By: Duncan Lunan

Duncan Lunan — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 13:05:18 +0000

There was a not dissimilar episode with a Gloster Meteor and UFOs in October 1952, on a training flight over Gloucestershire. At 14,000 feet the instructor, Michael Swiney (later an Air Commodore), drew the attention of the trainee, David Crofts (later a Lieutenant-Commander RN), to three silvery discs ahead of them. Although they had a lens-shape, so that their appearance altered with changes in perspective, they were otherwise featureless, with no detail like the windowed flight deck, tail-fins and jets of the Shining Ones’ saucer. The sighting was apparently confirmed by radar, but as with so many UFO encounters – unlike Hawke’s – nothing of consequence ensued. (‘Timewatch: Britain’s UFO Files’, BBC-2, 8th January 2005.) In the second edition of his autobiography “Wings on my Sleeve” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), the late Capt. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown describes being sent up in a Vampire in February 1956 to try to intercept one over the Bristol Channel, but it was too high for him, well over 40,000 feet. In his interview at the launch of my book “The Elements of Time” in September this year, Sydney Jordan said the events at the beginning of Jeff Hawke were inspired by the death of Capt. Thomas Mantell, who died in January 1948 while chasing a UFO ‘metallic and tremendous in size’ in an F-51. The most likely explanation is that Mantell was actually chasing a Mogul spy balloon (still classified at the time) and passed out due to lack of oxygen, possibly realising his danger and throwing his aircraft into a dive from which he failed to recover in time.

Comments on: Close encounters of the third kind

By: Duncan Lunan