RAF Valley, 1956?

[ZeBedie]

Regarding this letter in the Telegraph:

SIR – I was pleased to read that Professor Stephen Hawking has expressed interest in alien life.
In 1956, during night duty at an RAF bombing range on the west coast of the Isle of Man, I was alerted by a colleague to a circular object in the sky that appeared to be rotating and changing colour while remaining in the same position.
I called our section commander, who was equally baffled by what he saw. Having ascertained that this was no star, he roused the station’s group captain, who called the station commander of RAF Valley. He, in turn, scrambled a Hunter fighter to investigate. A few minutes later the Hunter roared overhead but the pilot reported that the object was far above his maximum height.
As we watched, the object suddenly shot off and disappeared. The RAF took this sighting seriously, and a plane-load of senior officers arrived the following day to question everyone who had seen it.
Years later I was chatting to a retired pilot who told me he had been on night patrol over Cyprus when he also saw a UFO. He was told to forget it. I understand that many records of UFO sightings during the Fifties and Sixties were removed from the records office at Kew and destroyed.
George Wilkie
Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire

A friend of mine was working on the radar unit with George Wilkie and has similar memories of the UFO, but doesn't remember the Hunter flying over.
Is it likely that a Hunter would have been available for scramble from Valley, given that Valley was, I presume, a training base and the Hunter was at that time a front line fighter?

[Art Smass]

I think Valley was home to Vampires and Meteors around that time - doesn't mean there weren't any Hunters there though.

Hunters were used at Valley as trainers from the mid 60's to the late 70's I think (happy to be corrected here)

[brakedwell]

I filled in a couple of months at Valley after passing out at Swinderby in 1957. 7 FTS, which was training FAA pilots, operated Vampire FB5, 9 and T11. Half a dozen Swift F7's of the Guided Weapons Development Squadron were also based at Valley at that time.

[Shaggy Sheep Driver]

I don't think Hawking believes in flying saucers, simply that in the unimaginable vastness of the Universe it's highly unlikely there isn't 'life as we know it' somewhere else.

What we do know is there isn't such life within our own back yard outside of Earth - that is, within several million light years. So if an alien entity is capable of covering the distances between us and them, it won't be in any kind of 'space ship'.

[ZeBedie]

it won't be in any kind of 'space ship

I think they'd send UAVs - wouldn't matter if the journey took 10000 years.

[Fareastdriver]

Our Sun is an insignificant star in an insignificant galaxy of insignificant age.
Millions of galaxies have had some considerable time in compared with our own and they in turn would have produced billions of suns that would have billions of planets in the same sort of environment as ours spread over billions of years.

Any one of them could, with natural advances in science and physics, have worked out a way of travelling faster than light itself.

We believe that is impossible, with only 5,000 years experience.

[Art Smass]

What we do know is there isn't such life within our own back yard outside of Earth - that is, within several million light years

Do we REALLY know that with any certainty:rolleyes:

[BEagle]

Shaggy Sheep Driver wrote:

What we do know is there isn't such life within our own back yard outside of Earth - that is, within several million light years. So if an alien entity is capable of covering the distances between us and them, it won't be in any kind of 'space ship'.

No one would have believed, in the first years of the twenty-first century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

At midnight on the twelfth of August, across hundreds of million miles of void, invisibly hurtling towards us, came the first of the missiles that were to arrive on Earth.

As I watched, there was another missile on its way.

And that's how it was for the next ten nights. A bright green light, drawing a green mist behind it - a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight. Ogilvy, the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. He was convinced there could be no living thing on any remote, forbidding planet.

"The chances of anything coming from Space are a million to one," he said.

Then came the night the first missile approached Earth. It was thought to be an ordinary falling star, but next day there was a huge crater in the middle of the Common, and Ogilvy came to examine what lay there: a cylinder, thirty yards across, glowing hot... and with faint sounds of movement coming from within.

Suddenly the top began moving, rotating, unscrewing, and Ogilvy feared there was a man inside, trying to escape. he rushed to the cylinder, but the intense heat stopped him before he could burn himself on the metal.

"The chances of anything coming from Space are a million to one," he said.

Next morning, a crowd gathered on the Common, hypnotized by the unscrewing of the cylinder. Two feet of shining screw projected when, suddenly, the lid fell off!

Two luminous disc-like eyes appeared above the rim. A huge, rounded bulk, larger than a bear, rose up slowly, glistening like wet leather. Its lipless mouth quivered and slavered - and snake-like tentacles writhed as the clumsy body heaved and pulsated.

Surveying the area in dismay, it cried out in despair "What is this place?"

"Doncaster", replied Ogilvy.

"Bugger it!", cried the Visitor, "All that way and we land in such a wretched dump. Can you put the lid back on and aim us back at the sky, please!"

With apologies to HG Wells, Jeff Wayne....and Richard Burton!

[Haraka]

Beags,
Wells of course wrote "Twentieth Century" (Followed by Wayne and Burton.)
That diabolically awful Americanized so called remake of a few years ago turned the wording to "Twenty-first century" ( in an American voice-over drawl), totally bastardised the plot and moved it all across to the other side of the Atlantic.
The 50's American film version was hilariously funny and obviously did not take itself seriously .

Apparently Jeff Wayne was working on a cartoon version of his musical some time back.....

[octavian]

Nice one BEagle, and it gave us "Forever Autumn" from Justin Hayward.

[Cubs2jets]

If there are other life forms (i.e. intelligent life) out there, who's to say that our perception of time and theirs is the same? Maybe a thousand light years to us is a two "day" journey for them?

C2j

[megan]

When young we tied a torch with the lens covered in red cellophane to the tail of a kite and launched it aloft at night. Gave an occulting light of no fixed rate. Papers the next day had headline report of UFO.

[BEagle]

Not quite as good as the 1967 UFO hoax created by RAE engineering apprentices who placed 6 'saucers' across southern England....

UFO fever gripped Great Britain in the late Sixties - and a handful of students perptrated a very big hoax | Daily Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363151/UFO-fever-gripped-Great-Britain-late-Sixties--handful-students-perptrated-big-hoax.html)

[pr00ne]

The chances of anything coming from MARS are a million to one, he said.

[BEagle]

Yes, I know - hence the footnote to my post.....:rolleyes:

[chevvron]

Instructor on an Air Cadet instructor's course at Leeming c 1979 was an ex Vulcan driver. He told us of an instance in the mid '50s whilst based at Moreton in Marsh (flying Meteors) where he and his mates had seen 'something' high in the sky they couldn't explain.
On reporting it they were told 'forget it, it never happened'.
As I only live a couple of miles from Knaphill/Horsell, I promise to keep an eye on the common and report anything unusual in this column.

[Warmtoast]

Thread Drift

Aliens? - In my view "probably", as according to astronomers there are ten-times more stars in the universe than the number of grains of sand in all the deserts and beaches here on earth.

Read this:
Star Survey Reaches 70 Sextillion

SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Ever wanted to wish upon a star? Well, you have 70,000 million million million to choose from.
That's the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers.
It's also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts.
The figure -- 7 followed by 22 zeros or, more accurately, 70 sextillion -- was calculated by a team of stargazers based at the Australian National University.
Speaking at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Sydney, Dr Simon Driver said the number was drawn up based on a survey of one strip of sky, rather than trying to count every individual star.

The team used two of the world's most powerful telescopes, one at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in northern New South Wales state and one in the Canary Islands, to carry out their survey.
Within the strip of sky some 10,000 galaxies were pinpointed and detailed measurements of their brightness taken to calculate how many stars they contained.

A whole lot of zeros
That number was then multiplied by the number of similar sized strips needed to cover the entire sky, Driver said, and then multiplied again out to the edge of the visible universe.
He said there were likely many million more stars in the universe but the 70 sextillion figure was the number visible within range of modern telescopes.
The actual number of stars could be infinite he said.
The universe is so big light from the other side of the universe "hasn't reached us yet," The Age newspaper quoted him as saying.
Asked if he believed the huge scale of the universe meant there was intelligent life out there somewhere, he told the paper: "Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable."

[FlightlessParrot]

Would a Hunter have been tasked with a night mission?

It would indeed be sad if the best the universe could come up with is apes with language, but I think it's unlikely we'll make contact with other life forms before we go extinct.