Considerable interest has been expressed world-wide following news about the British Civil Aviation Authority's year-long investigation into a close encounter. This incident was between a British Airways Boeing 737 and a UFO. It occurred in January 1995 as the plane was in-bound to Manchester Airport and passing over the Pennine Hills, itself a notorious UFO window area. . The C. A. A. concluded that the object was unexplained and - very reasonably - wanted to leave decisions about alien craft to organisations such as BUFORA.
Fair as that is, there are two points that emerge from this case that are perhaps as significant as the remarkably enlightened attitude from the investigating authorities.
Unfortunately, this particular sighting is not especially strong. It was investigated locally when it occurred last year and several factors emerged which suggested an explanation. This does not seem to have been contemplated by the C. A. A. - who only sought other aerial craft (such as hang-gliders or stealth aircraft) - presuming that their crew must have witnessed a structured object .
Bear in mind that only the two cockpit crew saw the UFO. No passengers were witness. Moreover, the captain and first officer saw the UFO heading more or less head on towards them at great speed and one admits he instinctively ducked out of the way. The maximum time they had the UFO in view was perhaps 2 - 3 seconds. UFOlogists know from experience how difficult this makes any perception of an anomalous object.
The account offered by the crew speaks of a lit craft; although there is not total consistency as to its precise form. In fact, what they really saw seems to have been a rapidly moving streak of illumination into which, past cases teach us, any shape could then be read. Anticipation was that they had seen a fellow aircraft so inevitably this was the line that their perception and evaluation took.
So - what else might this object have been? Something readily springs to mind which the C. A. A. never contemplated. A bright fireball meteor. Indeed there are many comparisons between this case and the famous Eastern Airlines encounter over Montgomery, Alabama nearly 50 years ago. That, too, was probably a fireball meteor - as Dr J Allen Hynek concluded after detailed investigation.
In the Manchester encounter there are several important clues to bear in mind. Firstly, between mid December and mid January there were several bright fireball meteors witnessed over Britain. More than usual, suggesting that the earth was passing through a debris field in space. This may perhaps have been as a result of the impact between the Shoemaker-Levy comet and Jupiter a few months earlier. The solar system was sprinkled with debris after that comet slowly broke up.
Secondly, the eyewitness accounts of shape, speed, bright illumination and head-on trajectory all match previous aerial reports on meteors.
Thirdly, there was nothing on the Manchester radar screens. Now the aircraft was at moderate height on its final descent and any object at a similar height certainly should have been detected by radar. Nobody would see it from the ground due to cloud. The aircraft was just above this ceiling.
Speculation that it was a stealth type aircraft which was radar invisible is just speculation. Whilst there have been a spate of reports in the north-west (e.g. around Morecambe in January/February l996 and Southport in early March l996) which may very well be test flights of Britain's own stealth (the HALO project being designed by British Aerospace at Warton on the Ribble estuary) it is highly improbable that any military jet would be reckless enough to cross one of the busiest air traffic routes in the country - as the approach to one of Europe's biggest airports certainly is.
So the lack of radar target is important. The one reasonable explanation for it would be that the object was too high for the aviation radar - and a meteor miles up in the atmosphere would qualify. I would surmise that the aircrew thought the object was smaller and lower, because of their understandable assumption that it was an aircraft of some sort. In fact, if it was much larger (and a burning meteor would be many tens of times larger than an aircraft) then it would be similarly higher than they estimated.
This is a common misperception made during such encounters. We saw it at work, for example, in the very well studied re-entry of space debris from the Russian military rocket Cosmos 1068 on New Years Eve 1978 . Thousands witnessed the event over Britain and almost universally stated that it was an aircraft crashing - estimating size and height as both being far less than it actually was. Being trained observers in that case, as some witnesses were, did not effect this misperception - which is a product of the way the human mind works (See my book UFO Reality, Robert Hale, l983, for a full report).
However, there is another factor to bear in mind regarding this mid-air conflict from l995. It is not unique. For some time now I have been building up a data-base of cases and it is ever growing. There at least 10 from Britain during the past decade and three of these were tracked on radar. In one case, Gatwick air traffic control scrambled another aircraft out of the way as a precaution.
There is without doubt something occurring in our skies which is disturbing. Nor is Britain on its own. I have records of similar encounters from Eastern Europe, the USA, South America and Australia during the same period. At present I am assessing what all of this data may mean, but I suspect it may tell us something interesting about the ever-changing UFO enigma.
In many respects the Manchester Airport case is the weakest of these numerous encounters and yet it has had a disproportionate amount of publicity. Speculation about 'silent Vulcans' (a name coined in l978 for sightings in the Leicestershire area - and being what I suspect were very early flights of stealth based at RAF Alconbury) could prove a little distracting here, I am afraid.
However, the good news is that the C. A. A. - hopefully like counterpart aviation bodies around the world - has woken up to the fact that there is something going on and will in future take such matters more seriously than before. If a meteor over Manchester has left us with such a legacy then it may turn out to be an IFO case that proves invaluable over time.
Jenny Randles
The full CAA report can be seen here