One of many unanswered questions in the eyewitness accounts and testimonies of military personnel encountering UAPs near their aircrafts or the warships they’re in place to protect is why none of them took any sort of aggressive action and fired upon those UFOs. This question looms even larger after the recent release of the Pentagon’s UAP report, which goes out of its way to emphasize that the government deems this unidentified but seemingly sophisticated objects risks to national security. We may finally have an answer … and it comes from a pilot who himself encountered these UAPs and claims to have first coined the name ‘Tic Tac’. His answer may shock you.

“Once I got the target of interest on my radar I took a lock and that’s when all the kinda funky things started happening. “The erratic nature of the tic-tac. The air speed was very telling to me. Then we started seeing what we call jam strobe lines. Strobe lines are vertical lines that show up on your radar that are indications that you are being jammed.”

Still image from the footage of the “tic-tac” UFO

The tic-tac UFO was jamming the radar of Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, the pilot who filmed the now famous encounter in 2004 between his F/A-18 Super Hornet and the USS Nimitz carrier group that was in exercises off the coast of southern California. For the first time since then, he revealed to Jeremy Corbell, the filmmaker responsible for making so many of these videos public, that his jet, and most likely the rest, had its radar jammed by a “target of interest.” If you haven’t figured it out by now, Corbell explains on his Twitter feed how serious this action was.

“P.S. Active Jamming a weapons system – it’s an act of war.”

Corbell promises the release of his entire interview with Underwood is “imminent.” This appears to be his first interview since he talked to New York magazine in December 2019. Until then, David Fravor, commanding officer of the Black Aces group which Underwood was part of, was the media spokesperson for the encounter. Fravor also mentioned the radar-jamming in another interview but did not refer to it as “an act of war.” That 2019 interview was where Underwood made his own big reveal.

“The term “Tic Tac,” I actually coined that. So, any time you heard the term, “It looked like a ‘Tic Tac’ out there in the sky,” I was the one that kind of coined that.”

While the look of the UAP was candy-like, it’s performance was anything but sweet to the eyes of a trained fighter pilot.

“The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets. It was just behaving in ways that aren’t physically normal. That’s what caught my eye. Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.”

At that time, Underwood said he didn’t want to call the craft anything but a tic-tac – he had no opinion on “alien beings” and “alien aircraft.” Has he changed his mind since the Pentagon report came out? That seems to be what Jeremy Corbell is implying as he teases with his pre-release of the interview, where disabling weapons is the starting point. What more will Underwood reveal? We’ll be waiting.

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For several decades—well over half a century, in fact—information has been collected about unidentified aerial phenomena.

That’s what they’re called in modern parlance, at least. Prior to the last few years, these mysteries of the skies were more commonly known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs. This had been the name given to them by Edward Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s systematic study of anomalous aerial phenomena that ran from March 1952 until December 1969. The program was the successor to a pair of previous studies, Project Sign and Project Grudge, undertaken by the USAF beginning in the late 1940s.

Project Blue Book, although it had been the longest-running government study of UFOs to date, produced limited results regarding the potential that an unrecognized form of technology existed and operated in our skies. Among its primary findings had been three main points:

• “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.”
• “There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.”
• “There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”

This might all be news to anyone who hasn’t been following the UFO/UAP subject now for more than the last few years. In fact, it might also be news to the most recent government group that has been convened to analyze the problem, which appeared to frame its analysis of the issue within a narrow period spanning only the last few years.

Recently, a widely anticipated government report on UFOs was recently delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by the Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). In it, we learned that our government has been using a formalized method of collecting reports on UAP encountered by our military since early 2019, involving a refined mechanism for the collection of data on such reports that subsequently was adopted by the USAF in late 2020. Based on this, the Navy’s UAPTF has analyzed 144 incidents that have been logged since 2004, the majority of which occurred within the last two years.

To summarize their conclusions: all but one of these incidents remain unexplained, and the technology behind them could represent both a hazard to aviators, as well as a “challenge” to United States National Security.

Despite the merit of the Task Force’s analysis of recent reports involving UAP, it leaves much to be desired. For instance, the nine-page report—which also consists of a cover page, and appendixes at the back—leaves us with a total of just six pages that are actually related to the discussion of what the UAPTF learned from studying UAP reports during its short time in operation. What’s more, of the 144 reports that were logged, there were no details provided that gave any specific information about any of these incidents… not even one.

Indeed, the UAPTF report leaves much to be desired for longtime followers of the UFO topic. Also contained within the report are a few curiosities; take, for instance, the following excerpt regarding the USAF’s involvement, and its limited participation in the analysis of the phenomenon in question:

“Although USAF data collection has been limited historically the USAF began a six-month pilot program in November 2020 to collect in the most likely areas to encounter UAP and is evaluating how to normalize future collection, reporting, and analysis across the entire Air Force.”

Obviously, the report’s authors must have meant that the USAF has played a “limited” role in the recent collection of information on this topic, which the UAP Task Force relied upon for its analysis. However, many who read this when the report appeared online were no doubt aware of the irony in the statement: the one branch of the military that actually did undertake what remains the single longest study of unidentified flying objects in American history with Project Blue Book is now considered to have participated in “data collection [that] has been limited historically”?

Of course, there are other issues the public version of the UAPTF report presents, and we must recognize that this is also considered to be nothing more than a preliminary report, as its title aptly conveys. Nonetheless, many Americans and others around the world had probably been hoping for a bit more from our government about its involvement with the study of UAP.

Perhaps with time, there will be additional analysis and even portions of the classified version of the report that will be obtained and released by diligent transparency advocates who make frequent use of the Freedom of Information Act. However, for the time being, it appears that “what you see is what you get,” and in light of that, the American public has been left wanting on the subject of UFOs, or whatever else people may choose to call them.

It certainly isn’t the first time it has happened either… indeed, some things really don’t ever change, do they?

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There are UFO reports of all shapes and sizes, spanning the globe, and these can run the range from the odd to the outright insane. In many cases the elements come together to form a case that not only includes traditionally reliable witnesses, but many of them, all seeing the same thing and leaving us to wonder what is going on. In 1960 there was just such a case, which was first brought to the public’s attention by two sober, reliable police officers, and which would later be corroborated by many others to leave it a highly intriguing account that has never been solved.

August 13, 1960, started off fairly normally in the small town of Corning, California, near another larger town called Red Bluff, and on this hot night California Highway Patrol officers Charles A. Carson and Stanley E. Scott were out at work along Hoag Road. It was a hot, lazy evening, with the two of them looking for speeding motorists, but no one was really out in the rural area, and so they were mostly just driving along lost to their thoughts. Just before midnight they noticed something in the sky that they at first took to be an airliner, but it was flying so low that they feared it was in trouble, possibly even coming in to crash. They stopped their car to get a better look, and it would soon become apparent that this was no normal aircraft. Carson would later say of what happened:

From our position outside the car the first thing we noticed was an absolute silence. Still assuming it to be an aircraft with power off we continued to watch until the object was probably within 100′ to 200′ of the ground when it suddenly reversed completely, at high speed and gained approximately 500′ altitude. There the object stopped, at this time it was clearly visible to both of us and obviously not an aircraft of any design familiar to us. It was surrounded by a glow making the round or oblong object visible. At each end, or each side of the object there were definite red lights. At times about five white lights were visible between the red lights. As we watched the object moved again and performed aerial feats that were actually unbelievable. At this time, we radioed Tehama County Sheriff’s Office requesting they contact local radar base. The Radar Base confirmed the U.F.O. – completely unidentified.

In the meantime, the two men continued to observe the object, which they described as “as large or larger than an airliner,” completely transfixed by what they were seeing. At this point they had no idea what it could be up there doing its aerial acrobatics, and even as they excitedly wondered to each other what it was things got weirder when the object began to show signs that it knew they were there, on several occasions approaching them and then moving away again, all while occasionally lighting up the ground below with a bright red light. Officer Carson would explain:

On two occasions the object came directly towards the patrol vehicle, each time it approached, the object swept the area with a huge red light. Officer Scott turned the red light on the patrol vehicle towards the object and it immediately went away from us. We observed the object use the red beam approximately 6 or 7 times, sweeping the sky and ground areas.

After this, the mysterious craft then began to slowly move off to the east, and not wanting to lose sight of it the officers followed in their car. They kept increasing their speed to keep up with it, and were now chasing it down the road, and although they lost sight of it a few times they managed to relocate it again. At one point, they were shocked to see a similar light begin approaching from the south. This second inscrutable object approached the first and they took up a tight formation, after which they stopped and hovered there for some time, sporadically shooting red beams towards the ground, before both of them sped off to the east and disappeared. The two startled officers then went back to the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office, where they found that two deputies had also seen the strange object. Carson would say of this:

We returned to the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office and met Deputy Fry and Deputy Montgomery, who had gone to Los Molinos after contacting the radar base. Both had seen the U. F. O. clearly and described to us what we saw. The night jailer also was able to see the object for a short time, each described the object and its maneuvers exactly as we saw them. We first saw the object at 2350 hours and observed it for approximately two hours and 15 minutes. Each time the object neared us we experienced radio interference.

Image by Steve Baxter

The objects were also allegedly seen by another deputy, other Highway Patrol Officers, the night jailer, several prisoners, and some residents of the area, with around a dozen people having also observed one or both of them. In one case a formation of eight mysterious lights was supposedly seen. On top of this, the deputies who had seen the original object also reported trying to follow it as it had sped off along to its rendezvous with the other. Deputy Fry would explain in a report that would be heavily redacted and later released by the Air Force of what he and four prisoners had seen:

At 12:00 Midnight this Officer and Officer Montgomery went to Los Molinas and set on a small hill to the East named or called Blueberry Hill and at approximately 12:30AM of 8-14-60 observed four objects in the Western sky, they were traveling from the south to the north in a straight line and at times they would go straight up or down, one of the objects seem [sic] to stop and hover over the Red Bluff area. After a short time, there was an object seen going from the North to the South. I went out side of the Tehama Co. Jail to check the sky as officer Montgomery radioed that he had an object in the area that had appeared to have landed twice to the east of Los Molinas, on checking out side of the Jail observed a object coming in from the west to a position of about South East of the jail, and it appeared to stop and hover for a moment in that position. I called to the four trusties a [Blacked Out], [Blacked Out], [Blacked Out] and a [Blacked Out] to come out side and observe the flying object, by the time the four men arrived the object was hovering and it looked like a large Rail Road car with two large Red Lights one on each end, the whole object was a pale yellow glow in color and white lights appeared along it in three or four places which may have been windows. The object then took off in a southerly direction and passed out of sight without any of the above four persons and this writer hearing any type of motor or sound from the Object.

This was a great relief to officers Carson and Scott, because they had not believed their own eyes, and had thought that everyone would think they were crazy. Officer Carson would say of this in a radio interview on the matter:

I am like officer Scott, I still find it rather difficult to believe even after watching. It was amazing to sit out there for two hours and fifteen minutes watching this thing, and it is even more difficult to tell someone else what you saw. It is quite an experience. That is all you could say about it. It was definitely not a balloon or optical illusion. We saw something out there. I could hardly believe what I had seen out there and I was thankful for the fact that there were other officers from different agencies that had seen the object, plus residents of the area and people traveling through because myself — I don’t think if I had seen it and no one else had seen it — I would have been pretty confused.

Image by Steve Baxter

In the meantime, the Red Bluff Air Force Station, a radar-only site at nearby Red Bluff, who had originally confirmed to deputy Fry that they had made radar contact with something strange, were now flatly denying that they had, claiming that they had seen nothing unusual. In the following week after Carson and Scott’s sighting there would be myriad other reports of something strange in the sky, some by similarly traditionally reliable witnesses, and this is what must have finally caused the Air Force to move in for their own investigation, sending in investigators from their Project Blue Book division, which was specifically tasked with dealing with UFO reports. They would immediately confirm that there had been various sightings both before and after the Conrad and Scott sighting, and investigator Duane K. Bilslend would write of this in his report:

Local inquiry succeeded in locating various residents who had witnessed the appearance of UFO previous to or on the same date the Highway Patrol Officers had reported seeing the one in question. The undersigned interviewed each of the above persons and based on a personal opinion formed through observation of credibility, responsibility and reputation, concluded that an unidentified object and/or objects of similar physical appearance, whether real or imaginary, were observed by various solid citizens of Tehama County California.

This all seems to be very promising, with a solid series of sightings made by many disparate reliable witnesses all describing the same thing, but unfortunately, the Project Blue Book investigation was under the authority of a Colonel Philip G. Evans, who was at the time was very keen to end the Air Force’s investigation into UFOs and was known for conjuring up reports that were riddled with misinformation and dishonest data and information, mis-stating, fabricating, or omitting relevant facts, as well as often offering up lengthy and scientifically questionable “rational explanations” that sounded great to skeptics but didn’t always add up and were just as pseudo-scientific as anything else. His dismissive final report on the matter would read in part:

The conclusion of ATIC is that the sightings which occurred in the Red Bluff area were due to atmospheric refraction. It is an impossible task to determine what the exact light source was for each specific incident, but the planet Mars was the most probable culprit in the instance of the highway patrolmen. The planet at the time of the sighting was just below the horizon and probably hove into view due to the refraction of its light by the atmosphere. A contributing factor to the sightings could have been the layer of smoke which hung over the area in a thin stratiform layer. This smoke came from the forest fires in the area and hung in a layer due to the stable conditions associated with the inversion. In addition to the usual results of atmospheric refraction, special optical effects known as mirages may occur when there are strong temperature contrasts in adjacent layers of air. It is quite probable that reports of all of the sightings which occurred in California during the period 12-20 August 1960 did not reach ATIC. It is, therefore, impossible to make an accurate estimate as to how many sightings actually occurred and what percentage were due to the inversion. It is possible that some were due to other causes such as “hysteria” and the “get into the act” attitude of some people. However, in view of all available evidence in this case, it is concluded that the effects associated with the inversion were responsible for the sightings which occurred in the Red Bluff, California area between 12-20 August 1960.

This is despite the fact that Mars, Aldebaran, and Betelgeuse were all below the horizon at the time of the sighting, and an analysis of the meteorological records of the area for that night by atmospheric physicist James E. MacDonald did not find any evidence that would indicate the presence of a temperature inversion. Nevertheless, this was the Air Force story and they were sticking with it. As to what he thought of these findings, Officer Carson would say:

I have been told we saw Northern lights, a weather balloon, and now refractions. I served 4 years with the Air Force, I believe I am familiar with the Northern lights, also weather balloons. Officer Scott served as a paratrooper during the Korean Conflict. Both of us are aware of the tricks light can play on the eyes during darkness. We were aware of this at the time. Our observations and estimations of speed, size, etc. came from aligning the object with fixed objects on the horizon. I agree we find it difficult to believe what we were watching, but no one will ever convince us that we were witnessing a refraction of light.

Is that what this all was, just some refraction of light or some other mundane phenomena? Is so, how could it fool so many trained witnesses and be described by many people as something wholly otherworldly? Why did the Air Force confirm a radar lock on the object, only to then go and withdraw this? Just what was going on here? It is hard to say, and the Red Bluff incident remains a rather curious and intriguing mass sighting involving a good amount of very good witnesses, and which has never been adequately explained.

June 25, 2021, might have been the day the United States government released its most significant report on unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, that the American public has seen in several decades.

By some measures, the report that arrived on this date was as significant as many had hoped that it would be. Nobody would deny that the document, produced by the U.S. Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), had been both highly anticipated, and conveys that the United States military appears to be taking the subject of UFOs more seriously than it has in decades. The information it contained would have been especially significant for anyone new to the subject, who might have been surprised—if not a little concerned—to learn that our military believes there is reasonable evidence of unidentified technologies operating in our controlled airspace.

By contrast, the contents of the report left much to be desired of long-time advocates of the existence of unidentified flying objects, who probably looked at the report as being, loosely summarized, “the same old, same old.” In other words, little that the report conveyed in its brief, nine pages (just six pages, if we exclude the cover page and appendixes) was anything new to those who are well-read on the topic of UFOs. These folks have likely been hearing about the release of documents through the Freedom of Information Act now for decades, conveying similar instances where unusual aerial objects appear to be capable of entering our controlled airspace at their leisure, and with little regard for the national security concerns of our military.

Because of this, there have no doubt already been plenty of members of our military that have taken the subject seriously in years past, whether they ever voiced their interest or not. However, the appearance of a larger scale, coordinated effort to collect information about possible aerial threats, and analyze them within government, has never been more apparent in recent memory than it is now. This, following both the release of the UAPTF report, as well as a press statement on it from the Pentagon that referenced a memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks outlining the objectives of the UAPTF as it moves forward. In addition to this, several Senators, and even NASA weighed in on the timely subject of UAP following the report’s release.

Where does all of this leave us though? Perhaps more importantly, where do we go from here, and what will the American military be doing in the years ahead as it continues to study this phenomenon?

While much of this remains to be seen, there are several things that the United States, as well as any other nation that endeavors to study the phenomenon, should consider in terms of transparency, as well as the possibility of threats that could arise from such studies. Below are just a few considerations related to the study of UAP and its implications in the years ahead.

Make at least some information about UAP available to the scientific community for analysis: 

There has long been a significant disconnect between government and science on this subject. Since the UAP issue currently appears to remain within the purview of national security, a degree of government secrecy is warranted (especially as it relates to potentially classified technologies used to obtain information on the phenomena). However, if any of these objects should prove to represent novel or breakthrough technologies (especially in the unlikely event that they have exotic origins), it will be incumbent upon our government to coordinate with the scientific community on this issue and assess whether it has implications that are broader than the isolated space of national security, with potential ramifications for both the American public and maybe the entire world.

Along with its internal system of formal reporting, the U.S. Government should provide ongoing updates to the public: 

The public version of this report, while limited, is a necessary step in the right direction toward government transparency on a timely issue. When it is possible to do so while maintaining national security protocols, future information about this area of study should be periodically conveyed to the public.

Our government should commit to the ethical use and management of technologies potentially derived from UAP: 

Whatever the source of UAP may ultimately prove to be, the potential exists they may serve as the impetus for new innovations and disruptive technologies. This may hold true whether the technology is captured by our military, studied, and replicated, or even as a result of the mere observation of the devices and their operation. Such technologies may prove beneficial, although the possibility also exists that they could even hold the potential for escalating an arms race at some point in the future.

The problem outlined above is only one among several possibilities that military studies involving UAP might lead to, whether or not it was ever intended. If a significant technological breakthrough were ever to arise from the study of UAP, it indeed might prove to be beneficial to humankind. However, all-too-often in the past when new technological innovations have been acquired by militaries, their use in weapons systems development and other potentially destructive capacities has remained a consistent problem.

Transparency will be the key. In addition to being able to be studied by the scientific establishment, government studies of UAP could benefit greatly from the oversight and moral guidance that civilian organizations might be able to provide, ranging from think tanks, to media agencies and a host of other sources of valuable feedback. For that to happen, it also requires the government to be transparent with at least some of its UAP data.

The release of the UAPTF report in late June is already a step in the right direction in that regard, but will this trend continue? Or as information on military UAP studies begins to trickle out, will we merely see a bottleneck effect, where the pace of “disclosure” (if we dare even call it that) begins to steadily slow, and finally stop?

All of this remains to be seen, but for now, if nothing else, the U.S. government’s current UAP studies have injected a much-needed renascence of interest into the debate about unidentified aerial phenomena observed by pilots and others for decades. This, as well as a new awareness of the scientific possibilities—both potentially good, and bad—that the study of them might afford us in the years ahead.

In 1948, shortly after the “Flying Saucer” craze had erupted over the Americas, a new kind of aerial apparition began to be frequently reported: the so-called “green fireballs.”

Among the most notable sightings had been one occurring over New Mexico in late 1948, reports of which were logged by the crew aboard both military and civilian aircraft operating on the night of December 5. Both groups of observers likened the object to “a huge green meteor.”

The December 5 incident had not been the first time that bright fireballs lit up the night sky over America. In February of the same year, a brilliant flash of night occurring in the night sky over Kansas had been announced as the result of a meteor by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, then director of the Institute of Meteorites at the University of New Mexico. Later that summer, reports of a huge green fireball observed over Oregon also made headlines, after a bright meteor was observed by many Oregonians on the night of June 28, which disappeared over the ocean.

However, the objects that were being seen over the southeast in December appeared to behave differently from typical meteors, a fact noted by LaPaz in a letter he sent to the U.S. Air Force on December 20. The following month, a concerning new possibility had been raised in official circles: The Director of Army Intelligence from Fourth Army Headquarters in Texas had suggested that the strange fireballs could be the “result of radiological warfare experiments by a foreign power,” and deemed this possibility to be “of such great importance, especially as they are occurring in the vicinity of sensitive installations,” that a scientific board should be established to investigate the matter.

The U.S. Air Force had already become concerned about the presence of unusual flying objects operating over America, following a rash of reports of the alleged objects in the weeks following a landmark sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold over Mount Ranier, Washington. The sightings helped initiate the formation of Project Sign, the first Air Force investigation into the possible source of the objects. In February 1949, a conference was held at Los Alamos which Project Sign investigators attended, along with several scientists and other military personnel, with the objective of assessing the fireball sightings, although the conference led to no conclusions about what their source might have been. The following December saw the establishment of Project Twinkle, which involved plans for systematic efforts to observe and photograph the mysterious green objects, although the operation never saw full implementation, and was discontinued after just two years in operation.

However, the sightings had not completely subsided, and on January 22, 1953, an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican featured the latest theories of Dr. LaPaz, which still involved the possibility that Russian technology could be to blame.

“A fireball expert said today Russia may be scouting the United States and other parts world with strange new guided missiles,” the article stated. “Dr. Lincoln LaPaz said a good many shreds of evidence point to green fireballs sighted throughout the world being a type of missile—possibly of Soviet make.”

Although the mysterious green fireballs are commonly associated with the early years of UFOs, there have been some notable incidents throughout the ensuing decades that appear to describe similar phenomena.

On the night of November 17, 1995, the crew aboard Lufthansa Flight 405 and that of British Airways 226 each observed a brightly lit, greenish object as it flew past them while flying over Long Island, New York. Several of the observers described it as resembling a green projectile, which they estimated to be flying at an altitude approximately 3000 feet above them and to their left. Following the incident, Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center compiled additional information about the incident, and also obtained a transcript of the communications between air traffic controllers and the pilots who observed it. Strangely, the transcripts revealed that the object had apparently managed to evade detection by radar at the Air Route Traffic Control Center at nearby Nashua, New Hampshire, despite being observed by multiple witnesses on the night in question.

Is it possible that the sightings of green fireballs from over the years represent nothing more than the occasional peculiar behavior of meteorites as they burn through our atmosphere? Even Dr. LaPaz seemed to think otherwise based on his assessments of the sightings from the late 1940s, although his attribution of the phenomena to prospective Russian technologies seems to fall flat—much like the modern attribution of UAP observed since 2004 to Russia or China, an unlikely conclusion that many nonetheless appear to maintain.

Although prosaic explanations may exist for the green fireballs, their source still remains undetermined, leaving them as one of the many peculiar and colorful footnotes in the broader history of the longstanding UFO mystery.

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Over the years, controversial claims have been made about a highly-classified facility located in Wiltshire, England:  the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). It is better known as Porton Down. Over the years, claims have been made about a connection between Porton Down and UFOs. Before we get to the matter of UFOs, let’s first take a look at Porton Down. Dr. Robert M. Wood’s book, Alien Viruses states: “Although work at Porton Down had originally begun in March 1916, it was not until 1940 that the installation became the central hub of British interest in biological warfare. Following the start of the Second World War, a highly secret and independent group – the Biology Department, Porton – was established by the War Cabinet, with a mandate to investigate the reality of biological warfare and to develop a means of retaliation in the event that biological warfare was utilized against the United Kingdom. By 1946, the name of the wartime group had become the Microbiological Research Department. A decade later, the biological warfare research of Porton Down’s staff had become solely defensive in nature; and in 1957 it was re-named the Microbiological Research Establishment.”

The BBC say: “Porton Down was set up in 1916. It was a center designed to test chemical and biological weapons. Nerve gases such as Sarin and CS gas were tested on volunteer servicemen. Servicemen were offered around £2 and three days leave as an incentive to take part in tests. Very few servicemen knew what they were volunteering for and some were even told it was research into the cure for the common cold. In 1953 it is alleged that serviceman Ronald Maddison died after taking part in a Sarin gas experiment. In 1962, one of Porton Down’s own scientists, Geoffrey Bacon died of the plague. Since the end of WWII, 20,000 people have taken part in experiments at Porton Down.”

Now, let’s get to the UFO angle of Porton Down. It was in January 2001 that the then-retired – and now late – British Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Hill-Norton, decided to get into the Rendlesham Forest controversy – without doubt the most famous “UFO” event in the U.K. Having had an interest in UFOs for decades, he used his considerable clout to try and figure out what occurred in 1980. It was hardly an easy task for Hill-Norton to achieve. Of specific interest to Hill-Norton were the claims of a Rendlesham  connection to the activities of the Porton Down staff. He wanted to know “whether personnel from Porton Down visited Rendlesham Forest or the area surrounding RAF Watton in December 1980 or January 1981; and whether they are aware of any tests carried out in either of those two areas aimed at assessing any nuclear, biological or chemical hazard.” As time progressed, more and more data surfaced and suggested that the “UFO landing” was really a sophisticated hologram-driven experiment designed to determine the extent to which the military personnel in the forest could have their minds meddled. “Mind-control, in other words.

Berwyn Mountains

Of course, most people in Ufology don’t want to hear one of their most famous cases destroyed. Too bad. Now, let’s jump back to 1974. Andy Roberts states in his book UFO Down!: “In 1958 Gavin Gibbons wrote a children’s science-fiction novel By Space Ship to the Moon,which featured a UFO landing on Moel Sych in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales. Sixteen years later, in a surreal case of life imitating art, those very same mountains would again be the focus for a story involving a downed UFO. But this time, some said, the story was for real.” Indeed, there have been claims for years of a crashed UFO on the mountains. Not only that, in 1996 an anonymous soldier came forward, claiming to know that the remains of dead aliens were held at Porton Down. Of course, this has not been confirmed. But, we do have the fascinating story of a man named Robert Bolton.”

I first interviewed Bolton by phone, and then met him in person, in Norwich, England, in 2000. He told me: “I spent thirty years in the Royal Air Force as an aircraft engineer. I had various postings, including at Akrotiri in Cyprus, RAF Honnington, and at RAF Valley in North Wales from 1971 to 1974. My wife and her family came from Corwen. At the time that the thing on the Berwyns happened, they lived up on the side of the mountain and her mom still lives there to this day. Corwen is part of the Berwyn range. From where their house is, if you walk up the path that goes behind the houses up and onto the top of the mountains, you’re talking perhaps a mile and a quarter away from where it all occurred; so it’s not very far away at all.

“She still remembers what happened on the night of 23 January. She said to me when I spoke to her about it just recently: ‘I saw aircraft and heard aircraft shot down during the Blitz and it was like an aircraft coming down, but the sound was louder, bigger, heavier that anything you could imagine to do with an aircraft.’ They didn’t know what it was. They heard the noise first of all and ran out into the road. They weren’t the only ones: all their neighbors ran out as well. It got louder and louder and louder and they couldn’t see anything in the sky but then they felt the impact where the houses shook and she had things fall off the mantle-piece in the house.

“It was my wife’s dad, who told me the story about bodies being found on the mountain. His name was Harold Smith. But everyone called him Mick. He had a full-time job with Vauxhall at Elsmere Port; he was a local councilor and was also a part-time Sub-Fire Officer at Corwen. One day we got talking and got on to the subject of UFOs and he said to me: ‘Oh, well, you obviously don’t know about the incident up on the Berwyn Mountains.’ “I first heard the story from him around 1976. At that time he only told me that bodies had been brought down from the mountain and didn’t say anything more. Nothing about who brought them down or where they were taken. But from 1979 to 1982 I was posted to Germany and Mick and my wife’s mother came out to stay for a month and it was here that he told us a lot more.

“I remember that the information that he told us had apparently come from another person in the North Wales Fire Service whose son was in the Army. But it’s not surprising that he would have been told: Mick was a well-respected man and knew people throughout the North Wales Fire Service including at Bala and Wrexham. Mick told me that while the police weren’t involved, the Army was – heavily. I can’t give you an exact date when they visited and he told us this, but it was definitely between 1979 and 1982. He said that there were definitely [trucks] from Porton Down at the scene; that there was a lozenge-shaped object on the mountainside; and that bodies were taken off the mountain and driven to Porton. And to this day, his wife can also confirm that Mick told her the story about Porton Down and bodies too – either in the late 1970s or the early 1980s [italics mine].”

Robert signed off: “I do remember Mick saying that when he had first told me this story in 1976, he didn’t know that it was the Army who had taken the bodies off the mountain and he didn’t know at the time that they’d been taken to Porton Down. So he must have learned that between 1976 and when he came to see us in Germany.” Dead aliens at Porton Down? A Rendlesham Forest connection to Porton Down? All we have right now are rumors. Maybe, things are destined to stay like that. On the other hand, though, just perhaps something incredible might one day surface.

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It is hard to get a lock on the true beginning of the UFO craze in the United States, but there are some old standbys. The Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947 often crops up, as of course does the supposed UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico that same year. These are the cases that launched the UFO phenomena into the mainstream consciousness And started the whole “flying saucer” fad, but there have been sightings and incidents going back well beyond these commonly held milestones. Indeed, the earlier UFO reports from America predate Arnold or Roswell by quite a good margin, and have served to carve out their own bizarre corner of the UFO landscape.

In 1628, the English Puritan settlers of the New World established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was the second major settlement in New England following the Plymouth Colony. A very important figure at the time was a lawyer named John Winthrop, who was in charge of a huge wave of settlers coming to America, and he would serve as the governor of the colony for 12 years starting from 1629. Winthrop would also be the founder of various other communities along Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River, and was also known as an authoritarian and religiously conservative leader, known to be against pure democracy, once calling it “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” Despite this, he was still a well-respected leader and politician who has made his mark upon the early history of the United States, with some of his writings serving to influence politicians to this day, but a lesser-known aspect of the man is that he also wrote some pretty weird stuff in his journals, including what is thought to be among the very first UFO accounts in the New World.

John Winthrop

Tucked away between the pages of various mundane accounts of colonial life is a very curious entry dated March 1, 1639, in which Winthrop writes of a very bizarre and outlandish  incident involving a man named James Everell, who he describes as a “discreet, sober man.” According to Winthrop, Everell had been rowing with two other men up a section of the Muddy River, about two miles from the village of Charlestown, when they saw a “great light in the sky,” which seemed to dart about back and forth.

When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours ran as swift as an arrow, darting back and forth between them and the village of Charlestown, about two miles away. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Diverse other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.

The men claimed that after the sighting they had inexplicably found themselves transported about one mile upstream, with no idea or memory of how they had gotten there, nor any sense of the time that had passed. This is an odd detail, as it would mark this incident as not only the first report of a UFO in America, but also the first account of missing time and possibly even the first of alien abduction. One of the explanations at the time was that the men had merely seen illumination from a light phenomenon springing from swamp gas, called ignis fatuus, caused by the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. Others thought it was just a misidentified meteorite, and one skeptic was a man named James Savage, who added his own footnote to the sighting in a published version of Winthrop’s journal in 1839, saying:

This account of an ignis fatuus [pale light over marshy ground] may easily be believed on testimony less respectable than that which was adduced. Some operation of the devil, or other power beyond the customary agents of nature, was probably imagined by the relaters and hearers of that age, and the wonder of being carried a mile against the tide became important corroboration of the imagination. Perhaps they were wafted [carry lightly], during the two- or three-hours’ astonishment, for so moderate a distance, by the wind; but, if this suggestion be rejected, we might suppose, that the eddy, flowing always, in our rivers, contrary to the tide in the channel, rather than the meteor, carried their lighter back.

In the end, neither swamp gas nor meteorites really seem to adequately explain what the men reported as written in Winthrop’s journal, and considering that it is only mentioned in one entry and happened so long ago, we will probably never know for sure. Interestingly, this isn’t even the only weird such account to be found within Winthrop’s journal. Five years later there is another entry dated January 18, 1644, which makes mention of a light rising from the water that was witnessed by several boatmen near Boston. This light was apparently “in form like a man,” and “went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away.” A few weeks after this yet another journal entry mentions another strange report from Boston Harbor, in which Winthrop writes:

A light like the moon arose about the N.E. point in Boston, and met the former at Nottles Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted diverse times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many. About the same time, a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!’; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times. It was heard by diverse godly persons. About 14 days after, the same voice in the same dreadful manner was heard by others on the other side of the town towards Nottles Island.

Winthrop would muse that the voice heard was perhaps from the ghost of a sailor who had died several moths prior to the UFO sighting when his ship had exploded when gunpowder had accidentally been ignited. Whatever the case may be, it is a pretty bizarre report, and it is hard to know what might be going on here. Once again, it only appears in one entry and is never brought up again, leaving it firmly and forever in the realm of speculation. It is all quite the strange case and series of events, and we are left to try and make sense of it all. Was any of this real, and is so what was it? Or was this just a gag thrown into an important historical figure’s journal. And if so, why? It is all certainly a bizarre historical oddity, which has definite repercussions on the UFO discussion and which many are not aware even exist at all.