Behind the Feature: Watch The Skies

Taking you through the process of creating a feature including additional details, notes and interview clips

Behind the feature is a weekly column going behind the scenes of that weeks longform feature showing how information was gathered and how the story was put together. Read this weeks feature here.

‘Watch the Skies’ began, as most features do, with a story. A fellow journalist friend of mine had told me that his grandfather had once seen a UFO leading to an interview that would help shape the foundation for the feature. John Gadd told me in a roughly 20 minute long conversation, the story of how he and his wife witnessed something they couldn’t explain.

I had been working on a feature about UFO investigations and the various government programs that have attempted to understand the phenomena. With the AATIP revelation in late 2017, the MoD files and other famous programs I felt an investigation into such work would help to clarify the truth around many reported sightings.

Gadd’s sighting wasn’t, to my knowledge, ever investigated by the MoD although I am in the process of attempting to acquire flight patterns for the area from the time of the sighting to ensure that it wasn’t a light aircraft. Since completing the feature Gadd has sent me a package containing newspaper clippings and magazines that he has collected over the years since his own sighting. Included amongst the clippings was the original report from 1978 about Gadd’s sighting.

Gadd recounts the story to The News in much the same way he did to me during our interview but there are a few interesting details to be gleaned from the original report. Most notably, Gadd states that “No helicopter or airplane could look like that nor could it hover or accelerate in the way the UFO did,” suggesting his belief that the object was not of this world.

The inclusion of Gadd’s sighting in the overall feature was an attempt to try and offer a first hand account of a UFO sighting. Where my discussion’s of the Ministry of Defense and the AATIP showed only an investigators view of events, Gadd’s perspective was that of a believer. I felt that this helped to counterbalance the words of Nick Pope, the former director of the MoD UFO desk also known by his official title: “Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a.”

My investigation into the MoD’s UFO program began with two things. Firstly I made contact with Nick Pope via email in order to ask him a series of questions about his time at the MoD. I then began looking at the MoD files released in June 2013. The released files include a range of UFO related documents covering the final two years of the UFO desk from 2007 to November 2009. The documents range from drawings, letters and photos to freedom of information requests and government reports and while none of the files include what Pope described to me as the “smoking gun” they did help illistrate the MoD’s attitude towards UFO’s.

One single phrase turned up regularly during my research into the MoD program. “No defense significance.” During an interview I conducted with Nick Pope via email I questioned this explination to which he replied; “It had been the longstanding policy (dating back to the Fifties) of the MoD to downplay the true extent of our interest in the subject, along with the true extent of the research and investigation we undertook. The reasons for this are complex.”

Pope went on to explain that “Part of it has to do with the embarrassment over the fact that we have unidentified objects in our airspace that are seen by RAF pilots, tracked by RAF radar operators, but about which we have no firm answers.”

This brought me onto the unsolved 5%. Pope’s website reads; “In around 15% of cases there was insufficient data to make a firm assessment,” a statement that I thought required further explination. His response, as included in the feature, read; “My best assessment of the approximate breakdown is that 80% of sightings in our files were explained as misidentifications, 15% had insufficient data to make a reasonable assessment, and 5% remained unexplained.”

That 5% became the hook for my feature. What were they? Why were they unsolved? The first case that Pope told me was part of his unsolved 5% was The Rendlesham Forrest Incident. The story is as follows:

During the early hours of Boxing Day 1980, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, two US Air Force members, were sent out to investigate a suspected civilian aircraft. As the story goes, when Burroughs and Penniston arrived at the supposed crash site in Rendlesham Forest, they were surprised to discover that the vehicle was not a civilian aircraft.

Penniston was able to get close enough to touch the the unknown craft and to see strange hieroglyphics on the underside of the vehicle. The Rendlesham Forest incident remains one of Nick Pope’s unexplained 5%. The infamous incident and the evidence that surrounded it propted Pope to start his own investigation during his time on the UFO desk. His inquiry resulted in a report detailing the events as they unfolded and the subsequent investigation by both the US and UK.

It became clear to me through my investigation of Rendlesham that much of the information surrounding the case was scattered between both the UK and US due to the concurrent investigations that took place. The lack of communication between the two investigations led to evidence being removed and, as Pope’s website states, “By the MoD’s own admission, there was no definitive explanation for the Rendlesham Forest incident and the case remains unexplained to this day.”

Over the course of writing the feature I was unable to explain the events at Rendlesham and the cause of the incident. I did learn that the AATIP (Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program) might have “a dossier of ‘best evidence’ from around the world” which I am currently investigating for further clarification. Since the AATIP revelation, much has been written about its investigation’s but little information is actually known about the specifics of what and whom it investigated. A future TNR feature will delve into the AATIP and will further investigate Rendlesham in an attempt to understand what happened in greater detail.

Throughout the feature I was only able to scratch the surface of global UFO investigation but I did uncover a key problem. As Nick Pope said, “While the UFO phenomenon is clearly a global one, my terms of reference limited me to looking at sightings within the United Kingdom Air Defence Region.” The closed nature of UFO investigation around the world has led to many, including Rendlesham, remaining unsolved.

Gadd’s encounter remains hard to prove but also hard to disprove and the many other cases in Pope’s 5% have offered fuel for my obsession. I am currently working on a series of features that will attempt to expand on these UFO programs pressing the governments of the world for answers. For now, I’ll end this the same way I ended the feature, “If only one documented sighting is true then we are not alone in the universe and that, for me, is enough to keep searching for the truth.”