Ross Coulthart investigates the UK's UFO files: Nick Pope on the Cosford incident (7NEWS Australia)

0:00 Or about 150, 200 yards from right ventricle, no doubt about it. And we're seeing strange like that guy in the morning. We just read the newspaper and that has come this way, the his right to sign off revenue got about it It's it's weird and we don't know so we're standing there and all and all of a sudden a beam came down right to the side of us and I'm thinking, is this a warning? Is this communication? Is this what is this? You know, what do we do now? There was something which he and his navigator saw and his voice is quite shaky, so they don't know what it was. But on radar, it was climbing like the clappers. And these witnesses saw something real and solid. These are military witnesses. And and these people, when they make a report like this and say this is highly unusual, you can take that to the bank

1:11 inside the British Ministry of Defense. Nick Pope was cleared to read Britain's most closely held state secrets as he was to discover the ministry was sitting on its very own. X Files in the early nineties. This former deputy director of the Mod was pulled aside to investigate the threat to British national security posed by UFOs. When you were asked to do it, did they sort of come up with a bit of a wry smile and say, I've got something for you? boy, I was effectively headhunted into that job. I was broadly skeptical. I certainly went in there having no expectation of finding little green men. What Nick Pope found in those secret files was intriguing, but one incident left him questioning for the first time whether the truth really is out there. The turning point was the Cosford incident.

2:13 It was this point midway through my tour of duty where I came in one morning and the phones were ringing off the hook. And gradually throughout the day, I put together this story of this amazing series of sightings that occurred over a period of 6 hours on the night of 30th of March 1993. Across southern England, reports flooded in of strange lights moving in a northeasterly course. They formed the outline of a massive black triangle. The most dramatic sighting that night was here around the Royal Air Force's Shawbury base in Shropshire. Multiple witnesses independently reported seeing not just lights, but a clearly structured black triangular craft which moved slowly overhead and then accelerated off to the horizon at impossible speeds. Now, the effect of this sighting is clearly recorded

3:13 in the newly released Ministry of Defense files. But even more interesting, the investigators from the Defense Department were unable to explain that mystery. Even to this day. Of all the accounts, the most compelling was filed by the on duty metrological officer at a nearby base. He saw it initially move slowly towards the base and he said it's very slow speed, maybe 30 or 40 miles an hour. And then he heard this this low frequency humming sound, which he said was quite unpleasant, rather like standing in front of a bass speaker. He said he could feel the sound as well as hear it. He saw this narrow beam of light firing down from the craft and from this very slow speed. The UFO accelerated away to the horizon in seconds, and he described this to me as many times faster than a military jet aircraft. And this is a credible military witness. This is an Air Force officer with eight years service.

4:16 And you it absolutely just there it was moving to turn a northern direction in the direction of o f shortly. It was moving very, very slowly. The white light at the front. It was very erratic emitting, you know, emitting the light. And it was as if it was searching for something very, very slowly. And I stood there for at least two or 3 minutes and watched it just move so slowly. And then all of a sudden, you know, it just it just went off, just shot off, gone, poof. This is the first time Darren Perks has publicly spoken about what he saw that night in 1993. He was an Air Force cadet. His description matches exactly the one given by the RAAF met Officer Craft. It was defined against the sky. The sky was clear, the stars were right. This blocked out. The stars. It was. It was black, solid triangular noise.

5:18 Myself nor my superiors at the MoD have any conventional explanation for what was seen. To this day, it's completely unexplained. The British Ministry of Defense Investigators even approached their American counterparts here in Washington, DC to ask them whether the US was doing any secret test flights in British airspace. That might explain the spate of weird UFO sightings. The answer they got back from the Americans was even more intriguing. They gave us absolutely cast iron assurances that there was no such craft. Let's say it was of extraterrestrial origin. Why would E.T. fly billions of light years across the galaxy and park itself over a rest base in England? Speculatively speaking, if these things were were alien, I guess their motives, it seems to me, would would be scientific study.

6:20 But but crucially, you concede it's a possibility that it was alien. It's a forgive the politicians answer. I can't rule it out. But I guess in strictly logical terms, of course I can't convinced now that there was something to the sightings. Nick Pope launched a cold case review of UFO activity over Britain dating back decades. And what he found was a surprising number of cases where the ministry had no rational explanation. Ocean for what had been seen in this document here is pretty impressive. This is the assistant chief of the air staff being briefed on a UFO incident where an object was assessed as operating over the UK. Completely unknown.

7:23 This was something which we had never seen before. We couldn't explain. Alan Turner is long retired, but in 1971 he was wing commander in charge of an Air Force radar unit that went on high alert after multiple objects moving at impossible speeds and heights were trapped on his screens. Turner ordered a bomber pilot to try to intercept. He admitted that there was something which he and his navigator saw, and his voice is quite shaky. So they don't know what it was. But on radar it was climbing like the clappers. We didn't see anything visually, but it was definitely on our radar. Would you have spoken out about what you saw that night while you were with the RAAF? No. Why not? Professional integrity. I was told not to talk about it. Colonel Charles Halt was also worried that revealing what he saw would kill his career.

8:24 It certainly wasn't career enhancing. How am I ever going to explain this? Nobody will believe this. It was 1980 and Halt was the US deputy base commander at the Bent Waters RAF Base in England. He was a senior officer, almost certainly controlling nuclear weapons, one rank shy of general with 20 years experience in the Air Force. The on duty flight Lieutenant. Security Police Squadron came in white as a sheath, and he said it's back. What's back? He said The UFO is back. He said he saw something out in the forest. We can't explain. The night before, two of Halt's men had reported seeing. And one of them said he'd even touched a UFO with strange markings on the side. This time, Halt decided to see for himself. He gathered a large number of soldiers and headed into Rendlesham Forest. They had radios, lights and military Geiger counters. Took those things along just to disprove all of this stuff.

9:27 I looked up and looked through the forest toward the coast and saw a glowing object. I can best describe it as looking something like an eye with a black center. It's moving like this through the trees, going up and down, avoiding the trees. You use the word there, avoiding the trees. You're under the clear impression that this object was intelligently moving. Definitely is under some type of intelligent control. Halt also took a small tape recorder to the station by way of a friendly and again, quite sure to head off a fresh face. Here it is. I see it to prove it. We all know she had a chainsaw on the screen right away. Where else is coming this way? Crucially, this is an incident that's witnessed by maybe a dozen people, probably a total of 30 or 40 people, five of the people involved on the first night actually made formal statements, witness statements.

10:31 Now, that would be a disciplinary offense if there was anything false in that. Halt submitted his investigation to his superiors with its explosive conclusion that an unknown craft had been seen by dozens of military personnel near one of America's most sensitive foreign bases. His report was buried. Do you believe that the US government or somebody in the US government knows more than they're letting on? I suspect there's more than one agency that knows a lot more than what they're letting on. I've met Charles Halt and I. As far as I'm concerned, he's a very sincere and genuine, an honest man, just because he feels that he is certain about what he saw. Doesn't mean that there isn't any room for memory distortion or perceptual errors that were made at the time. Professor Chris French is professor of psychology at the University of London and an arch UFO skeptic. How do you explain eyewitness testimony from credible witnesses?

11:34 Well, no matter how convincing the account and how convinced witnesses are, he says the mind plays tricks. And the most powerful trick of all is that there is an overwhelming human desire to believe we are not alone. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I'd love to believe the idea that there is alien life out there, that we might make contact with it, that we might learn from it is an incredibly exciting idea. I looked up and saw this thing in the sky. People very often will be influenced by what they think they might be seeing, and we have this very natural tendency to kind of fill in the gaps, both perceptually and in terms of memory. There's no doubt in your mind it's very real. It is real. I know what I saw. I know what we saw from where you've been sitting inside the Defense Department. You haven't seen any evidence of a massive conspiracy. They're saying what they're saying because they just don't know. There is no spaceship in a hangar or anywhere in the United Kingdom.

12:36 There's not some great smoking gun that's going to blow this. This whole secret wide open. No, the bottom line is we don't have a clue what these things are. Take the Cosford incident. There is some evidence to suggest that an unidentified object or object was operating over the United Kingdom. That's about as close as the Mod will ever get to. Saying, Yeah, these things are real.