Evening. I'm calling about something that happened back in August of '56. I was a Technical Sergeant with the United States Air Force, stationed at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. I worked as the Watch Supervisor in the Radar Air Traffic Control center there. This was the night of August 13th going into the 14th. I remember it was a clear night, warm for England. My shift started at nine that evening, and I figured it'd be routine. Standard traffic, maybe a few training runs. I'd been at Lakenheath for about eight months by then, so I knew the patterns pretty well. Around ten thirty or so, I got a phone call from Bentwaters. That's another base, about forty miles southeast of us. The guy on the line, he sounded rattled. He asks me, do you have any targets on your scopes traveling at four thousand miles per hour? I thought he was joking at first. I said something like, you feeling alright over there? But he wasn't joking.
He tells me they'd been tracking these unidentified radar echoes for the past hour. Multiple targets, moving at speeds that shouldn't be possible. One came in from the sea, crossed right over the base at thousands of miles per hour. Another group of returns merged into this massive single target, bigger than a B-36 bomber on their scopes. Then it just moved off to the north. I looked at my own radar. Nothing unusual at that moment. I told him we'd keep our eyes open. Then I hung up and briefed my crew. We switched our scopes to higher sensitivity, started watching more carefully. About twenty minutes later, we started picking up our own contacts. The first one we saw, it was about thirty miles southwest of the base. Moving steady at first, maybe a hundred knots. Then it just stopped. Dead stop. Hovered there for a few minutes. Then it took off northeast at a speed I couldn't even calculate properly. Had to be over a thousand miles per hour, maybe more. The radar return looked solid, not like interference or weather.
Then we got visual confirmation. One of the airmen on the ground called up to the tower. Said he was seeing lights outside. I sent someone down to check, and they came back saying there were these luminous objects in the sky. Two of them came in from different directions, made this sharp turn, almost a right angle, and then they seemed to merge together. After that, they moved off as one. The way they described it, the objects looked about the size of a golf ball held at arm's length. Bright, definitely not stars or aircraft lights. And as they moved away, they got smaller and smaller until they were just pinpoints, then gone. That ruled out meteors in my mind. Meteors don't dwindle like that, they burn out or streak across the sky. I was trying to stay calm, keep everyone focused. We're tracking multiple unknowns now, and I'm getting reports from the ground crew seeing things visually. I called up the chain, reported what we had. That's when things got more intense.
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