RAF Station, Upper Heyfore Eng., March 1961March 1961

On the night of March 18, 1961, at 2120Z (9:20 p.m.), a control tower operator at RAF Station Upper Heyford in England saw a very bright white or yellowish circular object in the sky. The object appeared small, somewhere between the size of an orange and a basketball. He reported what he saw to other personnel at the base, and several more observers got a look at it from different locations around the airfield, including air police officers and a weather observer.

The object appeared to be tilted at about a 45-degree angle to the ground and stayed in that same position the entire time anyone watched it. Ground observers said it seemed to be sitting still, but a radar operator tracking it on an APS-8 radar scope reported that the object was moving very slowly. The radar picked up the object for about twenty minutes, showing it first moving due east, then on a heading of 050 degrees (toward the northeast) for roughly ten minutes, and then turning to 180 degrees (south) before radar contact was lost. A nearby RAF station at Gaydon also briefly tracked a radar return north of Upper Heyford. When Midland Radar Control tried to vector an aircraft to the object about two hours after the initial sighting, the pilot reported seeing nothing, though he was at 6,000 feet on top of a cloud layer.

Weather conditions at the time included clear skies generally, with some haze and ground fog. Cloud cover was eight-tenths, and visibility was eight to ten nautical miles. The base intelligence officer investigated and ruled out known aircraft and balloons in the area. His report noted that the headings tracked by radar were broadly consistent with wind directions, which led to a theory that the radar return might have come from cloud fragments drifting in the wind. However, the officer acknowledged that this theory could not easily explain the bright light that all observers reported seeing. He offered no definitive explanation for the sighting.

The Air Force concluded the object was unknown. The full case file, consisting of 7 pages, is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.