Picture this: 2:17 a.m., 14 August 1956. Suffolk, England.
The Cold War is ice-cold. Two NATO’s biggest nuclear bomber bases in Europe RAF Bentwaters and RAF Lakenheath are lit up like Christmas trees. Dozens of airmen are glued to radar scopes when something moving at 4,000 miles per hour streaks across the screen, slams on the brakes, and just… stops. Eight miles out. Hovering in the sky. Like someone hit pause on reality. Then it starts playing games.
For the next six hours glowing orbs toy with two scrambled de Havilland Venom night-fighters the way a cat toys with half-dead mice. They split into three. They merge. They mirror every turn for turn. They vanish off radar at 60,000 feet climbing. And every single impossible move is tracked by three separate military radar systems.
Strangly the USAF will later call this their single strongest UFO case on file... and then they’ll lose the tapes and tell everyone to forget it happened, because of course they would.
Minute-by-Minute: The Night Physics Filed for Divorce
21:30 (13 Aug) – Bentwaters tower spots lights over the North Sea. Too fast for meteors, too slow for missiles.
23:30 – CPS-5 radar locks a target 30 miles east doing 4,000+ mph. Controller Freddie Wimbledon: “It came in like a bat out of hell, then braked so hard the blip almost disappeared.”
00:04 – Same target stops dead 8 miles from Bentwaters. Hovering motionless for several minutes. Wimbledon: “I’ve never seen anything just stop like that. Not then, not since.”
00:15 – Target shoots west, passes directly over the base at 2,000–4,000 ft, executes a perfect 90-degree turn, and heads back east. No aircraft on Earth in 1956 can pull more than 9 Gs without disintegrating. This thing corners like it’s on rails.
01:00 – Lakenheath Type-80 radar picks up a second object. Tracked at 12,000 mph before it, too, stops instantly over the airfield. Ground observers see a “brilliant white light” hanging dead still.
Enter the Venom Night-Fighters
02:00 – RAF Waterbeach scrambles two de Havilland Venoms. First aircraft, callsign “Red One”, pilot Lt. John Brady (Korean War veteran, 2,000+ hours).
Lakenheath radar vectors him: “Target 10 o’clock, 10 miles, angels 10.” Brady sees nothing. Radar says the object just slid behind him at 6 o’clock, 3 miles.
Brady breaks hard left. Object mirrors.
Brady breaks right. Object mirrors again.
For five minutes they dogfight like this. Brady is furious on the radio:
“This thing is bloody well playing with me! Every move I make, it copies. I’m not imagining this, the radar sees it too!” Lt. John Brady, declassified USAF tape
02:40 – Brady almost out of fuel returns to base. A second Venom launches. The same game starts again. Only this time the object splits into three distinct radar returns and surrounds the jet in a perfect equilateral triangle.
Second de Havilland Venom Pilot reports: “I’ve got three of the bastards boxing me in!”
03:15 – The three blips merge back into one.
03:30 – Single object accelerates vertically. Lakenheath height-finder loses it climbing through 60,000 ft.
The orbs are gone, heading into space. During the event the objects are tracked on radar at over 12,000mph.
Uhhh... 12,000mph+ in 1956. Less than 10 years after Roswell.
The Radar Evidence: Three Systems, Zero Mistakes
- Bentwaters CPS-5 surveillance radar (60-mile range)
- Lakenheath Type-80 search radar (200-mile range)
- Lakenheath CPN-4 height-finder radar
All three painted identical tracks. All three operators were interviewed separately and drew the exact same flight path on paper. The raw radar film was rushed to Project Blue Book HQ. It has never been seen again.
The Scientists Try (and Fail) to Explain It
1969: The U.S. Air Force pays the University of Colorado $500,000 (1960s money) to kill the UFO problem forever. Radar expert Dr. Gordon David Thayer spends two years on this case alone.
His verdict, printed in the official Condon Report:
“This is the most puzzling and unusual case in the radar-visual files. The apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation.” Dr. Gordon David Thayer, Condon Report Case 2, 1969
Translation: “We got nothing. It’s probably aliens.”
The Cover-Up Wasn’t Even Clever
Within weeks, every radar film, every tape recording, every written log “disappeared” from USAF archives.
Airman 1st Class Freddie Wimbledon was pulled aside by his commanding officer and told: “You didn’t see anything. This incident never happened.”
When researchers finally found the pilots in the late 1970s, every one of them still remembered it like it was yesterday.
Lt. John Brady talked about the 1956 event in 1978 and reportedly still held that: “I’ve flown against MiGs. I know what planes can do. Whatever was up there that night… it wasn’t one of ours.”
Final Verdict
THE SINGLE BEST-DOCUMENTED RADAR-VISUAL UFO CASE IN HISTORY.
Three independent military radars.
Two fighter jets humiliated in real time.
Speeds exceeding 12,000 mph.
Instant stops and 90-degree turns that would liquefy any human pilot.
Intelligent, playful behavior for six straight hours.
Then every scrap of physical evidence vanishes into thin air.
Tell me again how this was “anomalous propagation.”