UFO reports went to top

A former chief of defence staff warned Margaret Thatcher's Government in 1985 that its "perfunctory" dismissal of UFO sightings near an RAF base shared with the US Air Force in Suffolk could turn into a political "banana-skin" because it was unexplained.

In a letter to Michael Heseltine, Thatcher's Defence Secretary at the time, the late Lord Hill-Norton said the sightings of unidentified flying objects in Rendelsham Forest by USAF personnel in December 1980 had "puzzling and disquieting" features that have never been satisfactorily explained.

The letter, written on May 1, 1985, is among official British government documents on UFOs released yesterday by the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives. Fourteen files containing more than 4000 pages spanning 15 years between 1981 and 1996 have been placed online.

Hill-Norton's letter covers perhaps the best-known British UFO incident of the period when the USAF twice reported mysterious lights and a metallic flying object in the woods at the perimeter of the base. They said a triangular-shaped object had left radiation traces and three visible markings in the ground.

Colonel Charles Halt, the USAF deputy base commander, who saw the lights himself, wrote a short report on January 13, 1981, but the ministry denied all knowledge of the events until the colonel's memorandum was released in June 1983. The ministry's public response was that the incident had no defence interest.

"My personal view, having considered the fragmentary but compelling evidence brought to public knowledge by the media, is that the case cannot be disposed of in these rather perfunctory terms," Hill-Norton wrote.

"If the report made by the USAF authorities in January 1981 is accurate, there is evidence that British airspace and territory are vulnerable to unwarranted intrusion to a disturbing degree. If, on the other hand, the report of the deputy base commander must be dismissed ... then we have evidence - no less disturbing, I suggest - that a sizeable number of USAF personnel at an important base in British territory are capable of serious misperception, the consequences of which might be grave in military terms."

- INDEPENDENT