is that stupidity or negligence I mean well again I I just I just think they they

1:07:28 just they don't value it they don't value the subject they don't um they don't think it's important they they just they just think they just regard the likes of us as nuisance as a nuisance basically so anyway um this has got me on there 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 yeah absolutely Dan says great answer David thank you we shall meet soon when I visit Vinnie absolutely man if you're not aware that's Dan who I went to Columbia with and yes I GA all that yeah yeah excellent well listen David let's leave it at that we'll arrange to come back and talk about the the top Cliff case um if you don't mind hanging about we'll have a little chat after this uh 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

1:08:29 people to see like I said to everybody who is watching now or in the future or listening 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 it you know and I just can't recommend it enough so yeah go ahead and check it out um yeah I think that's it guys I'm going to be back tomorrow night I'm I'm not having a day off this week back tomorrow night with Christina 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 bye