It was the early hours of the morning in the late 70’s when John Gadd saw a “flying saucer”. Gadd, who lives on the Isle of White, had been renovating the master bedroom of his house at the time. As a result, the curtains had been taken down, leaving open the large bay window looking out onto the park beyond his house.
It was 5am in October of 1978 when he was awoken by his cat scratching at the bedroom door. What he saw that night would ignite a lifetime interest in UFOs and the perceived culture of secrecy that surrounds them.
The search for extraterrestrial life has long been an obsession for scientists across the world. The millions of documented UFO sightings, most of which have been disproven, have only added fuel to the fire. In a conversation with astrophysics professor Dr. Timothy Davis from Cardiff University, he noted that “we’d only need to find evidence of one more type of life out there in the universe for it to be a mathematical certainty that life has evolved out there in space.”
The past decade has brought the revelations that both the UK and US government had off book programs investigating UFO sightings and that some of the evidence they collected has yet to be disclosed. What questions have we answered and what remains a mystery?
Unfortunately for most UFO enthusiasts around the world, many of the flying objects sighted are very much identifiable. They are regularly debunked and refuted as being military aircraft, experimental craft or, in the more boring cases, weather balloons. In 2008, the Ministry of Defence (the UK’s department for implementing defence policy) declassified hundreds of documents relating to the investigation of UFO sightings. From 1991 to 1994, the so-called ‘UFO desk’ was run by Nick Pope.
Pope, who is now a prominent UFO speaker, investigator and journalist, ran investigations into multiple sightings all over the world and, while most were identifiable, some investigations remained unsolved. “My best assessment of the approximate breakdown is that 80% of sightings in our files were explained as misidentifications,” began Pope, “15% had insufficient data to make a reasonable assessment, and 5% remained unexplained.” So what about that 5%?
Everyone has heard of Roswell. The much debated sighting that occurred in 1947 has been continually debunked and refuted with much of the reported evidence being explained and many eyewitness accounts being disproved. To this day, the official line on Roswell is that a US intelligence balloon monitoring Russian nuclear activity crashed in the desert near Roswell with many mistaking the mess of wooden sticks and paper for a UFO. Despite the popularity of the Roswell crash within popular culture, the evidence has always remained thin and, dare I say it, explainable. The Rendlesham Forest incident, however, is one of the most fascinating unsolved UFO sightings in history.
During the early hours of Boxing Day 1980, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, two US Air Force members, were sent out to investigate a suspected civilian aircraft. As the story goes, when Burroughs and Penniston arrived at the supposed crash site in Rendlesham Forest, they were surprised to discover that the vehicle was not a civilian aircraft.
Penniston was able to get close enough to touch the the unknown craft and to see strange hieroglyphics on the underside of the vehicle. The Rendlesham Forest incident remains one of Nick Pope’s unexplained 5%. The infamous incident and the evidence that surrounded it propted Pope to start his own investigation during his time on the UFO desk. His inquiry resulted in a report detailing the events as they unfolded and the subsequent investigation by both the US and UK.
“There were several dozen military witnesses, the most senior of whom was the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt.”
Pope’s report details; “A subsequent analysis of the landing site showed indentations in the ground forming the shape of a triangle, scorch marks on the sides of the trees, and radiation levels which scientific staff at the UK’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) assessed as being “significantly higher than the average background”.” The UFO had been very briefly tracked on Radar, Pope’s report explains, and according to eye witness reports, it returned two nights later and “fired light beams at the Deputy Base Commander and a small team of men who had gone to investigate.” Pope’s report also notes that “It later fired light beams at a particularly sensitive area of the Woodbridge base.”
Pope’s report revealed much about the relationship between the US and UK in their investigation of the Rendlesham incident. The report says: “Investigations by the UK were inconclusive. I do not know the results of the US investigations, because as MoD documents released under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act show, some evidence was removed by the US authorities without their informing the UK Government.” The missing evidence was taken by General Gabriel, the Commander in Chief of the US Air Force in Europe at the time, who had been visiting the sites in Bentwaters and Woodbridge and subsequently removed evidence relating to the investigations and took it back to his base of operations in Ramstein, Germany.
When asked about the missing evidence, Pope noted; “My understanding is that the material removed included documents (copies of police blotters, witness statements, etc.), radar tapes, and a copy of Colonel Halt's audio tape recording of his own investigation/encounter, along with soil samples from the landing site, and samples of tree bark and sap from trees assessed as having been affected by heat and/or radioactivity at the landing site.”
In the years since the original investigation and Pope’s reevaluation of the incident, it is unclear what became of the evidence removed by General Gabriel. Pope told me; “it's not clear what happened after he removed the material. We don’t know where it was sent, what analyses were done and what was concluded.”
In my conversation with Pope, he alluded to the AATIP or the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, which ran off the books within the Pentagon. The program sought to explain and investigate UFO sightings and collected evidence from all over the world.
The New York Times and Politico reported in December 2017 that it was was ran using $20m in supposed ‘black money’ and was headed by Luis Elizondo who, in the months since the programs identity was made public, has talked openly about his experiences, even going so far as to release footage of a UFO spotted by a US navy jet.
“My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
- Luis Elizondo to CNN
Considering the pertinence of the Rendlesham incident to the US government it has since been suggested that the AATIP may have been carrying out their own reevaluation of the investigation.
“There's been a suggestion that AATIP had a dossier of 'best evidence' from around the world, so it may be that they have this material, or at least some information relating to it,” added Pope. Rendlesham sits in the unsolved 5% of Pope’s investigations.
The suggestion that there might be a “dossier of ‘best evidence” out there could indicate that there is more to the mystery than we know. In December 2017, Elizondo told CNN that “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
The lack of communication between countries and the lack of willingness to share evidence has been a major problem in attempting to understand the unexplained 5%.
"While the UFO phenomenon is clearly a global one, my terms of reference limited me to looking at sightings within the United Kingdom Air Defence Region,” continued Pope, “On reflection, I think this was a mistake, but previous initiatives aimed at better international cooperation - e.g. under the auspices of the United Nations - have not borne fruit.”
This brings us back to John Gadd. He stood looking out at the object floating in the sky over the park behind his house filled with a mixture of “awe and fear”. The “flying saucer”, as Gadd described, was small. Small enough for him to think that its pilot must have either been of a diminutive stature or that it was merely a drone for a larger ship. Gadd woke his wife who looked out beyond the bedroom window at the object in the sky. While she doesn’t have the same interest as her husband, she does concede to having witnessed the strange object and corroborates Gadd’s sequence of events.
“It moved so slowly that it was hardly moving,” began Gadd, “and there was no sound coming from it and all of a sudden it tilted upwards to 45 degree angle so we were looking at the top.”
It was at this point that his wife noticed that the vehicle was about to leave and so Gadd asked his wife to switch on the lights in an effort to communicate. The light filled the room and immediately obscured the parkland beyond the window in darkness. By the time they had switched off the lights and their eyes had readjusted to the darkness, the vehicle had disappeared. Gadd searched the skies frantically in an effort to find the object, sure he was witnessing something not of this world. That’s when he saw it. It had begun turning back towards the house, aware of the flickering light inside the Gadd’s bedroom.
It shifted on its axis, making its way back to the airspace over the park hovering low in the sky in the darkness. “It shot up in a vertical take off and we watched it for a few minutes, a black disk in the space above us,” continued Gadd.
Since seeing the UFO over his house, Gadd became fascinated with the phenomena, collecting books and magazines and newspaper clippings related to the subject. He was invited to speak at a youth society on the island about his experience. Gadd went on to say that not everyone was so interested in his story.
“You get professional people saying that you are mistaken and trying to explain away what you saw and they’ve cooled down a bit now, sightings. I think the reason being is that a lot of them are hushed up.
“I think you’ll find, I always say to people, it’s a lot like ghosts isn’t it? People will say to me ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, you can explain them’. I always say that you only need to have one sighting be true and the whole thing stands as credible.”
Like Rendlesham and like Gadd’s encounter, not everything seen in the sky can be explained. Nick Pope’s time at the Ministry of Defense proved that not every sighting can be understood and identified. Like Dr. Davis said, we only need one more form of life to make it a mathematical certainty that there is more life out there. If only one documented sighting is true then we are not alone in the universe and that, for me, is enough to keep searching for the truth.
