Posted on 10/20/2008 3:44:51 AM PDT by Stoat
Locked on ... Sabre jet had UFO in sights
RAF controllers told US pilot Milton Torres to “lock on” and launch all 24 of his rockets over the city.
Tale ... Milton Torres as a young man, and today
But as he came within seconds of firing at the alien intruder — “the size of an aircraft carrier” on his radar — it vanished at 10,000mph.
The amazing close encounter is revealed in secret Ministry of Defence X-Files which are declassified today.
Milton said: “It was some kind of alien snooping over England. I guess we’ll never know what it was.”
The incident happened in 1957 when Milton was a 26-year-old US Air Force lieutenant based at RAF Manston in Kent.
At 11pm one night he was ordered to scramble in his F-86D Sabre fighter to attack a “bogey” hovering above Norfolk.
Speaking about it publicly for the first time, he said: “I was told I would be firing a complete salvo, all 24 rockets. I was pumped up — this was the sort of thing that happened before a war.”
He got the UFO on his radar and closed for the attack at the Sabre’s top speed of almost 700mph — then it disappeared off his screen in a flash.
Milton, now 77, said: “I was smoking, as fast as I could go. This thing had a different propulsion system. It was not an airplane.”
The flyer said he was visited afterwards by a sinister security official and warned not to tell anyone — so he kept silent until now.
The close encounter is in 19 files made available online yesterday by the National Archives.
Thanks.
Ping.
UFO ping
The “tin foil hat” crowd must not be awake yet.
Sorry this is off-topic, but is the cockpit of that plane open?!
Probably saw an unknown model of Soviet ELINT bird that got lost from an odd angle...sheesh...
Weather balloon.
It certainly looks that way....not being a pilot, I don't know if that's normal or not for this sort of aircraft. Undoubtedly somebody will come along soon who can add information about that....Free Republic is teeming with experts on all manner of military and aviation subjects.
smoking?....what? ..he said: “I was smoking, as fast as I could go...”
Was it not Merry Ole England that gave us the Piltdown Man and now, more crop-circles... ? must be something in their mutton..
OK, but where are the declassified files and what do they say?
I hate the way British writers present stories - with words, but no information; and always with some stupid tag line or pun somewhere. Yeah, I’m slightly off topic - bugger me.
NCC-1701?
Cheers. I searched the archives and couldn’t find them.
I should have searched the UK Archives, not the US. :)
A hawk hunts a flock of panicked starlings. Hawks commonly follow migrating starlings and blackbirds.
Only the Brits would scramble ONE single-pilot aircraft (only one eye witness) armed with 24 ground attack missiles (Sabres could not carry 24 air-to-air anything except gun rounds) to attack something the size of an aircraft carrier ... that might be armed itself.
Despite the official nature of this ‘report’ it has BS all over it.
Yep, an ELINT bird the size of an aircraft carrier.
“Lets see here, a classified government file released from 1957, a first hand report from the fighter pilot, why do you say tinfoil?? sounds legitimate to me.”
You overlook a key point.. “the size of an aircraft carrier” on his radar “
No one saw the craft, they saw only a radar image.. It means nothing.
The pilot has the canopy slid back for some reason; odd, but not impossible: there'd be some airspeed above which the canopy had to be closed but below that, no problem. The plane is landing, incidentally (airbrakes are deployed), so there might be some problem and the pilot is cautiously making sure he can get out if it all goes pear-shaped.
Wrong model F-86, anyway: the rocket-armed one was the F-86D, which only had about 25% parts commonality with the basic F-86.
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