ECHOES AND ANGELS: UFOS ON RADAR
Dramatic accounts of sightings by US naval personnel have placed the instrumental evidence for UFOs in the media spotlight. As DAVID CLARKE explains, radar is an imperfect tool in the armoury of military investigators – and what it detects is open to many
Dramatic accounts of sightings by US pilots have placed radar evidence for UFOs in the media spotlight. But as DAVID CLARKE explains, what radar detects is open to interpretation.
NEITHER HE NOR HIS WINGMAN COULD SEE ANYTHING ON THEIR RADARS
‘Whoa, got it – woo-hoo!’ ‘Roger---’ ‘What the [expletive] is that?’… ’Oh my gosh, dude. Wow’ ‘What is that man’ ‘There’s a whole screen of them…’They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 12 knots from west’…’Dude…look at that thing!’
Extract from radio chatter between F-18 fighter pilots involved in UFO incidents in 2013-14.
The UFO subculture has been buzzing with stories from military sources collected by a once-secret Pentagon project that investigates anomalous aerial sightings.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) has been replaced with an ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’ led by the Department of the Navy, according to a statement released by the US Department of Defense in August 2020.1 The role of UAPTF is to “detect, analyse and catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security”. This includes investigation of sightings that are “initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing [my emphasis]”. 2 Since the New York Times first revealed the existence of AATIP in December 2017, media attention has quite understandably been focused on the striking video footage captured by US Navy aircrew. But much less has been said about the radar detections that triggered military interest in the first place.
TIC-TAC
The most circumstantial story concerns the fast-moving ‘Tic-Tac’-shaped UFO reported by F-18 ‘Super Hornet’ pilots David Fravor and Jim Slaight in November 2004. They had been diverted from an exercise to investigate some unusual radar contacts detected by the cruiser USS Princeton that was part of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group exercising off the western coast of the US. One piece of footage – nicknamed FLIR after the infrared camera carried by the F-18s – is often linked to their experience but was actually filmed later the same day by a second F-18 flight led by Chad Underwood. 3 Two more short video clips (nicknamed ‘Gimbal’ and ‘GoFast’) were captured by other F-18 pilots during a separate UFO flap off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina in 2013-14 4. All three videos received official confirmation from the US Department of Defense in April 2020. But the curious lowkey statement that accompanied them simply said that “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterised as ‘unidentified’”. To paraphrase Dr J Allen Hynek, consultant to the US Air Force Project Blue Book, “unidentified to whom?”.
Cdr Fravor, leader of two F-18s involved in the 2004 incident, has said the radar operator on the USS Princeton briefed him they had been tracking anomalous radar targets for two weeks prior to his sighting. He was initially asked to investigate a target at 80,000ft (24,400m) above the Pacific that rapidly fell towards the ocean, where it remained stationary. When Fravor arrived at the ‘merge plot’ where the target should have been, neither he nor his wingman could see anything, either visually or on their airborne radars. But when he looked down, towards the ocean, he spotted a strange disturbance on the surface of the water. This was the point where he saw a whitish oval-shaped object that he compared to a Tic-Tac shape. This object accelerated away “like nothing I’ve ever seen”. The two pilots were then directed by their controller to investigate another target that had appeared 60 miles (100km) away at their own rendezvous point. By the time they arrived this had disappeared.
The accounts provided by the aircrew
sound impressive, but the devil is in the detail. Analysis of the FLIR footage by Mick West of Metabunk produced some familiar explanations. The impressive sudden departure of the object is an illusion; West found it does not actually move except when the aircraft’s own infrared camera moves. He believes the object “resembles an out-of-focus low-resolution backlit plane” filmed at distance. 5 A US Navy summary of the incident confirms that Chad Underwood, the pilot, “was clear that he couldn’t confirm that it was the same object as described by [Cdr Fravor] … he never had visual, only seeing the object via the FLIR [infrared camera].” 6 Underwood told the New York magazine Intelligencer: “It’s just what we call a UFO. I couldn’t identify it. It was flying. And it was an object. It’s as simple as that.” Mick West admits he does not know what Cdr Fravor saw, but concludes the FLIR footage does not contain any evidence of advanced technology. He feels the US Navy must have arrived at similar conclusions if this is the best evidence available to them. But if, as claimed, UFOs were constantly buzzing sensitive US Navy assets, then why have we yet to see any incontrovertible evidence from US Navy radars? Independent analysis of these would help to settle the debate about the ‘unidentified’ aerial phenomena depicted on the footage released so far.
It may be significant that both US Navy carrier groups that reported UFO flaps in 2004 and 2014-15 had only recently re-joined fleet exercises after they had undergone major upgrades of their radar systems. The USS Princeton was testing a sophisticated phased array radar system that was intended for use in exercises involving conventional aircraft. The US Navy’s report on the incident says “it never obtained an accurate track” of the UFOs pursued by Cdr Fravor. They were quickly dropped by the Princeton’s radar when the computer categorised them as ‘false targets’. When operators become more familiar with the presence of UFOs on radars, they either ignore them or their equipment is adjusted to eliminate ‘noise’ from the displays. Decades earlier, radar meteorologist Kenneth Hardy warned against using such detections as evidence for UFOs because “strange and bewildering radar echoes will be seen occasionally as new radars are put into operation or as the existing radars carry out their remote probing mission.” 7
CREDIBLE WITNESSES?
Much has been made of the impressive calibre of the fighter pilot witnesses. The cult of the ‘credible witness’, especially if they have military or police experience, is a
MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF THE CALIBRE OF THE PILOT WITNESSES
recurring theme in the UFO industry’s rhetoric. But the experts assembled by the multimedia entertainment company promoting the stories appear to be unaware of the findings by earlier official UFO projects that should encourage a more cautious approach to witness testimony. Dr Hynek, who was consultant for the USAF’s UFO project for two decades from 1948, analysed thousands of similar reports and concluded, surprisingly, that “commercial and military pilots appear to make relatively poor witnesses.” 8 He turned to psychology for an explanation, noting how those with skill and experience in one field (flying a military jet and identifying other aircraft) do not necessarily transfer that competence to another field (identifying unfamiliar aerial phenomena). Radar personnel did not fare much better either. Drawing upon the database of Radar-Visual cases logged by Blue Book, Hynek expected that cases involving both radar and visual corroboration of UFOs should offer more reliable data; but “such is unfortunately not the case” and that conclusion remains true today.
Another instructive case occurred 30 years ago following a wave of UFO sightings over Belgium. On two occasions in December 1989 the Belgian Air Force scrambled F-16 jets in response to UFO reports by gendarmes that appeared to correlate with unusual radar targets seen by ground radars. But nothing was seen by the aircrew and they returned to base. Then on the night of 30-31 March 1990 the BAF decided to scramble again after police reports of flickering lights in the sky were linked to radar targets by two ground radar stations south of Brussels. According to the Chief of Operations in the Belgian Air Staff, Major General Wilfried De Brouwer, “once aloft the pilots tried to intercept the alleged craft, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behaviour, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity.” 9
Both jets were equipped with cameras to record the cockpit displays, but mistakes were made and only one captured real-time footage of the target. Claims are often made that a craft of some kind was detected by the airborne radars that could move from stationary to seven times the speed of sound in seconds. This is a common characteristic of radar UFO reports, along with the fact the pilots saw nothing visually. But as Belgian ufologist Wim van Utrecht discovered,
the lights in the sky that triggered these scrambles were almost certainly misperceptions of bright stars and planets. The radar evidence was scrutinised by the Belgian Royal Military Academy and their report found at least one of the three ‘lock-ons’ occurred when one F-16’s radar locked onto the second aircraft. Utrecht was told that “at no time during the scramble had [the pilots] witnessed anything unusual, nor were they impressed by the freakish radar blips”. The airborne targets did not correlate with the visual sightings and the returns seen
by ground radar were caused by anomalous propagation where radio waves are bent by atmospheric conditions, causing moving objects on the ground like cars and trains to appear as airborne targets.
Modern radars are designed so that computers normally filter out and remove so-called spurious echoes caused by meteorological conditions. But when UFO flaps occur, as in the USS Princeton and Belgian cases, military personnel are on high alert for anything unusual, including spurious echoes that might otherwise have been
ignored. In his own account of the Belgian wave, de Brouwer notes that during the flap radar controllers were asked to “pay particular attention to angel echoes” that appeared to corroborate sightings from the ground. “As a result, a number of radar echoes were recorded where it was impossible to know whether they were ‘angels’ or real aircraft in flight.”
‘Angels’ were first noticed on crude early radars during the 1940s around the time flying saucers and UFOs became a media obsession (see panel). Air defence systems
were plagued with reports of ‘angels’ and on some well-known occasions these were linked with UFO flaps. But when the source of the radar angels was traced to birds, insects and atmospheric turbulence, military and air traffic systems began to employ computers to eliminate targets that did not behave like aircraft. This fact explains the almost complete dearth of radar-visual UFO reports from the last five decades. In the UK MoD’s Condign report, radar scientist Ron Haddow (see FT396:28-29) flagged up “a significant absence of radar plots/tracks compared to the larger number of visual sightings reported to MoD”. The one event he claimed as possibly significant, from a 1996 flap in East Anglia, has been explained as a false return from a ‘permanent echo’ – a tall church spire (see panel).
SPURIOUS SIGNALS
Despite these lessons from history, the former head of the former US Department of Defense UFO project, Luis Elizondo, has presented a list of “five observables” that he maintains “are uniquely associated with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAPs”. The first of these is sudden and instantaneous acceleration – “objects moving in such a manner that they are capable of manoeuvring suddenly and deliberately... [that] involve a change in direction and acceleration that is well beyond the healthy limitations of any biological system… to withstand”. The problem with this and the other four ‘observables’ is that all are subject to human interpretation and are not empirical evidence of anything unknown to science. As Bob Sheaffer has said, Elizondo’s ‘five observables’ are more accurately called “five assumables”. 13
The idea that military detection of UFOs on radar provides empirical evidence of visitations to Earth by an unknown technology is an attractive one – if it were true. All evidence from radar, along with that provided by other instruments such as infrared cameras, remains subject to interpretation by humans. And when such evidence is placed under withering scrutiny, it often fails to impress the experts who design and use advanced radar systems for military and civilian purposes. As former RAF fighter pilot Michael Forrest remarked, reflecting on an occasion when he tried – and failed – to intercept a UFO detected on radar near Hong Kong (see panel): “Experienced operators learn to know what to believe and what not to believe, but it took time to recognise spurious signals. Even experienced operators could be fooled in exceptional circumstances… That is because these things are so rare, experience didn’t always mean anything.”
NOTES
1 DoD press release 14 Aug 2020. Previous coverage of the AATIP saga by Peter Brookesmith can be found in FT363:28-29; 366:28, passim. The acronym ‘UAP’ was adopted by MoD and USAF during the 1990s as military jargon for UFOs.
2 DoD press release 27 Apr 2020.
3 New York Intelligencer, 19 Dec 2019: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-videoq-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html.
4 FOI releases on the East Coast flap and the Gimbal/GoFast footage were obtained by The Drive/ WarZone in May 2020: www.thedrive.com/ the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-detailed-ufoincident-reports-from-navy-pilots-flying-off-the-eastcoast.
5 Mick West, ‘Explained: New Navy Videos’, 27 Apr 2020: www.metabunk.org/threads/explainednew-navy-ufo-videos.11234/
6 Tic-Tac UFO Executive Report, Department of US Navy, 13 pages, undated, FOI release, May 2018.
7 Kenneth R Hardy, ‘Unusual Radar Echoes’ in UFOs: A Scientific Debate (ed. Carl Sagan and Thornton Page) 1972, pp183-89.
8 J Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience (1972), pp96-7.
9 Wilfried De Brouwer in Leslie Keen, UFOs: Generals, pilots and government officials go on the record (2010), p24-40
10 Wim van Utrecht, ‘The Belgian 1989-90 UFO Wave’ in UFOs 1947-97 (ed Hilary Evans and Dennis Stacy), 1997, John Brown Publishing.
11 MOD file UFOs: Defence Policy Issues Part 1, 1992-96, FOI release.
12 ‘Five Characteristics Unique to UFOs’ 16 Feb 2018, https://invest.tothestarsacademy.
13 Bob Sheaffer, ‘The Pentagon’s UFOs’, The Skeptic: www.skeptic.com/reading_room/pentagon-ufos-to-the-stars-academy-ttsa-ufo-mediafrenzy/
✒ DR DAVID CLARKE is an Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University, a consultant for The National Archives UFO project and a regular contributor to Fortean Times.