Britain's Roswell: a flying saucer in Suffolk

Rather like the green shoots of economic recovery or sunshine in summer, reported sightings of alien life are endless, but almost impossible to verify. And there will be plenty of knowing smirks following release of the government's UFO files. Among the thousands claiming to have received a visitation from outer space was that unusual specimen, the "sober" Glastonbury reveller. Oh, and the Belgian air force, which one rather imagines being more mythical than the Swiss navy, or indeed the UFO it supposedly tracked.

But those of us inclined to dismiss UFO enthusiasts as geeky conspiracy theorists who live with their mothers and spend too long in their darkrooms might have to take all this stuff more seriously.

Sure, the 800 cases reported to the Ministry of Defence between 1993 and 1996 in the newly released files do detail endless sightings of implausible individuals with "lemon heads" trying to abduct boys and the like; but they also show that Lord Hill-Norton, the then chief of the defence staff, wrote to the defence secretary of the time, Michael Heseltine, demanding that Britain take seriously the possible threat of alien life. How Tarzan rode to the rescue we are not told, but the high-level exchange followed a mysterious incident in 1980 when American servicemen stationed at Rendlesham in Suffolk claimed to have seen a strange metallic object hovering near an RAF base.

The incident is now being described as "Britain's Roswell", a reference to the notorious case in New Mexico in 1947. Then, an American commander initially reported the crashing of a possible UFO, apparently with mysterious debris scattered for miles around. To type "Roswell" into a search engine is to enter a fantastical world where alien body parts are apparently cold stored in secret American bases as part of endless – and contradictory – conspiracies. The story even provided inspiration for Scooby Doo. Yet amid all the paranoia and cartoon fun there are enough eyewitness accounts to make you wonder just a little bit.

It now emerges that senior American personnel gave similar credence to the British sighting. A day after the incident, a US commander supposedly found indentations near the scene in the Suffolk forest and later reported "red, sun-like light" through trees which "moved about and pulsed".

Hill-Norton became a Churchillian voice in the wilderness, warning about the alien threat. He wrote to Heseltine in 1985, describing failure to prepare as "a potential 'banana-skin'," a mandarin's mild and mercurial way to describe the potential invasion of the planet by flesh-eating monsters from outer space.

I was the reporter on the Mandrake column who, many years ago, first disclosed the late chief of the defence staff's new-found interest and I confess I ascribed it to the vivid imagination of a man approaching his senior years.

But with plausible evidence emerging from American commanders and other sources more respectable than Glastonbury revellers – however sober – it grows harder to dismiss every UFO sighting as X-Files fantasy. Well, isn't it arrogant to assume that ours is the only civilisation? How do we know what may lurk in an infinite universe, or indeed in infinite universes?

But what actually is a UFO? The newly released files highlight public and official confusion with the case of "Aurora", an American spy plane whose existence has never been admitted. In 1993 there were numerous sightings over the West Country, prompting an exchange between the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (ACAS), Sir Anthony Bagnall to the head of the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk (yes, there is such a thing). After much debate, the UFO desk was told to drop its investigation. As Hereward Pelling, a documentary maker who has investigated numerous sightings says: "A UFO is simply unidentified – there need not be anything supernatural about it."

Either way, few would have predicted this latest story, best summarised as "UFO: the comeback". After all, hadn't UFOs gone out of fashion? Hadn't digital photography shown "flying" saucers to be kitchen saucers? Hadn't we discovered enough real human threats to our security without inventing phantom superhuman menaces from galaxies far away of which we know little?

How quaint it now seems that President Ronald Reagan could have posited to the Soviets that it would actually have been a blessing if humankind discovered a threatening enemy life form, so the competing nations of earth might unite against the common enemy, the lemon-headed peril.

Certainly UFOs now seem rather retro, like very exotic classic cars. With reason. Pelling, whose documentary, Nazi UFO Conspiracy, says UFO fever reached its peak in the cold war. Back then man had not even landed on the moon, so space was unknown. One theory Pelling has investigated was that German scientists working for the Nazis created the first "flying saucer" and that these experts were taken to America after the war, where they continued to develop spaceship technology. "There is just about enough evidence for this to be plausible," ventures Pelling, who has interviewed many of the most prominent people in the UFO world. "What is true is that a high proportion of sightings are near military bases," he says.

During the war, Allied pilots reported seeing so-called "Foo Fighters", which moved at great speed and with alien agility, and which were investigated at length by Britain and America. But Pelling says the first major sighting of a UFO was by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 in America. "The craft he describes is identical to the German Second World War Horton Brothers Flying Wing prototype that was taken by the Allies in 1945 and shipped back to the US. In turn, this flying-wing design is identical to the B-2 Stealth Bomber." America was also testing a vertical take-off flying saucer with conventional propulsion methods, though with scant success.

"Perhaps," speculates Pelling "it has suited the American and British authorities to have people believe they have seen a UFO rather than so-called 'black projects', secret new kit they are trying out." Stealth Bombers do move with incredible speed and silence, so these may have confused witnesses. But such explanations don't account for the incident at the British base, where service personnel witnesses would surely recognise an aeroplane.

And the American authorities appear to have taken UFOs surprisingly seriously, since Washington was supposedly "buzzed" in 1952, with even President Truman becoming involved. Ditto Britain. Long before the intervention by the chief of the defence staff, Winston Churchill was on the case. Indeed, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he is credited with the first "official" reporting of a UFO, above Kent on October 141912.

The incident must have left an impression because in the Fifties, Churchill was involved in the delightfully titled, comic-book sounding Flying Saucer Working Party, which was, naturally, terribly hush, hush. More recently, correspondence has emerged from 1952 between the prime minister and his air minister asking for an assessment of the truth about flying saucers.

Far from being some period piece of Cold War paranoia, the surprise is that UFO sightings are actually on the rise. A councillor in Lincolnshire recently claimed to have spotted one. A dazzling light in Norfolk has just sparked huge speculation, with independent sightings as far as Suffolk. Recently we have had alleged sightings on a television broadcast, over Hatfield House and trailing an RAF Hercules. And nor is there a shortage of those willing to believe. A Briton facing extradition to America for hacking into top-secret military computers claimed he was actually trying to expose a conspiracy that Washington is covering up its knowledge of UFOs.

Sure, many "sightings" have more humdrum explanations, from meteors to the shimmering white craft that turned out to be nothing but an airship and an inevitable Virgin publicity stunt. Nick Pope, who was employed by the Ministry of Defence to look into UFO sightings, actually found that one of the biggest causes is the party craze for releasing Chinese lanterns – they float for miles, often in groups, radiate light, then suddenly disappear when the candle burns out. Pelling estimates up to 90 per cent of sightings can now be attributed to these rather soulful party emblems.

Yet as even one eminently sober gentleman from the Public Records Office conceded on the nation's airwaves yesterday, not all incidents are so easily dismissed. True, great surges in UFO "sightings" follow films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Independence Day; but just as certain atheists can be a little too categorical that god doesn't exist, perhaps we UFO sceptics should reserve final judgement. After all, if we don't dismiss them out of hand, perhaps the little green men with lemon heads might be a bit nicer to us when they really do come a calling...