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May 22, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:02:06

Edition 297 - Channel Islands UFO

This time - ten years on - Ray Bowyer - the Aurigny Airlines Pilot who had a "closeencounter" with a mile-long UFO...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
	A lot of shout-outs and a great guest to get to in this edition, but before I do anything, I'd just like to say that for reasons that you will have read and heard about in the news, my heart goes out to the people of Manchester after the recent terror attack that's claimed innocent young lives.
	Just people, families, young people going to a concert in the city.
	And this is what the modern world has brought us to, and it's enormously sad.
	You know, I'm from Liverpool, and that's just down the road from Manchester.
	We are friendly rivals.
	But when something like this happens, we all come together, and my heart goes out to you.
	And, you know, I hope there will come a time in our lives when such things do not happen.
	Okay, let's get on to shout-outs.
	And then a very special guest, a man who witnessed one of the most remarkable UFO encounters ever.
	A man who was piloting a plane, a passenger plane, and saw something astonishing.
	I've been trying for 10 years to get him on this show.
	He's on this edition.
	Shout-outs first.
	Alex in Albuquerque, very much liked one of our recent shows.
	Made nice comparisons with Art Bell.
	Thank you very much for that, Alex.
	That is very, very kind of you.
	Sasha, if you'd like to tell me the story on this show, the one that you emailed me, I would be keen to hear from you.
	Thank you for your thoughts about the Garrett Graff and Leslie Kane shows, by the way, Sasha.
	Mandy says, I'm in Brisbane, Australia.
	Listen to your podcasts at work.
	289 with Trisha Robertson was fantastic.
	It was like listening to two people having a chat over coffee.
	That's kind, Mandy.
	That is what we always aim to do.
	And, you know, we can't always, as broadcasters, do it, but that's so kind.
	Marty says, Captain Randy Kramer, is he a cipher?
	Is he a disinformation agent?
	Well, that is a question you are posing.
	Mike in Texas, though, says, finally, congratulations, you had someone on your podcast who's a real whistleblower.
	You still need to get Corey Good on.
	Okay.
	Liam loves the show, says, I'm a high school teacher in Cheshire, listening to your show for three years, think it's great.
	Thank you for that.
	I would give you an A star for your interviewing.
	That's very kind.
	Thank you.
	And you tell me about the nuclear bunker that people can now visit at Hack Green near Nantwich.
	I remember that place.
	Kelly in Kansas says I couldn't listen to your episode with Garrett Graff.
	Trashed it after a few minutes.
	The USA people are getting a lot of spin these days, says Kelly.
	Michael Fenimore, Garrett Graff is incredibly ignorant about 9-11, says Michael.
	He is not a worthwhile guest.
	Okay, thanks, Michael, for your comment.
	Stephen says, great shows, as usual, you need to get Starfire Tour on.
	Thank you, Stephen.
	Ed in Sierra Vista, Arizona, thank you for your email.
	Brad Brewster in the US says, I recently started listening to several of your podcasts and have thoroughly enjoyed them all.
	I also appreciate Howard Hughes, that's me, for his exquisite and enlightening ability at interviewing.
	Brad, that's so kind.
	Thank you.
	Jill says, Randy Kramer, bunk, sheer bunk.
	Peter in Adelaide, Australia, good suggestions, thank you.
	Nick Rappertone says, I'm listening from Hollywood, California.
	I heard you mention that you've received requests to cover the flat earth topic, even though there are flat earth followers from around the globe.
	Joke intended, says Nick, may I kindly put a vote in to skip that topic?
	All right.
	Tim in Milwaukee.
	Thank you.
	And what was that song that Rod Stewart had?
	What made Milwaukee famous?
	Which is beer, isn't it?
	Has made a loser out of me.
	Tim, thank you for the photo that you sent.
	Susan in Essex, thank you very much for your email.
	Aide in Liverpool, thanks for your email about Stephen Greer.
	He will be back on this show.
	Paul in Wisconsin says, I just finished listening to the interview with Randy Kramer.
	I like to consider myself open-minded.
	This struck me as a bit much.
	His story sounded like a mashup of Stargate and the Halo video game franchise.
	John in Erskine, Scotland, says, listening to what people have to say gives me the impression that you can't win at times, Howard, but I'm sure that we can all agree that you do your best.
	John, I think that's all that we can do.
	You know, you can only give it your best shot, otherwise, don't bother doing it.
	And that's why I do what I do, I guess.
	Jess in Melbourne, Australia, kind comments.
	Thank you, Jess.
	Finally, Jim in Moriak, Australia, near, is it Geelong or Geelong, I think it is, isn't it?
	Really loving your show.
	It's the only thing getting me through the long car trip on the way to and from work every day.
	Thank you, Jim.
	If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to the website designed and maintained by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
	It's theunexplained.tv.
	And you can send me an email or if you'd like to make a donation to help the show keep going there.
	Theunexplained.tv.
	Let's get to the guest on this edition.
	A man who had his own close encounter 10 years ago.
	His name is Ray Boyer.
	And I think you are going to be intrigued by what you're about to hear.
	Ray, thank you so much for making time for me.
	You're welcome, Alex.
	Now tell me first of all about where you are, because my listeners in America, I have many of them, I think they're going to have a little time, a little trouble getting their heads around the idea that here is somewhere very close to France and the French mainland, but is actually a set of little islands that are British.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	It stems back from when the Channel Islands, where I'm living, invaded England in 1066 and occupied it.
	So that's sort of the distance back that this place goes.
	I live in a place called Albany, which is the northernmost of the Channel Islands, eight miles from the French coast.
	And it's actually the only Channel Island.
	It's only one island that's actually in the English Channel.
	All the rest are in the Bay.
	So we get pretty much big extremes of weather and wind and tides there and very, very fast tides, eight, nine, sometimes ten knots around the island.
	So yes, interesting place to live, very remote and quite cut off, which was why I went there in the first place to fly for the local airline, Marini.
	It is a beautiful place and it is British, but there is a sizable French influence there because just across that bay you've got places like Guanville and that is as French as you can possibly get.
	Absolutely, yes, just a few miles away and visiting yachtsmen are always Coming over from France.
	I'm presuming back in the day that there was a massive amount of smuggling going on between the mainland France and Brandy into the UK.
	There was also, the Channel Islands itself was a place for privateers, some I think the Americans would call them more like buccaneers, and the ships were arrested and on behalf of the king were pillaged and the goods taken away.
	So that caused a lot of problems between the French and the English.
	And that explains for one particular reason why this huge port was built in Auderney, which was placed there to house the British fleet at the time in the 1850s, because we were once again at war with France, their best friends.
	And the other thing, the other thing about where you are is the fact that it is so different.
	It is so very different from here.
	It is, as you say, isolated, and it is very French in influence.
	Yes.
	And the one thing that a lot of people of my generation will recall because of all the television coverage that there came to be in later years was the fact that, of course, the Channel Islands, which some people in this generation forget, was occupied by the Nazis in World War II, which, you know, I know that you're not of that generation, but there are still people around who will have recollections either of themselves or of grandparents or even parents who went through that.
	Absolutely.
	And it's all around the place in Alderney.
	There are so many military installations built there out of huge tonnages of concrete, probably millions of tons of concrete.
	And the reasons for that is, I think, now becoming apparent.
	There's quite an interesting article in the mainstream media in the UK citing the possibility that Alderney was possibly going to be a centre for rocket attacks into the UK.
	And there may well have been up to 40,000 people involved in the construction of this site.
	All a bit speculative.
	I haven't heard much more about that.
	But what you can actually see on the surface is massive gun emplacements, huge defences against attack.
	But really, the only reason people don't really understand.
	All we had to do was go around this little tiny island.
	They didn't need to attack it for huge loss of life, just leave it alone and it would eventually starve itself out.
	So there must have been something else to the reasoning for the construction of all this massive amount of concrete.
	I think these chaps from the Daily Mail have got an idea that it was going to be a strategic rocket base for bombing the UK with poison gas.
	Well that would be a whole other story for my show, I think, and I'm going to have to come back.
	I love Guernsey very much and I love the islands very much.
	I've been to a few of them.
	And of course Alderney, when you go to Guernsey.
	Guernsey had a very much more torrid time.
	I think when the boats evacuated Alderney, there were only six people remaining on the island and apart from the cattle that were left behind, the very famous, world-famous Alderney cow.
	And in Guernsey, of course, about half the population left.
	I believe there was about 15,000 people left in Guernsey to operate with the Germans for an occupied period of about five years.
	And there was tremendous problems with starvation and medical assistance in Guernsey itself.
	And of course, Jersey and Sark.
	It's a part of our history that we should not forget.
	As time goes by, that becomes even more important.
	Okay, so we've painted a picture of where you are.
	These little islands, is it Guernsey, Jersey, Herm, Alderney, Sark?
	Is that all of them?
	That's a lot.
	They're all the occupied ones, yeah.
	All right.
	Beautiful, very French influence, as you say.
	Very tiny streets, cobbled streets.
	Yeah, very, very pretty.
	And also going back right back into the Neolithic period with ancient monuments as well.
	So yeah, it's a huge amount of history on these islands.
	But a very different place and some distance from the UK.
	You either access it by boat, which people used to do and the ferries still run, or you do it by air.
	And you were a pilot, I know you're retired now, for an airline that I've used many times called Origny.
	Tell me about you and your career with all Aurigny Airlines.
	Okay, well, Aurigny actually is a Norman French word for Audeny, so that's where the name of the airline came from.
	I never knew that.
	I joined the company in January of 1999 and had 10 years with them.
	It was good fun.
	And my principal airplane that I flew with them was the Norman Trilander, which is an 18-seat airplane with a through cabin where the person right at the back, 18 seats back, could see the pilot at the front directly.
	It's quite an agricultural type of airplane.
	It's designed for moving about 15, 16 people over short distances of say 10 or 15 minutes at 120 knots, so two miles a minute.
	So short distance airplane, very strong, very powerfully built.
	And now frankly, it needed to be to work out of Orderney because that was, out of all the airports that Orini used to fly into, Orderney is by far the most significantly difficult place to operate into due to the closeness of the actual runway from the cliff itself and turbulence that's created, especially in a southwesterly wind, which is the prevailing wind.
	And yeah, a challenging, challenging sort of an airport.
	So I joined them in 1999 and was based in Alderney until 2003 where I was then based in Guernsey.
	But my actual UFO sighting occurred in Alderney.
	Apologies, but when I was based in Guernsey, I was flying into Alderney from Southampton in 2007.
	No, I flew that route.
	And it is a very small scale thing.
	So your passengers can actually see you.
	I remember that part.
	And you feel the throb of those turboprop engines.
	And it's very much a community in the air, really.
	You feel a great connection with the crew that you don't feel on a big airline.
	Now, the reason I'm saying that Is that the passengers were part of this UFO event, which we will get into describing, I think, right now.
	Tell me about the event.
	It's 10 years ago, and it put you on the front pages of some papers, certainly the pages of many, many papers around the world for a while.
	And I guess you've probably got a little bit tired of all the phone calls you've got from people like me wanting to talk to you about this.
	But 10 years on, I'm glad we're able to do it.
	Tell me about that duty and that day.
	Well, it was, of course, fantastic free publicity for the company.
	To actually garner that amount of publicity around the world would have cost millions of pounds.
	And I remember they were very happy to give me numbers where I might be able to contact you back then.
	I think back at that point, you'd stop doing interviews, but the company was completely behind you.
	Yeah, I had a phone call from the managing director at the time, and he simply asked me, you know, he asked me what I saw, first of all, and I explained to him, just as I'm about to explain to you, and he said, well, do you want to go with it publicly?
	I said, well, it's up to you, really.
	I'm perfectly happy to.
	He says, yeah, so am I. So it was supported by the company, which I understand is a totally different thing to what happens in the US at the moment.
	They're not supported at all by any of their airlines.
	In fact, I believe it's a sackable offence if they start talking about UFOs and things like that.
	But regards the actual sighting of that day itself, just to correct you on one thing, the engines actually have pistol engines on this airplane.
	There's three of them.
	Not turbine.
	But it's only a small point.
	It's propellers.
	And it's designed as a very short landing and take-off airplane.
	All I can remember is the throb of those engines.
	You really do feel it.
	You do feel them.
	Massively noisy airplane.
	And I hear it from in the second row, right behind the pilot, next to the propellers.
	It's a similar sort of sound generated by Concorde on takeoff, so very noisy.
	But that particular day...
	April 2007, April 23rd.
	And I'd already flown to Southampton with a group of passengers from Alderney and was returning from Southampton to Alderney.
	And the standard flight, it was quite a nice day, it was benign, there was no particular weather problems, a very high level of cloud, over 10,000 feet.
	But this aeroplane would cruise on the way from Southampton to Aldeny at 4,000 feet, just in the airway.
	So it was an instrument flight.
	And I started to see things that were slightly interesting around about the south side of the Isle of Wight, leaving Southampton.
	And there was a very bright light in the sky.
	So I continued on towards this bright light, and I'm thinking there's something there, because at that sort of range, you sometimes see reflections from the sun from all the greenhouses, all the vineries, they call them, in Guernsey.
	I was going to say that at that time in the morning, some of these flights are quite early in the morning.
	You do see effects from the sun, don't you?
	Yeah, you do.
	You see them all day because the greenhouse roofs are angled and the sun reflects for a few moments or even a few seconds from the roof to your eye, which you can be 50 or 100 miles away.
	You can still see this reflection.
	You can't see what is being reflected from.
	You can't see the greenhouse.
	But anyway, that's what I thought it was.
	And I looked away and then carried on with the flying, you know, usual checks, that sort of thing.
	and look back up and this reflection is still there.
	So consequently, it can't be a reflection because the angle between the sun So I thought I'd better have a look at this light that I'm seeing in front of me.
	And so my trusty pair of binoculars came out of my flight bag and we have a look at this object.
	And there it was.
	I'm on a 7x10 binocular and I could see that there was a very defined and tangible shape to it, which wasn't going away.
	It was very, very brilliant, but at this time it was quite small.
	So I called up air traffic control in, was then Jersey, and I said to the Jersey controller, do you have anything on radar?
	And he eventually came, he had a look, and he said, no, nothing seen.
	There's a little bit of anaprop, which is anomalous propagation, atmospheric effect, which wasn't in the area where I was seeing this thing.
	So I thought, well, I'll keep my eye on this.
	And consequently, moving closer to this object, I'm thinking initially it was around six or seven miles away, and probably the size of a 737, something like that.
	And the light that was around it or coming from it, I mean, how was that light, from what you could see, how was it radiating?
	How was it generating?
	What was it doing?
	It was emitting light.
	It wasn't reflecting, it was emitting light, but it appeared to me, and today it's exactly the same.
	A very, very, very brilliant yellow, if not golden colour, but I was able to look at it directly.
	It wasn't blinding in that respect.
	It was just brilliantly emanating, sort of a shimmering yellow colour.
	So you think the light was coming from the object, not around the object?
	It's difficult to say, Howard, on that one.
	It could have been around it, an atmospheric effect, or it could have been emitting from it, but certainly appeared to be a source of light coming from it.
	How that was propagated, I don't know.
	And also, from left, looking at this object from left to right, about two-thirds away along this object was an area, a darker grey-banded area, preferably one-tenth the whole length of this object, but about two-thirds from left to right looking at it, with a shimmering interface between the sort of grey area and the yellow, this brilliant yellow colour.
	Able to look at it perfectly happily through binoculars.
	But I would love to have seen it at night, because I think then it would have been quite a spectacular display.
	But this was, you know, in the afternoon.
	So, yeah, I was unable to get the full effect of the actual light that was coming from it.
	So we're now getting closer tonight.
	I said to Jersey Air Traffic, look, this thing's probably seven, maybe ten miles away in front of me, and it's still there.
	Can you see anything on radar?
	And the controller then said, no, we still haven't got anything on radar, but I'll keep an eye on it for you.
	Now, I'm going at two miles a minute, and I've travelled now five minutes, and this object is still clearly in front of me.
	So I've got done the 10 miles what I thought was the distance to or from the object, and I'm calling back to Jersey Air Traffic.
	So this thing is getting quite big now in front of me.
	Now, this, after five minutes, now people in the back of the airplane are starting to look over my head and over my shoulder to see what this thing is, because they also are having a look at it, and it's unusual.
	And what sort of reactions, obviously, through the cabin crew, what sort of reactions were you getting from them at that point?
	The childlander actually flies with a bit of a nose-up pitch attitude.
	So only the people in the first couple or three rows behind me would have been able to see it.
	The rest would have been too low.
	In other words, the nose would have been too high for them to see over.
	But the chap behind me, when I started looking at this thing through binoculars, he just tapped me on the shoulder, which is, you know, there's no barrier between the cabin and the pilot.
	He just asked me, what's that?
	And I said, well, have a look for yourself through these binoculars and see what you think it is.
	And he sort of did, and he focused it, and he was quite surprised at what he could see.
	I said, I don't know what it is.
	I haven't got a clue, but we're going towards it.
	And, you know, that is a thing, isn't it?
	I've flown on many planes of different sizes in different parts of the world.
	And, of course, as a passenger, you always expect the pilot to be totally in control of which you were, but also to have the answers to every question you might have.
	Here was one occasion where you could not answer.
	Absolutely, and I had no clue what we were going towards.
	So I'm now talking once again to Jersey Air Traffic Control.
	And the controller then now takes out the filters, which filter out slow-moving objects and that sort of thing.
	And it increases specific areas of that radar that he could look at.
	And I asked him once again, are you sure you haven't got anything on radar?
	This thing's getting quite close now.
	I'm getting close to it.
	And he said, yeah, we have got something.
	So at that point, I realized that there was almost certainly something there which was physical.
	It wasn't a propagation of light.
	It wasn't a reflection.
	It was physically in the air at that time.
	And it was around about that time, after seven or eight minutes of looking at this first object, that I noticed through this sort of haze layer a second object, exactly the same shape, but further away, therefore quite a bit smaller.
	And these two objects looked like they may well have been working in conjunction with one another.
	Had you had up to that point the thought UFO cross your mind?
	Had that occurred to you?
	After a few minutes, yes.
	After a couple of minutes.
	I mean, first of all, you know, you're going through the usual thinking of reflections, something like that, a fire on the sea, maybe, a ship on fire, whatever.
	But yeah, then came the realization that this thing wasn't on the ground, it was actually in the air, and there's a radar signature.
	So let's proceed with caution.
	And were Jersey Air Traffic Control who you were talking to throughout this?
	Were they taking you seriously?
	Yes, they have no choice, really.
	I'm asking them questions which they didn't have an answer to, and in the end they did have an answer to.
	In fact, after the event, I went down to Jersey Air Traffic Control and took copies of that afternoon's flight.
	And to me and to others, it clearly shows two tracks of two objects moving away from each other that appeared at the same second and disappeared at the same second.
	And these were big objects, very, very big.
	And how did you get that record at that time?
	Because I thought those things, you know, were not accessible to people other than the people working for air traffic control.
	Well, I just phoned them up, said, had a chat with the controller himself, and he said, well, come down, let's meet.
	And let's go to the El Vira machine, which was then the radar machine that was being used in Jersey.
	And I just, they said, there's the television screen.
	It's not a Windows compatible machine.
	It's totally completely out of production now.
	But there is an interesting side story to this afterwards, after we've spoken about the sighting.
	And I just got three or four hard copies and one cleaned up copy of the sighting that day.
	And yeah, it's pretty damning evidence, actually.
	What happened to that report, Ray?
	Where did that report go?
	You've got a copy, but what did they do with it?
	Well, the interesting concept here is that the Alvera radar, it's a French design, was replaced, I think it was in 2009.
	It was all torn out.
	A new air traffic control tower was built in Jersey, and the old radar system, which was conjoined with Guernsey, the same radar would be used for both heads, one in Jersey, one in Guernsey, which were 20 miles away from each other.
	And the old system was taken out, a new system was put in, and my old tape of that particular couple of hours was kept in a storage bin and was thrown away.
	Really?
	Or so we thought.
	So you thought.
	You mean there's another aspect of this story?
	Well, there is, and it's quite interesting, and it's happening right now, is the fact that a complete recording of that whole event, one of the controllers on duty took it home from the old Alvera radar, had no way of replaying it because the system had now disappeared, and kept a copy of it in his shed, in his garden.
	And through a very diligent French team, they discovered that this tape was in this chap's shed and they've gotten hold of it.
	And they are, as we speak, in the process of downloading it into a Windows compatible system.
	Now, I understand it's a very long-winded process And it has to be done one frame at a time over a number of hours because the systems aren't compatible.
	But they are downloading it into a Windows system, which should be able to clean up the whole issue and see exactly what we've got and the timings that we've got on there.
	Because each radar head, as I mentioned, one in Jersey, one in Guernsey, every time it hits an object, it puts an instantaneous timing message on that particular dot.
	And so each particular dot from both the Jersey head and the Guernsey head can be seen as different colours.
	One is red and one blue, I believe.
	And the other thing is that each individual dot is timed.
	And that's how we know that these things appeared.
	These two objects appeared and disappeared at the same time.
	Very, very, in fact, exactly the same time, to within a few seconds.
	And was that report later sent to the Ministry of Defence?
	I'm just wondering whether Nick Pope, who was still working for the MOD at that point, whether his department got that?
	It would have been, that was sent, but of course all this stuff happened weeks after.
	When I went down to Guernsey, it's inside of Jersey and took this data from the Jersey Air Traffic Control and the photographs and the pictures of the traces.
	That was all much later, three, four weeks later, and or more than that actually.
	But there was an instantaneous report sent to the Ministry of Defence from Jersey Air Traffic Control.
	It's a mandatory report, it has to be sent.
	And of course, here we go.
	The usual story.
	Ministry of Defence is not a threat, it's not a threat to UK airspace, so we're not going to investigate it.
	The fact that at that time, the airspace category has changed now, but at that time that airspace category was Class A. Now, in the UK, there's only the London Terminal Manoeuvering Area and the Channel Islands that were Class A controlled airspace, which is the highest control available to UK, anywhere in the world.
	It's the most highly inspected and surveilled airspace in the world.
	Now, people ask me, do you think this was a military exercise?
	I said, it's perfectly possible it could have been.
	I don't know.
	But why would you want to do that in Class A controlled airspace in front of everybody?
	You would want to do that somewhere really private, really secret.
	Let's get back to the chronology of this thing then.
	There you are.
	You'd seen it.
	You'd reported it.
	Jersey were aware of it.
	Was anybody else in that airspace at that time?
	I wonder if any other aircraft pilots saw it.
	You mentioned about one chap in the airplane.
	There was a couple that sat behind that particular fellow using the binoculars.
	And they also saw it.
	John's actually colourblind, so he got the colour wrong.
	But Kate, she saw it as well, and we got together afterwards and we discussed it.
	I hope I lead her, but she reported it as an independent witness.
	But we're now getting quite close to these two objects, and I'm becoming a bit uncomfortable.
	I've been flying towards them now for about 10 minutes and getting closer and closer.
	Now, you don't need binoculars to see this closest one to me now.
	It's like very tangibly visible just hanging in the sky.
	It appeared to me to be stationary, but it wasn't quite.
	It was doing about six knots to the north.
	So at that point, the Jersey air traffic controller, unbeknownst to me, is talking to another aircraft, which was a Jetstream 32 aircraft out of the Island Man into Jersey, operated by Blue Islands.
	And the general call is, can anyone see anything in the general area of Alderney?
	And this particular pilot, which was going in a southeasterly direction, looked over his captain, looked over his left shoulder, and in his seven o'clock, right over his left shoulder, he could see the object that was closest to me.
	So there was a second, a verifiable airborne viewing of the same object that I was watching.
	So that was nice.
	I didn't know this until long after, well, until I got back into Orderney that night.
	I got a call from Jersey saying that there had been a second sighting of it.
	No contact from the ground at all because there was a haze layer at 2,000 feet.
	So now we're in a scenario where we've got physical viewing on my aircraft, radio reports, and also radar contact, but also a second aircraft in a different part of the airspace being able to see the same object.
	And we're still getting closer and closer to this thing.
	So you are closing in on a large solid object which appears to be working in unison with another solid object of a similar kind.
	What is going through your mind at that point?
	Well, now I'm getting a little bit tetchy now because I'm wondering that when we go down through this haze layer, where this thing is going to be, is it going to start moving towards us?
	I'm estimating now that we're still around about, as I start the descent from 4,000 feet, that we're still around about 10 miles away, but I've got around about 8 miles to fly into Alderney.
	Where's this thing going to go?
	When I lose sight of it through the haze layer, where's it going to be?
	So I'm thinking, let's start now this descent.
	Had I been on my own, and I've said this to other people, had I been in an empty aircraft, I've gone and have a good look at this thing.
	I've gone over it, under it, or whatever it took to find out what this thing was.
	But with the passengers on board, that's not my job.
	And you're sure that this was a solid object with the same integrity as your aircraft?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, without any doubt about that.
	I just wish there had been some upper, you know, no upper clouds, so that there would have been direct sunshine shining on the sea.
	So that I could have actually seen a shadow, if you understand what I mean, on the sea surface, but there wasn't anything like that.
	There was no terms of reference.
	I couldn't tell you whether this thing was circular or just an oval section from what I could see it from my side.
	Excuse me.
	It looked like a C D disc on edge.
	If you hold a C D disc up and just move it very slightly in the plane, it looked very sharp at each end.
	And yeah, I couldn't tell if it was circular, but there's definitely something solid, definitely something tangible right in front of us now, albeit it was actually still 10 miles away.
	But that's how large this massive piece of equipment was.
	So By this point, you're getting a much clearer idea of the scale and size of this thing.
	Absolutely, yeah, getting very close to it now.
	So we start the descent into Orderney and keep an eye on this object to see if it's going to move or not.
	And as we go through 2,000 feet, I lose physical sight of it because of the haze in the atmosphere.
	It precludes any visual until you get down below it.
	And I got down below it and still couldn't see up through the haze layer.
	And there was Aldeny right in front of us.
	And we landed.
	And at that point, after landing, without wanting to lead the passengers, as I mentioned, as I said, if anyone saw anything unusual during that flight and you'd like to discuss it, please come into the office and make a report.
	Which, as I said, Kate and John did do that.
	And they've been sort of on television lots of times to describe what they saw, which was pretty much the same as what I saw.
	Did anybody take any pictures?
	Unfortunately not.
	Now, I had a brand new phone.
	I'd just got a phone.
	My old phone didn't have a camera on it, but going back into the day a bit now, we're going back 10 years.
	And the phone I had on me, which did take photographs, I totally forgot about.
	There's a lot going on, you know.
	So I just did not take any photos.
	That's the one regret I've got about this thing.
	But there we are.
	I read, I didn't see the channel television report.
	That's your local television station that made a big thing of this story at the time.
	But I did read one of the newspaper reports in the days subsequent to this.
	And the quotes from you sounded rather shaken.
	You sounded as if, even though you are an experienced pilot, that something had happened to you up there that really did leave you shaken and disturbed a little.
	Well, two things.
	One was the enormity of the size of these objects.
	We're talking something around about a mile across from one end to the other.
	A huge...
	How can this be reflecting radar if it's not solid?
	You know, there's got to be something to reflect the radar.
	So it has to be something physically in the sky.
	This was the biggest machine that would ever have been airborne in history.
	There's nothing bigger than this machine.
	And I'm flying towards it with a tiny little aeroplane with a dozen people on.
	What now?
	It was actually a very big relief to get on the ground and have some tea make this report, which I scribbled and sent off to Jersey because, actual fact, I'm flying again in a few minutes back to Southampton with another load of passengers and they want to get going.
	And how can you, after you've been through something like that, Ray, how can you get back in the saddle and do it again with the possible feeling you might encounter this thing even more closely on the way back?
	That's it.
	That is a very valid point.
	Now, I'm at this moment in time thinking I'm the only person that saw this.
	So I didn't know, apart from the chap with the binoculars immediately behind me, and not just this one object, of course a second object as well.
	But I didn't know about Kate and John in row three behind me that they'd seen it.
	I thought I was pretty much the only person apart from the chap with the binoculars that saw this.
	Am I thinking this is me?
	It's got to be something there.
	But, you know, I didn't know about all the other corroborating evidence at that time.
	So I just made a quick report to the CAA.
	Jersey contacted the Ministry of Defence and also the CAA in the UK when they weren't interested.
	So, okay, what do we do now?
	Let's go back to Southampton.
	So we loaded up the airplane and about 30 minutes later, a little bit late because of this report I had to write, got airborne out of Aldenin.
	It was heading directly towards the last point where I saw this object in the sky on the take-off heading.
	And as I rose up through 2,000 feet in quite actually a steep right turn, so I wasn't going to head towards this thing.
	There was nothing there.
	This thing had disappeared, both gone.
	And frankly, I was pretty thankful for that, to be honest.
	Well, I can certainly understand and appreciate that.
	At what stage did you come to believe this is what we now call an unidentified flying object?
	When did that hit you?
	I think that came definitively when I got the report that there was a radar contact.
	But it was very much confirmed by the second sighting from the other aircraft in controlled airspace, from the Blue Islands aircraft, the Jetstream going into Jersey.
	That's when it came home to me.
	It came home to me then quite firmly that there was something there which shouldn't have been in that airspace that obviously was.
	And really, that's about all I can tell you about that.
	It was weird.
	It was a strange thing.
	Not the first odd thing I've ever seen.
	But certainly it's, well, ten years later, people are still talking about it.
	Well, they say, Ray, that all pilots have these experiences, not quite of the scale and magnitude of the one that you had.
	But you said you'd seen other things over the years.
	What sorts of things had you seen?
	Oh, things like swarms of bees, strange-looking lenticular clouds, and mountainous areas, odd things over the desert, which probably dust swirls going up to high altitudes.
	Right, but up to that point, most things that could have a rational explanation.
	Absolutely.
	It's physical swarms of bees, for example, you know, they look quite strange.
	Then all of a sudden you hit them, and the aircraft is completely covered in carcasses.
	But yeah, all physical things that can be explained away.
	Now, this was a second item.
	I did see another one not long before that, actually.
	But it's a second thing I've ever seen that is totally unexplainable.
	It was brand new to me.
	I'd never seen anything like it.
	No flying machine has ever been made that I know about outside of the military.
	No other flying machine has ever been made not only to look like that, of its magnitude.
	And can you imagine the amount of money that it would take just to construct a mile-long machine that was flying?
	If that technology is ours, if you pardon the expression, an awful lot of thought and work has gone into this thing.
	And how would you disguise something that is that big?
	Well, you know, when it's on the ground.
	This is it.
	This is a very Good point, and why would, as we mentioned a few minutes ago, why would you want to put that in Class A controlled airspace to hide it?
	It just seems to me that the people, persons, objects, beings that were piloting this aircraft weren't from around here, as I've said many times before.
	They weren't from around this area.
	They didn't know this was Class A controlled airspace probably.
	Well, clearly not by the sense of a digital I don't know if there was a way.
	Did you or air traffic control try to signal this thing?
	No.
	No, I certainly didn't.
	Air traffic control have only got standard radio frequencies which they can use.
	They've got no other method.
	The only other way that any sort of communication could have been had is if they called up a military service, either French or the British.
	But like I said, they weren't interested.
	And that was my first, not quite my first, but one of the first issues I've got with the fact that we were being lied to by the powers that be, put it that way.
	And when you say lied to, let's be very specific.
	How do you think you were lied to?
	Well, when something of that magnitude appears in plant-like controlled airspace in broad daylight and there should be nothing there and you're told by your effectively government agencies that it's not a threat to UK or any other airspace and they're not going to investigate it, they're covering something up.
	It appeared to be.
	They're actually not wanting to get involved in this for a number of reasons.
	And the reasons, having thought about it over the years, is that we don't know what it is, that's number one.
	Or number two, we do know what it is and we can't do anything about it, so we're not going to do anything about it, that's number two.
	And number three would be we know exactly what it is and we're colluding.
	We're actually in communication with whatever these things, people, things, objects are.
	And Ray, before this incident, as somebody who's a professional man, you know, pilot is the most responsible job, I think, apart from a heart surgeon.
	I think they're probably equal that you can get.
	Did you believe any of these things before that incident?
	Were you a UFO man?
	Did you like conspiracy theories?
	No, not at all.
	No, I had no sort of, apart from the usual stuff you see in the newspapers and the Reynolds and Forest and big deals like that, I thought about it, but it wasn't anything that was affecting me in any way.
	No, so not pro or anti thinking about it.
	I keep a fairly open mind about different issues, but certainly not a ufologist, as I think the Americans tend to call them.
	And what about the crew on the plane?
	How big was the crew?
	I seem to remember there was one steward or stewardess on those flights.
	It's not my airplane, no.
	Mine's a single crew airplane.
	I'm the only crew on those planes.
	You're the only person?
	There is no aisle, so there's no drinks.
	Very annoying.
	That's right.
	Yeah, you get a bite to eat, and then that clears the eustation tubes when you're chewing.
	So, because it's not a pressurized airplane, it's unpressurized.
	It tends to help the children when we're going downhill to clear their ears and they don't get any pain.
	Yeah, but no other questions.
	I'm just giving my listener a sense of the scale and intimacy of that way of flying in that area.
	Did you try to make contact with anybody at an official level about this?
	I presume because you still work for the airline, you were bound by certain regulations and you couldn't.
	But you tell me.
	I made the excuse me a second.
	I made the assumption actually that they would want to speak to me.
	I was completely wrong.
	Absolutely 100% out on that one.
	They didn't want to discuss it with anybody.
	Jersey Air Traffic Control had a very short diverse response.
	We're not going to investigate it.
	And frankly, that was it.
	Now, of course, at this time, I'm getting inundated with television stations, radio, newspapers, etc.
	And lots and lots of investigative journalists, etc., wanted to get involved in probing this, whatever happened that day.
	So I thought, okay.
	I had so many offers.
	But I wanted to choose a sceptical band of people which would look at it with an objective view, which I assumed that they would.
	I wanted a sceptical group, and they wrote a 160-odd-page report going into all manner of different types of possibilities of what this sighting could have been.
	And after 160 pages of it, with reflections from French lakes and inversion layers, and military and ships on the sea, etc., etc., they came up with a, we don't know what it is, so therefore it is an unidentified flying object.
	That's basically what they came up with.
	So that doesn't really push you much further on, does it?
	No, what it did do is that I had an independent report.
	Now, this is where my issues somewhat become blurred over what was happening here, what their findings were.
	I don't know whether they were independent, but what it boiled down to is this tangible physical radar evidence ended up flying over a big rock called the Caskets Rock.
	There's a very tragic shipping accident there back in the late 1800s, 1896 with the SS Stellar.
	Huge loss of life, where this ship just crashed into this rock and broke up and lots of people died, unfortunately.
	Now, this object, the closest one to me, flew pretty much directly over top of this rock reef.
	And as you can see on the radar traces, it's pretty straightforward.
	However, on this official report of the independent skeptical group that I got involved with, they suggested that it was a ship.
	It's most likely to have been a ship.
	And this ship that they're talking about sailed right over the top of this cascade of rocks.
	So I don't know many ships that do that, you know, seagoing vessels.
	They don't tend to work out very well when they hit rocks.
	So just to explain that for our listener, just to put the pee in the pod here, if a ship had been reflected back up somehow into your line of sight, it was actually going over a place that it couldn't go over because it's a hazard to shipping.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, there's a big rock reef there, and as mentioned, ships have hit it and broken up before.
	So for you, it remains a mystery.
	I know that there has been renewed media interest in the last few years.
	I think there was a Canadian company, according to the Guernsey Press newspaper, got in touch with you about three years back.
	What came of that?
	Well, they actually were very not at all critical, absolutely.
	They were quite supportive.
	Canadians, there's a Dutch group and there's an American group.
	This is, like I say, it's reverberating all around the world, this particular story, because of the evidence.
	I've got all of the physical evidence, and it's out there now in a report.
	But also, I've got the radar tapes, I've got the, that hopefully is going to blow the lid off this thing completely, because then we can see exactly what it is when they're finally published.
	I've got the audio tapes, I've got the radar physical evidence, and we've got a confirmed sighting for another space.
	It's one of the only cases of a UFO sighting which can be corroborated in many different ways.
	Mostly they're visual sightings, sometimes they're film evidence from one place.
	Very occasionally, you get film evidence from two or three places.
	But this particular one, that's what it hasn't got.
	It hasn't got the film evidence, but it's got everything else that make up the story as being probably one of the most highly investigated UFO sightings out there today.
	Listen, I entirely get where you're coming from, and I'm right behind you.
	I may get the odd email from people saying this man is retired.
	Why is he keeping this going?
	What do you say to people who make those kinds of points?
	Oh, good luck.
	Here's the big issue.
	I've been asked to go and talk on various different programs all over the states.
	It's a big industry in the United States.
	I realize that it's a massive industry.
	There's a lot of people making a lot of money out of this type of operation and Roswell and all that stuff going on.
	I didn't want to go down that road.
	It was possible that it could have been speaking tours and all that sort of nonsense.
	I'm not like that.
	That, I think, would demean the actual validity of this event.
	I don't think it would have encouraged any further investigation if I'd have gone down that road.
	Now, it would appear that this French investigation group have now picked up the baton.
	They're running with it.
	If they can come out with some credible evidence from the newly found tapes that were in this garden shed in Guernsey, sorry, in Jersey, if that can then redefine this story with some sort of accurate outcome, I'll be more than happy with that.
	So to any sort of emailed sceptical listeners, and I hope there are a lot of skeptical listeners, because this stuff needs to be analysed from every side, and a lot of things do.
	But I'd say to them, wait for this new evidence, have another look at it when this comes out.
	It's probably going to be quite enlightening.
	In fact, it might really make a few people sit up and think, hell, maybe we're not alone here.
	But your life was not like this before that event.
	Your life changed on that day, didn't it?
	Definitely.
	Absolutely.
	It brought a number of things home to me that we're not being told what's going on.
	And that doesn't just translate into UFOs.
	It translates into, from my evidence and my researchers, ever since then, it converts into things like energy, free energy.
	There's so much free energy out there that we're not tapping into or not being allowed to tap into.
	But all of these things were peripheral to your life.
	You weren't as interested or indeed interested in these things before this event.
	This was a catalyst, it seems, Ray?
	Absolutely.
	I had no interest in that sort of area whatsoever at all.
	You know, the fact that the medical profession isn't doing what it should be doing, and, you know, evidence to support that now, and there is machinery out there that can do an awful lot of good.
	And all this appears, just like the UFO thing, it all appears to be being suppressed.
	And the reason behind that, I suspect, is, well, as we mentioned about the three things earlier, perhaps they don't know what it is, or they can't do anything about it, or they know what it is, and they don't want to do anything about it because they're working with them, is on the medical side of it, it's purely and simply financial.
	Well, that's another issue for another time.
	As you get older, and we are all getting older inevitably, there is a sense, I think, in a lot of us that we want to right the wrongs and we want to make sure the account is settled and squared before we have to go to wherever we might be going next.
	What would you like to happen?
	Not in any hurry.
	No, well, no, me neither.
	But what would you, vis-a-vis this incident and your involvement in it, what would you like to happen before your time comes?
	I suspect what's about to occur, and I can't put a time frame on this, is that there's a big issue here of whether this is actually exoplanetary, if it comes from outside of our planet, or whether it's a military operation.
	And that is a very strong point, actually, whether our military are re-engineering evidential craft that have landed or crashed or whatever here.
	That is a strong possibility in my mind.
	There's craft that are hovering in hangars right now in the US.
	There's no one on it.
	It's just simply not on the ground.
	it's just hovering away.
	So what happened to you was so momentous and so monumental that it's changed your mindset completely and made you think that way.
	After the event, I must ask you this because it's a point that I should have made earlier.
	After the event, did anybody wearing a uniform or a smart suit, carrying a briefcase, come and talk to you and try and debrief you?
	I have had no contact with any, not that I know of.
	I have no contact with any outside agency apart from my own company at all.
	All right, and what happened to your career after that then?
	You're retired now, Ray.
	Presumably it was uneventful thereafter?
	Yeah, no, it's I, yeah, it's I've gone into different things now.
	Flying still plays a big part, but I've just finished building a very large Aircraft hangar in Alderney itself, something that was needed.
	I'm looking at going back into flying now, actually, because in the UK you can still fly until you're aged and at the age of 65.
	So I'm looking at possibly going back into that.
	Don't know, but yes, it's a possibility.
	But for me, this particular event has really changed my outlook on everything that I see and do.
	There's a lot of false flag operations out there.
	So, you know, it all requires investigation.
	My maxim to everybody out there would be really to question everything that you are looking at, that you are told, that you see, everything that's pushed into your face.
	There's probably a reason for it, and question that.
	You don't sound like a bitter man on any level whatsoever.
	You sound like a very frustrated man.
	I think if I've done an awful lot of research over the last 10 years, not only into the UFO community and the world of UFOs, but also to pretty much every other industry on earth.
	And I find out that it's not the government that's running it.
	It's an exo-government.
	It's a government that's above the government, if you like.
	Some very rich people, some elites that are operating the whole system on our behalf, by the look of it.
	And I don't think it's beneficial.
	So I would like to think that eventually the people will sort of realise what's happening and would like to change it.
	It's going to be very difficult because these people sort of own a few armies and air forces and things like that.
	But I think people power eventually will overcome.
	So your reference to what I would like to see on my, you know, after I've passed away, it would be for the people to be in command as opposed to a few people in command.
	You know, a lot of us have watched that film about Sully, the man who saved that plane on the Hudson River and all of the people who are grateful and will always be to him.
	And, you know, brilliantly played by Tom Hanks in the movie.
	But that was a movie.
	In real life, when you were closing in on this thing that was so huge you didn't know what it was, were you mentally making a plan in case it started to behave erratically and affect you more?
	Yes, the plan was to turn 180 degrees away and get down quickly.
	That was my the ultimate escape plan.
	It's all you can do in an aircraft is give yourself distance and get out of its way.
	If it's coming towards you, it probably can't maneuver that quickly.
	I had no idea what it was capable of doing.
	So yeah, that was the ultimate plan.
	The primary plan was to get the passengers on the ground, carry on with their lives.
	But the ultimate plan was a 180 turn, going to go in the opposite direction and get down on the deck and see where we went from there, really.
	And what did your colleagues, both at the airline and other pilots, other aviation people, in the days and months after that event, what did they make of you and what did they make of the event?
	You'd be amazed at the number of people that I knew in the flying industry that came to me sat in a bar or in the street or whatever, passing pullover in a car.
	They flagged me down and said, do you know what?
	I saw something very similar to that in 1988.
	There was a relatively crusty pilot that had retired and was still living in Albany.
	And he came over to me.
	He never used to speak, very, very rarely.
	He is an ex-Royal Air Force.
	He said to me, do you know what?
	I was flying between Jersey and Guernsey one day and off my right-hand wingtip, I passed what I thought was a wood-burning stove.
	A black box with a bit of metal sticking out on top of it.
	I just went right past the wingtip.
	It was stationary and he flew past it.
	You know, this is a sort of fellow that would never discuss that in open conversation.
	It surprised me.
	But so many other pilots that I know and also that I've spoken to in various other places, they've seen a lot of stuff, but I don't think they're much in a position to want to come out and talk about it.
	I still believe there is a general feeling in the UK that it's not good for your career prospects.
	And as you said, airlines and in the US, airlines that pilots work for and they have to have a mind to their careers, a lot of these airlines don't want these things getting into the public domain.
	That was certainly the case with the Blue Islands pilot flying into Jersey with a jet stream that saw this object over his left shoulder.
	He said, he told me, he said, they won't let me talk about it, you know, which I think is terrible.
	It's really, it's his duty to report that and to talk about it.
	It's aviation law in the UK that the airspace you're in, if you see something that shouldn't be there or you think there's something that shouldn't be there, then you must report it and you must write a report and you must do it effectively over the radio.
	Did anybody test your competence after that?
	Did anybody have any doubts as to your competence after that event?
	If they think I was mental, you know.
	Did they think you perhaps had issues that needed to be investigating just in case?
	I think, well, because of the other corroborating evidence, people know.
	The other thing that I did see, which was actually going towards the Isle of White, I didn't make public because I was the only person to see it.
	It was a short-lived event, only about one minute, once again, looking through binoculars, and it just disappeared.
	Went behind some clouds, and that was that.
	So I didn't make any sort of noises about that or even have time to talk to air traffic about it.
	But once again, there was something there.
	But that was different.
	I was the only person to see that.
	This one has been, this particular sighting has been seen by many different people over different places.
	So yeah, I don't think there's any issues.
	My fellow aviators, pretty much on the whole, I can't even think of one that was anti-what I saw.
	So yeah, we believe you.
	Are you going to write a book, Ray, because you should?
	It's possible.
	I've been asked, actually, in fact, it wasn't that long ago, to do a life book.
	I don't know if you know what that is.
	It's from childhood to the end.
	I'm still thinking about that.
	It might be good fun.
	But this chapter would certainly be a long one.
	Absolutely.
	And all of that media interest, of course, it's boiled itself down a little now, so it's not going to be quite so much as it was at the time.
	But how did you feel about all of the press interest, the phone calls that you would get?
	I mean, one of those phone calls was from me, but I think you'd taken so many phone calls from other people at that time, your head was probably spinning, and you decided to give it a rest for a while.
	You know, it must have been difficult to get through.
	Well, I actually didn't decide to give it a rest.
	It decided that it would give itself a rest.
	And here's the interesting thing.
	You mentioned about the Canadian group a little while ago.
	That was, I think, 2014.
	I had three email contacts, having heard nothing for probably three years, I had three email contacts in the space of three hours to re-investigate this.
	So where did they come from?
	What was how is it purely coincidental that three independent companies on three different continents should contact me in three hours to say, can we go over this story again, please?
	I just wonder whether someone right at the very top pulling the strings on this.
	Perhaps thinks now is the time for some version of this to come out.
	Yeah.
	And who that may be, or if it is just purely coincidental, I really don't know.
	Because I spoke to all of these individual bosses of these companies that came to see me, and they said they had nothing from on high.
	They were just told by their immediate boss that perhaps this might be a good thing to reinvestigate.
	But who their immediate bosses were and who's at the top of that chain, I don't know.
	But I suspect, once again, there's a little bit of collusion going on there in what we see and how we see it.
	Oh, Ray, is there anything that you would like to say before we conclude this?
	And I'm very grateful to you, I must say, and to Leslie Kane for putting us in touch.
	Anything you would like to say that you haven't yet?
	Well, I'd like to say to Leslie, keep on doing the great work.
	The books that she produces are just amazing.
	The accuracy and detail, fantastic.
	I recommend to your readers that you go and buy them.
	To the general population, I think you're in a unique position now.
	Everyone out there with a mobile telephone is just to keep watching the skies because it's all out there.
	It's just a matter of looking out the window.
	I think that's a beautiful quote and point at which to park this.
	I hope we stay in touch.
	And I wish you luck in the future, Ray, with whatever you do.
	And I hope that one of these days we speak again.
	Thank you so much for making time for me.
	No problem, Howard.
	And yeah, please do stay in touch.
	And it's been a pleasure talking to you.
	Ray Bowyer's true life story.
	Let me know what you think about that.
	What a remarkable thing to have gone through.
	And I can only imagine that when you've been through something like that, your view of the world and everything probably changes fundamentally.
	And I wonder what happened to the passengers who saw what they saw on that flight.
	If you were a passenger or you know one on that flight, or you've experienced something similar, let me know.
	Get in touch at theunexplained.tv.
	You can send me a message through the website designed and honed by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
	And I always like to hear from you.
	When you get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	It is always vital.
	And I'll give you a shout out on here if and when we get the time.
	So, more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	Until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London, and please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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