Splicing the Mainbrace, Part Two
JENNY RANDLES traces the political and military fall-out from the UFO summer of 1952
“You can’t tell the people,” UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously said about UFOs to researcher Georgina Bruni. But you cannot avoid people becoming aware something has happened when events are as visible as those of the summer of 1952.
Startling UFOs infested the skies over the US capital and played games with Air Force jets. Intelligence agencies wondered if the UFOs were a secret weapon deployed to distract the US and its allies from a sneak attack. Project Blue Book – the USAF’s UFO investigation project headed by Captain Ed Ruppelt and astronomer Dr J Allen Hynek – found themselves sidelined as the CIA drew up plans to mislead the public into finding UFOs amusing and not scary. Quietening public response was the CIA’s intent.
Aware of the mayhem in Washington, the UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill was wily enough to know that if what was buzzing the White House and CIA garden parties was not our technology, the West was in trouble. But he also saw that US public statements did not support the notion that there was no problem.
So on the day Ruppelt was ordered to stonewall the media in Washington – 28 July 1952 – the British PM acted. Aware that an upcoming, huge NATO exercise codenamed Mainbrace was but weeks away, the PM wrote a memo to the Air Ministry: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.”
Ralph Noyes was then early in a civil service career that would take him deep into the UFO mystery. Noyes came to know the workings of the MoD on UFOs intimately: before he retired in 1977, he ran Defence Secretariat 8, which included their ‘UFO desk’. He told me of gun camera film taken by RAF aircraft in pursuit of objects much like those seen over Washington in 1952 and shot just months later.
In 1952 Noyes chanced to be in the right place when that Churchill memo was sent. As private secretary to Air Chief Marshal Sir Ray Cochrane, Vice Chief of the Air Staff, he had insight as the Washington events unfolded. Noyes vividly recalled his boss complaining to Churchill’s cabinet as this memo went out – “I thought Vandenburg had put an end to this in 1949.” That USAF General felt that weird glows in the sky were no proof of aliens.
Noyes told me the MoD was careful never to dismiss UFOs – just the concept of their alien origin. Noyes said: “The MoD will never lie and do not say ‘UFOs do not exist.’ Instead they do not go out of their way to say they do and emphasise that they have no evidence aliens are coming here.”
What he saw in gun camera film was “fuzzy blobs” chased by outpaced RAF jets – much as occurred in Washington. He believed most unresolved footage was likely to be unexplained energy phenomena in the atmosphere. I had reached much the same conclusion independently, calling them UAP. Indeed, he noted the MoD had recently started using that term too. So neither of us followed the UFO party line nor the dismissive meme. There was a middle road and we both took it.
Noyes knew that Sir Robert Cockburn – Scientific Adviser to the Air Ministry – was sent to Washington to follow up on Churchill’s memo just days before Mainbrace was due to take place. What he came back with was enough to persuade Churchill to greenlight a UK equivalent of Project Blue Book. This was not publicly revealed until 1956, when Ruppelt, in his uncensored memoir, The Report into UFOs, told how the British sent RAF intelligence officers to DC in late 1952. Those airmen had a long list of questions asking how to set up a UFO programme in the UK.
The project began in early 1953, based at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. Noyes told me all its cases were baffling. “The [reports] seemed like phantoms. We did not have a clue how to deal with them.” As for the gun camera footage – Noyes told me RAF staff tried to laugh it off, asking what aircrew were smoking and reminding everyone how “the real task at the time was to keep the Russians out!”
This ‘UK Blue Book’ was not ready when Mainbrace took place over 12 days from 14 September. This massive NATO exercise – 80,000 men, over 200 ships from nine navies, and 1000 aircraft participated – saw multiple sightings around Eastern England and the North Sea fleet. There were sightings from a Danish destroyer and from air crew. The three days of 19–21 September 1952 saw major events. Two involved the RAF – a total of seven aircraft chased top-shaped UFOs – with one at RAF Topcliffe that changed course and speed and entirely defied evaluation.
The most dramatic event involved the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D Roosevelt – overflown by a ball-shaped UFO allegedly filmed from the deck. But that footage went the way of the MoD gun camera film and has never been released. These cases caused consternation in the NATO alliance – but especially in the USA. The US Navy had not openly shared the uniqueness of this particular ship. The carrier was the only one at that time hosting nuclear missiles. A UFO encounter there was frightening.
We will likely never know what did happen in the summer of 1952, but there is little question the sightings tested NATO defences at a key time in history and changed forever decisions about how to treat the UFO mystery. They would turn it from a bit of a joke to real concern in the upper echelons, and this was the point when the words ‘cover-up’ started to have meaning – and, as you see, legitimately so. And not, as so often assumed, connected with little green men.
By the time the MoD UFO desk closed down in the 21st century they were using the same term as Noyes and I were doing in the 1990s – UAP. Perhaps they had finally become reconciled to the ambiguities in what UFOs really are, and felt that a less presumptive term, which may cover natural phenomena, might temper public concerns.
Perhaps Maggie Thatcher was right, if she meant that you cannot tell the people about UFOs and expect them to understand. Saying we have no idea what is going on breeds distrust – even if it is the truth.