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'Flying saucers' joke by aircraft engineers mobilised the military in southern England in 1967
Alan Travis, home affairs editor The Guardian, Thursday 3 March 2011
A "war of the worlds" rag week hoax by aircraft engineering apprentices was treated as a real alien invasion of Britain – for a few hours at least, according to newly released Ministry of Defence files.
The army's southern command, four police forces, bomb disposal units, RAF helicopters and the MoD's intelligence branch were all mobilised in the early hours of Monday 4 September 1967 to meet the threat.
They went into action after the police and RAF were flooded with calls from the public reporting the discovery of six small "flying saucers" in locations in a perfect line across southern England from Sheppey to the Bristol Channel.
It was not until a Scotland Yard bomb disposal squad with orders to check one of the objects with portable X-ray equipment arrived at Bromley police station, south London, that the hoax was uncovered – the Ever Ready batteries were a bit of a giveaway.
Another of the "saucers" was sent to be examined by Home Office scientists at Aldermaston and a third was inspected by the chief designer of the guided weapons division of the British Aircraft Corporation. One saucer which was found at Chippenham, Wiltshire, was blown up in a controlled explosion.
The Whitehall papers released at the National Archives show that within Whitehall the "1967 flying saucer hoax" was regarded at the MoD as an "obviously very successful practical joke".
Perhaps under the influence of Pink Floyd's first seminal space rock album, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released just a few weeks before, a group of apprentices and students from the Royal Aircraft Establishment and the nearby Farnborough technical college put together the flying saucers as a rag week hoax.
The papers reveal that a Westland whirlwind helicopter was despatched from RAF Manston to investigate the alien craft that had "landed" in Sheppey.
They also show that 20 years after the incident senior MoD officials thought of gagging a retired RAF group captain who had been the intelligence officer dealing with UFO sightings as part of his MoD duties at the time. He had gone down to Bromley police station as the department's investigating officer.
The retired group captain, whose name had been redacted from the files, described the hoax as "extremely clever". When he approached the MoD in 1997 for clearance to talk about the event they considered gagging him but decided it would leave them looking a laughing stock if they did: "If we cannot trust mature retired ex-Defence Intelligence Secretariat officers, we are in a bad way," advised one senior defence chief.
The latest batch of released UFO files also show that in the late 1970s the potential threat of alien abduction and attacks by extraterrestrials became a serious issue of debate for the UN and the CIA.
A proposal from Sir Eric Gairy, then president of Grenada, that the UN set up an agency to monitor UFO activity and conduct a full-scale investigation became a matter of delicate international diplomatic manoeuvring that included the British Foreign Office.
Gairy had been influenced by the views of a former astronaut and the Grenadians distributed free tickets for the recently released film Close Encounters of the Third Kind to press their campaign.
Britain was resolutely opposed but the files show that at least one senior diplomat was relaxed about the idea: "It must also be said, in fairness, that the Grenadian proposal is no more ridiculous than many other proposals before the UN. Indeed, President Carter has in the past reportedly taken a personal interest in UFOs," said one Foreign Office man warning against taking too open a stand against the Grenadians.ends
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Alien invasion hoax fooled Ministry of Defence, archive papers reveal
