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April 29, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:06
Edition 449 - UFO Special
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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.
Well, every time I've spoken with you recently, the sun has been shining through my window, so I guess it all had to stop after about seven or ten days of it.
And it has.
It's been raining over the last 24 hours or so.
It's pretty dull, but actually it's been a welcome respite.
You can have too much of a good thing.
How are you getting on with lockdown?
Here I'm kind of bearing up with it.
I have days where I think, I hope and pray this is going to end because I'm going to go nuts.
And days when I feel perfectly happy tinkering about in my little studio, doing little bits of laundry and trying to plan the future, which I want to be different from the past, because I've got a lot of big changes to make in my life.
And they have been staring me in the face for a very long time.
And I'm going to get round and do them, I hope.
Maybe you feel the same.
My thoughts are with all the families touched by coronavirus.
There are more and more of them in this country and around the world.
You know, you've got a lot of people thinking about you.
It is a terrible thing.
And one day, the world will overcome.
There are all sorts of trials and experiments being done.
And I've said this until I'm blue in the face, that I believe the power of human ingenuity will help us to see our way through all of this.
I just have this feeling.
There's no specific reason for feeling this way, but I've just got a gut feeling for what that is worth, that we're going to get through this and maybe come out of this faster than some of the naysayers and the doommongers are actually predicting.
I just reckon if we all think that way, it will happen.
But again, I have no special information and that's just a feeling on my behalf.
Thank you for all of your emails and communications.
I'm not going to do shout-outs on this edition, but I would like to thank one person.
And I've had a few emails like this recently, and they mean a lot when they come, especially when you're here in the silence and thinking about what is going to happen to me and to the world after this crisis that we're going through.
This is from Brian in Calgary, Canada.
Got it today.
He says, you've been putting out episodes at such a rate, you might even get to 500 this year.
I've been thinking that too.
He says some nice things about the show, and he says, you are one of the people helping the world get through this.
And he calls me a hero.
Well, I don't think I'm a hero, Brian, but, you know, I'm just happy to be doing this thing, and I'm happy that it's reaching people.
And the real heroes at the moment are people like I encountered when I had to go and have my ear looked at recently at a local NHS hospital.
Those are the people wearing protective gear and trying to help us get through this and trying to heal those who are sick and, you know, help those who go there with issues and problems.
So, you know, those, I think, are the heroes at this hour.
But what you said meant a great deal to me.
And I've had a few emails like that.
And, you know, they keep me going in the times when, you know, I do this show and I know that the show touches a lot of people.
But I have, like every human being, I have my downtimes when I have major doubts and a worry about everything.
But, you know, we have to have that faith that we are going to transcend and ascend.
And that's what I think about this.
Now, what we're going to be doing on this edition, there's been a story in the news the last couple of days about the Nimitz UFO sightings and the one other that happened in 2015.
Nimitz, of course, 2004.
News sources, including Sky News here, reporting the Pentagon has declassified three videos of, quote, unidentified aerial phenomena.
The black and white videos were recorded by Navy pilots, one, as we know, November 2004, two, in January 2015, the U.S. Department of Defense has said.
The footage had been shared online unofficially and was already well known to UFO enthusiasts.
But the Pentagon said Monday this week that it had chosen to release the videos officially.
Now, I think potentially this means a lot, but I need some confirmation on that and I need to talk it around with somebody.
So I'm going to be speaking in a moment with Nick Pope in the US, former MOD UFO investigator and now independent investigator in America.
So it'll be good to hear Nick's take on this and maybe he will think, as I kind of think that this has been coming, but what does it mean?
We'll find out.
And then from my radio show, I've been meaning to put this out for you.
Ray Bowyer, the airline pilot who in 2007 near the Channel Islands, he was a pilot of planes flying backwards and forwards to the Channel Islands from Southampton in the south of England.
He saw a massive, and I mean huge, UFO.
It still hasn't been explained.
There are people who are fascinated by this story as I am.
So I caught up with Ray Bowyer a couple of weeks ago on my radio show.
Got a lot of response to that, so I'm putting that conversation here without the commercials or anything else in it.
So you'll hear that right after Nick Pope.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And I send my best wishes from London Town, the outskirts of it, to you and your family, wherever you may be.
Thank you very much for being part of my show and part of this family that is the unexplained and has been for years and years.
All right.
First of all, then, those declassified videos, let's get to Nick Pope in the US and get his thoughts about this.
Nick, thank you for doing this.
Is this something that is earth-shaking, groundbreaking, totally unexpected?
How should we be viewing this release?
This is a hugely significant development.
I get the people who say, wait a minute, we've seen these videos before.
Yes, absolutely.
But as the Pentagon themselves said, those previous releases were unauthorized.
What's happened now, of course, is that the Department of Defense have themselves taken ownership of this and said, 100% confirmation, this is real.
Our pilots did see these things and our position is still, we don't know what the heck they were.
So absolutely, this is groundbreaking move.
It is now official.
Since everybody's seen them, you have, I have, the whole world has, why did they need to do this?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
And we've discussed this before.
And I've noticed in the last two and a half years since the story of the Pentagon's ATIP program and the associated story of these videos broke, I've noticed that every time the story is almost in danger of dying down, it flares up again.
But here's the interesting thing.
It's usually the U.S. military or the Department of Defense that does something to stir the pot.
And that, of course, is absolutely the opposite to the old way in which this was done, where governments either said nothing or when they did say something, it was very low-key and downplayed and debunked.
So here you've got a situation where the US government is itself putting this out under the spotlight.
And as I say, I don't have all the answers to this, but I think people should bear in mind that it's the government themselves leading with this.
Well, this could suggest a number of things, couldn't it?
It could suggest that somebody's just said, let's get this off our desks.
People keep asking us about this.
Let's just put the damn videos out there because they're out there already and then we can forget about it for now.
Or if you want to look at it another way, this is a prelude to something else.
Indeed.
And the idea of it being a prelude is quite timely.
There are rumors circulating of a second Pentagon announcement, imminently expected, probably not hugely ground-shaking in its revelations, but something that will give us more information about the shadowy ATIP program and what they did or didn't do in relation to UFO research,
which people are still debating, you know, whether this was really just a program looking at next generation aviation threats to the US, Russia, China, et cetera, or whether it was UFO-related.
So we've got that.
But also, of course, people are saying, well, maybe this is all part of a process to gradually acclimatize people, to drip feed the information out there ahead of something truly extraordinary.
And maybe they know something.
Maybe something's coming.
I'm speculating, but I'm just telling you what's out there, what people are saying about all this.
Which winds us back to the question I asked before.
Why would they do this?
And there has to be at least a 40% chance that it's because it is part of a process.
And if you were going to do it, I mean, if you only look at it rationally, if you looked at it rationally, if you had to make an announcement along the lines of we are not alone, then you'd have to give people some preparation for it.
You could not drop this particular bombshell on them without unexpected consequences.
I mean, look, there's a 40% chance, and that's just me putting odds on it.
But it is a realistic possibility.
It is.
I mean, I'm not one of these people who buys into the theory that there'd be panic in the street, but you're absolutely right.
Any psychologist will tell you that if you want to reduce the shock value of something, you don't have it come suddenly and unexpectedly.
You lay the groundwork.
So absolutely, if this was part of a process and then they did make some announcement, we found something, we're going to reveal something, however it unfolds, people will say, oh, yes, yes, I knew about that.
Yes, I've seen the videos.
And you don't, as the saying goes, you don't shock people by telling them something they already believe or already think they pretty much know.
And public confidence is an issue here, because if that is what is happening, and neither of us knows this, but public confidence needs to be massaged.
So if ultimately some other kind of announcement has to be made, then nobody's going to say they've been keeping this secret from us for so long.
They're going to make that process of people finger pointing a little easier for them.
Yes, I think what we see here is the, I used the phrase taking ownership, but absolutely, the Department of Defense is putting itself front and center.
They're taking this back.
They're driving the narrative.
So instead of reacting to people like the New York Times, to the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, they are now putting themselves back in the driver's seat of this whole process.
And that's important.
Something else which I think is important, and everyone is saying this in relation to the why now question, is what about the coronavirus situation?
This has clearly taken us into new and uncharted territory.
And a lot of people are saying, why would the Pentagon be putting out this UFO story now?
Is it because this is the archetypal bad day, good day to bury bad news?
Or is it the opposite?
With people so, by now, I guess, pretty much fed up with 24-7 coronavirus coverage.
A story like this actually, counterintuitively, I think, and I'd be interested in your take as a journalist and presenter, it maybe is more attractive and more noteworthy than usual because people say, at last, a big story that isn't coronavirus.
So again, it almost suggests they are trying to draw attention to this and put it under the spotlight.
Yeah, my take on that, I totally accept that point of here is some alternative news, because let me tell you, there isn't a whole lot of it around that is worth listening to.
And as you know, most broadcast coverage is about coronavirus.
Most of the newspapers are totally preoccupied with it because of the uncertainty about it, because of the mounting death toll in the United Kingdom and everywhere.
And you know about that in America, Nick, of course you do.
But there's another aspect of this that I considered as soon as I saw this story.
I thought, people, this year, since we've known about coronavirus, we've come to accept the unthinkable.
So in a climate where you've come to accept the unthinkable, if, and again, these are 10-mile high ifs, if you had to put out something that was going to cause a lot of finger pointing, may cause some consternation, who knows what it would, but if you had to put out a message that said we Are not alone in the universe.
How about doing it at a time when people are ready to accept the unthinkable?
Well, I think I like that point.
I mean, you're kind of 10-mile high what-ifs.
You could say, without wanting to get into some really kind of bizarre conspiratorial matrix-style conspiracy, but it's almost as if we're living in a low-probability reality at the moment.
Who would have thought a few years ago that Donald Trump would be president?
Who would have thought that the world would almost literally come to a standstill because of a virus?
And yet, here we are.
So, yeah, maybe it's like one, two, three, waiting for the other shoe to drop or the next shoe to drop, if I can mix metaphors.
And yeah, absolutely.
If these extraordinary events can occur, then maybe an announcement of an extraterrestrial reality would not seem so extraordinary given what has already come to pass.
And I can honestly, although I have no special knowledge, but I can honestly think that maybe some strategist somewhere might conceivably have had that thought, that this is a good time to do this because people are now ready to accept things that we may not have considered possible.
You know, there were two reports, I think, in the last year about the possibility of a pandemic, the fact that we weren't prepared for it.
Nobody was listening.
The public weren't listening.
We can see that governments weren't particularly listening as far as we know.
So maybe this is a good, but neither of us know this.
Maybe this is a good time.
One thing that did interest me, I don't know whether you've studied the official releases.
Do they differ in any way from what is already available on YouTube?
There are some subtle differences.
And in a slight comedy of errors, I think the Department of Defense accidentally uploaded to their own website for a while the wrong version of the video and instead of their own one of the pirated copies.
There are no significant differences.
The real missing piece of the puzzle, of course, well, there are two.
Firstly, the various telemetry and other data that have been stripped off that would tell us the critical pieces of information that we want to know.
Like, for example, what's the true speed of these objects?
So some of the data is missing in both versions.
And obviously, the real, the absolute raw data will be classified.
The second thing that's missing is all the rest of these videos.
We know the US Navy has talked about this as a series of unauthorized incursions into restricted military airspace.
And yet we've got just three videos.
So it's the tip of the iceberg.
There's a whole lot more out there, and it's highly classified.
So part of the process is maybe going to be getting some of the rest of this out there.
Yeah, because we know, both of us have spoken to people who've told us that this is the case, and there's no reason not to believe them, that people appeared on both of those vessels, both the Nimitz, and it was the Princeton, wasn't it, in 2015?
Yes.
That the tapes of those things, the records of those things, were spirited away pretty sharpish, and people were told, shut up about this.
So there must have been a reason for that, even if that reason was just the reason of, well, these are things that we need to study.
But maybe there was more to it because those people appeared on board those ships at just the right time as if they'd been almost prepared for it.
Indeed.
But I think the other important point with this is that the Pentagon now putting this out themselves further destigmatizes all of this.
And it gives top cover to other pilots and radar operators to speak out about this.
Because I think previously, even with these videos circulating, but in an unauthorized fashion, some people would hold back and say, yeah, well, this is a leak.
I don't want to be a whistleblower.
But now the Department of Defense themselves have put this out there.
I think it lays the ground for other people to come forward and say, well, now my own bosses have put this out.
Now I can tell my story.
And indeed, we may find some people actively being instructed to speak out about their encounters, if indeed this is part of a wider process.
Do you think this may ultimately oil the wheels for those politicians who've been pushing for full-scale inquiries, I mean, governmental inquiries in the U.S. into the whole phenomenon?
Do you think that this will oil the wheels of that process?
I think it will.
We've discussed before how, of course, not just the president, but senators on certainly the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee have received classified briefings on all this.
I think there are other committees like Homeland Security who want to get into it.
There's a little bit of a dogfight, turf war at the moment over this.
But I think, yes, absolutely, this may oil the wheels for a discussion about something more open and public.
Maybe congressional inquiries open to everyone, not just these closed, classified briefings that we've had so far.
So as we look at it now, we can speculate.
We always can speculate.
But now we've really got something to speculate about.
If you were, and you're a very sober-minded individual, Nick, you had to be in your professional career.
And as an investigator now, you've got to see things in a balanced view.
But if you were betting on this, what do you think the chances of perhaps so-called disclosure of a kind happening this year are?
Do you think that's a likelihood?
Well, I've said before, I don't think disclosure is a single entity.
It's not a single, my fellow Americans, people of the world, we are not alone moment.
It's a process.
So I think we are seeing that process right now.
Whether there is an even bigger flagship event or not, I don't know.
But as I say, I mean, not only is disclosure not necessarily a single event, but of course, as I often warn people, it depends what we think there is to disclose.
If it's an extraterrestrial reality that we're certain of, then fine, you can disclose it.
But if it's a little bit more nebulous, as may be the case, these things are in our airspace, our radar operators track them, our pilots chase them, we don't know what they are, but they're here.
If it's that, then maybe you can't do much more than just put out these sorts of announcements.
Maybe you can't do the my fellow Americans, we're not alone moment.
And when you read this story, and when your phone started going, which I know it's been going all week about this for understandable reasons, were you surprised?
Were you shocked, or did you just think, yeah, I saw this one coming?
I wasn't particularly surprised.
No, because time and time again, as this story is in danger of winding down, the US government, the military, the intelligence community themselves stir the pot.
So I thought we were due for something.
I didn't know the exact date.
I did know an announcement was coming.
And like I said, there's a second announcement imminent.
But, you know, this subject, sometimes it intrigues me, but it seldom surprises me having sat at the Ministry of Defense doing this for so many years.
Nick, thank you for talking with me about this.
We live in interesting times.
We do indeed.
Thank you.
Independent investigator Nick Pope with his take on this.
Let's see what happens next, I guess, is the only way we can conclude that.
Okay, let's get to the conversation I had on the radio a couple of weeks ago with Ray Boya.
Ray Bowyer flying an Augenyi Airlines plane to Guernsey in the Channel Islands or across to the Channel Islands and witnesses from his cockpit window something astonishing that he still hasn't been able to explain and that experts are still looking at.
Radar recordings are being checked, even at the moment, I think, on this one.
So a fascinating story from Ray Boyer, whose life, as you will hear, was completely changed by this.
So I caught up with him on my radio show a couple of Sundays ago.
Here is that conversation.
It is an astonishing thing to have been through.
And I know because I read all the reports at the time, I even spoke to you, I think, for that London radio station at the time somehow.
And I spoke to you, and you told me how shaken up you were by what you'd seen.
Well, it was a, you know, a very unusual, exceptional event.
As I mentioned on that little snippet there, it's not something I want to repeat, because at that time, having got airborne out of Southampton with about 10 people in the back of the airplane, this is not the sort of thing you come across every day of the week.
And I don't think many pilots on earth have had the same experience as myself.
However, there it is.
There was these massive objects and we still don't know what it is or what they were.
Even though many people have tried to speculate, can you talk me through?
I think it's a good idea to take some time explaining what that day was like.
Good day.
Weather was fine.
I just completed a flight to Southampton.
Now, the aeroplane is based in Albany.
I was based in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands.
It's actually the only Channel Island in the Channel, actually.
The rest are tucked away in the bay.
And airborne out of, on a scheduled service, is four or five flights a day in April at that time to Southampton.
And I was doing the, I did the GR533, which was the Arene 533 flight.
Sorry, 543, was air to Southampton.
And on the 544 was the return journey.
And I've got the actual flight log in my hand here.
We got airborne at 1339.
And it would have been just passing from north to south, having got over the top of the Isle of Wight, roughly, which is around about 15 miles south of Southampton Airport, that I noticed this quite a bright light.
Now, in those days, there's still quite a few left now, but in those days, there are lots of things called vineries where they used to grow grapes and then later tomatoes in Guernsey.
And quite regularly, you'd see reflected sunlight from the glasshouse roofs.
And of course, as the angle between the aircraft and the sun changed, they'd disappear.
However, this very, very bright light, yellow, sparkling yellow, actually, was still dead ahead after a minute or so.
So I thought, this isn't a reflection from a greenhouse, otherwise the relative angle would have changed by now.
And I had a look at it through binoculars that I carried with me, 10x7 or 7x10 binoculars, and I noticed that it was a definitive shape.
It was about a 15 to 1 aspect ratio of length to height.
A bit like a CD disc on edge, if you see what I mean, just slightly tilted, but a brilliant yellow colour.
So 15 to 1, then, that is an enormous elevation.
Well, if you tilt a C D disc very slightly, you'll see what I mean.
It's pointed at each end, but from looking at it edge on, it appeared to be sort of 1 15th the height of the length, if you see what I mean.
Difficult to describe to you.
And then from left to right, about two thirds of the way along, there was a dark patch, an area, a darker area, with a scintillating edge to it on both sides.
So I'm flying towards this thing at 4,000 feet, and I called up air traffic control to say that I'd got this thing ahead.
And the jersey controller got on his radar and said, I can't see anything at the moment.
And I called up again, about another minute later, saying, probably a little bit more urgently now, I've got this thing ahead.
Can you please have another look?
And he took his filters off of the radar, which gives him a much clearer but raw view of what's being looked at.
And he said he did have a contact.
There was an anaprop, which is a weather-related issue in another place.
But there was also what he was saying was a definite contact.
So I'm getting closer to this now.
what he is asking me, air traffic control, is his relative position to me, which I gave him, which coincided with his plot, and also how big it was.
Now, when I first saw this, I thought, well, it's as I mentioned in that snippet earlier, I thought it was about six or seven miles away.
And he asked me the size, and I said, well, it's roughly the size of a 737 jet, or maybe twice the size of that, but it's pretty big and it's right in the way, if you see what I mean.
So I'm getting sort of slightly anxious.
It actually turned out that from radar data that we now have, it's over 50 miles away.
That's how big this thing was.
Right, indeed, as you say, that gives an indication as to how big it was, but at the time, you actually felt as a professional pilot that you might have been flying into something.
Absolutely, yeah, because it looked to be a very similar level.
Now, the other thing was there was an area of high cloud, about 10,000 feet, so there was no sunlight, effectively.
And if there had been direct sunlight, I would have been able to have seen a shadow on the water to give a relative size for it.
However, we couldn't see that.
And also, I didn't know I was still 40 plus miles away from it, having seen this thing for three or four minutes, and continued on towards Auderney with the passengers in the back.
And a couple of the passengers, in fact, two rows behind, started to see this object.
And the man behind me directly tapped me on the shoulder and he could see me looking at it through my binoculars and said, can I have a look?
So I gave him the binoculars and he had a look and he said a couple of interesting words.
And he said, are we going towards that?
And I said, yes, we are.
So we're going to keep an eye on it.
Don't worry.
But he said, it's getting closer.
Well, I thought it was getting closer, but it's still 40 miles away.
So the flight continues and I'm getting more chat from Jersey Control.
And they're saying, yes, they have a contact in its general position, which actually was just south of Alderney.
And at that time, I noticed that there was a second identical object much further south.
And it had popped up through the haze layer due to me getting closer to it.
Right, when you say there was a second object, did it look like the first one?
It was identical.
It was absolutely the same, but obviously much smaller.
It's a lot further away.
It looked to me like the first one did when I first took sight of it from 53 or 55 miles away.
So there were two of these things working.
Well, I didn't know at that time, but they were working together.
And I was...
I'll get around to that when I talk about the radar information, actually.
It's quite an interesting point that's made there.
So I'm flying down towards these objects.
They both appear to be at 4,000 feet.
And the one, the closest one, now didn't need to be looked at through binoculars.
It was just clear.
There it is.
It's right in front.
But it wasn't.
It was still 25 miles away.
So I'm getting closer.
I'm getting slightly more irate with Guernsey to try and sort of, what is it?
Do you know what, have you got any information of what this or this object?
And I told him about the second object, what we were looking at here.
And there was not much of a response about what it could be.
But I was asked if I wanted to change direction.
I said, no, I'll continue the way we are, but I'm about to descend shortly into Alderney.
And that's what happened.
It started the descent.
And the closest one now looked very, very close.
Now, the Trilander aeroplane, which is an 18-seat aeroplane, flies slightly uphill, if you understand what I mean.
It doesn't fly flat.
A bit of a strange design, but anyway.
So having made the descent, the aeroplane is now pointing down.
And then the people in the back of the airplane, as opposed to just the people in the two front rows, were able to see what was going on, able to see these objects.
Remind me how many people were on board?
There's ten.
But they were scattered throughout the length of the airplane.
So the people at the back, when we're flying along normally, can't see over the nose of the aircraft.
But in the descent, they can see that because the airplane's pointing downhill a bit.
So we're getting closer and actually at around about 2,000 feet, which was the top of the haze layer, I lost sight of the one that was closest and the one that was furthest away and actually landed normally.
And I taxied in, and at that time was it landed at what, landed at 14.20 local time in Alderney.
And I taxied in.
I didn't say anything to any of the passengers.
I simply mentioned if anybody saw anything slightly unusual or slightly strange, perhaps you'd like to come in.
I didn't want to prompt anybody.
Perhaps you'd like to come into the office and we can make a note of it and write it down.
Because I had to get back off immediately to Southampton for my next sector.
So I quickly dashed in to the office and said, look, I've seen this.
This is what's happening.
Apparently I was as white as a sheet and I needed some tea.
And I actually got in my hand the air safety report which was quickly scribbled out and sent off to the CIA in London and also the military.
This was your report?
Yes.
I was asked to send it to Jersey directly, immediately, as soon as I landed and write a brief report and send it to Jersey.
They would then send it on to the CA in London and also to the Royal Air Force, the military, in London.
And if the report reached, I'll read it just quite brief.
Please do.
It's a GR544, a flight 700 to Ordney, a Squawk was 7764 and a loaded weight aircraft of 4,200 kilos.
During the cruise at flight level 40, I noticed a bright light ahead, which I thought was a reflection from the sun off of glass in Guernsey.
However, the light continued, so I looked at it through binoculars.
I saw a shape as per diagram, there's a little diagram on this report, a brilliant yellow shining with a dark area towards the right side as I looked at it.
It appears stationary.
I asked Air Traffic Control for any contact.
Initially, they said no, and later they said they had a primary contact in the area.
As the flight continued, I noticed a second shape exactly As the first, but further away.
A number of passengers aboard noticed the lights.
The flight continued uneventfully to Alderney, and that was immediately faxed off to Jersey and on to the military and the CIA.
Now, at that point, no one on the ground in the company in Arena knew anything about this.
So they're going ahead and we're refueling the aircraft and passengers are then coming out to load up to go to Southampton.
And I'm thinking, hang on a minute, this thing was immediately off the end of the runway.
And there's a hazel and I can't see what's dead ahead.
And I'm not sure how far away this thing is or was.
And I'm going to be taking off straight towards it.
Right, so did you really realistically think then, Ray, that you might encounter this again?
That was my thinking, because having seen this thing from 55 miles away and knowing that this thing must be at least a mile long, and they're talking a big piece of kit here, if it's just above the haze level, dead ahead, then I'm not going to see it until we go through the haze layer.
You can't see through a haze layer.
Anyway, fortunately, when I got airborne and turned right to go to Southampton, quite an early right turn, actually, to try and avoid this thing, there was nothing there.
It had disappeared, gone.
And I continued on to Southampton normally, and it wasn't until I actually got back from Southampton, back into Albany, to say that there was corroborating evidence from radar.
And also, another aircraft coming in from the Isle of Man had seen the same object.
And as far as you know, what had the pilot flying in from the Isle of Man seen?
What had they described?
I spoke to him.
It was in his 7 o'clock.
He was descending, going into Jersey from the northwest.
And he had to look, it's the captain of the airplane, he had to look over his left shoulder, almost to the tail of the aircraft, to see it.
And it would have corroborated the position that I gave to air traffic and also what was seen on radar.
So it got my passengers, myself, the radar, and also a corroborator pilot from a separate airplane seeing the same thing.
He didn't actually, couldn't see that far behind him to see the second object that I saw, but he certainly saw at least one.
Now, to be a pilot, Ray, we know that you've got to have a pretty strong constitution one way or another.
You've got to be able to make quick decisions, react fast to things that happen.
You've got to be a savvy individual.
But nevertheless, having come across something like this that you can't explain and that you file a report on, and then you have to get back in the plane again and take it back to Southampton because you're on a schedule and that's your job, I can't imagine what that felt like.
That was the worst part of it, actually.
Seeing it and knowing that it was right over there, even though at the end of the day it was only seven miles away when I last made contact with it, that was the worst part, was actually getting up through this haze layer and really diligently looking around.
I had a quick chat with the radar on the way up to see if they could see anything, but there was no response actually about that on that flight.
But that was the worst part, actually expecting to see this monster.
Perhaps you're 12 o'clock and you've got a very underpowered airplane with full up of people and you don't necessarily want to be making severe aerobatic maneuvers at short notice.
But no, there was nothing there.
So in actual fact, that is what I was mentioning earlier about the radar tracks.
It would appear that the timings were quite interesting.
I've actually got the radar tracer in my hand here.
And the times that both of these objects appeared and disappeared were identical.
And it was just over an hour.
They were moving away from each other at about six knots, so about 12 knots total of time.
They appeared at the same second, by the look of it, by the look of these radar traces, so I've got my hand here, and they disappeared at the same second from radar.
And the radar traces I've got with a very ancient system called Alvira.
And it's got a primary reflection, which is basically a simple radar reflection.
There's no other data involved in that, simply a reflection, and the time that that reflection took place.
They actually start at the same moment and they finish at the same moment.
Now, interestingly enough, when I went down to Jersey to visit the air traffic control center down there, they showed me the sweeps, they call the sweeps of the radar, and one reflection of the radar beam hit the same object three times in one sweep.
So I asked the chap, the radar technician, what does that mean?
He said, well, it's hit the thing three times on the same sweep.
I said, well, can you give me a size roughly?
You know how far away it was.
It was about 23 miles away.
He said, yeah, it's probably about a mile long, something like that.
So that's kind of fitted in with my noticing of the actual size of it.
Pretty big.
Before all of this, were you a UFO person?
Did you like science fiction?
Were you into all of this stuff?
I watched the Harry Potter film.
No.
I mean, everyone's seen it and known about it.
I'd never seen anything like it before.
It wasn't of great interest to me.
I mean, I've seen many, many odd, strange, weird things in my flying career, but mainly weather-related.
I mean, once flying down in, actually to Jersey, actually, from Albany, I flew through a swarm of bees, which I thought was a black object in front of me, and all of a sudden it was just bees.
A whole aircraft was covered in a swarm of bees and could hardly see out the windscreen sort of thing.
Well, that's a stomach.
Could they foul the engine?
No, I don't think so.
No, not on a piston.
You're okay with that.
I'm relieved to hear that.
So look, when you're, I think we need to get inside this though, When you're up there, this is when you're flying out, and you spot this thing that you begin to realise is either very close to you or it's a long way away and massive.
How were you feeling?
Were you thinking UFO or were you thinking this is some Kind of weather-related aerial phenomenon that I've never seen before.
As soon as I looked at it through the binoculars, I knew that it was a tangible physical object.
It wasn't erratic weather, it wasn't a cloud formation, it wasn't sun dogs.
There was something there.
I just knew it.
It's difficult to explain, really, because having seen things all over the world in my flying career, I'd never come across anything like this before.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen something in that area.
But it certainly appeared to me that it was a tangible object.
And when the second one appeared much, much further away, really 20 miles further away that I could see it, because it was below the haze layer before that curvature of the Earth, that proved to me that there was definitely two objects.
If they'd have both been the same size, I thought, hang on, that's a bit unusual.
But one was further away than the other.
So there were two separate but identical looking pieces of kit, but one 20 miles further away than the other, therefore it appeared to be a lot smaller.
And the corroborating radar traces saying that they appeared and disappeared at the same second, to me means there's a sentient being operating those objects, craft, ships, whatever you want to call it, spacecraft.
I don't know.
So you think something hit a button, something on board one of them or both of them, and made them disappear simultaneously?
Having not been aboard, I'd love to.
I don't know how they managed to time that perfectly.
But yeah, I believe that they were operating in conjunction with one another.
Now, at that time, I don't know who you're doing for commercials, but at that moment in time, London, Heathrow, Gatwick, and the Channel Islands were under Class A controlled airspace.
Now, the rest of the UK isn't, apart from very small areas.
Not anymore, but in those days it was Class A. Now, this is the most highly surveilled radar area in the British system.
So my thinking was, why on earth would anyone, anything, want to be making visits to this area and expect not to get spotted?
I don't think it was military, and I think maybe someone arrived here who didn't know the rules, but they certainly got seen, and they certainly were picked up on radar.
Now, you mentioned military.
I know, obviously, I'm familiar with Southampton and Portsmouth naval base.
To craft out of Portsmouth heading down towards the Med, maybe going down towards Gibraltar.
Is that part of their route?
Not really sure about that, but I mentioned a few minutes ago that I did see another strange thing, which involves the Navy as well.
I was heading, it would have been in 2001, and I was heading towards Southampton from Alderney in the same type of aeroplane, Trilander, and I saw what I thought was a tube, a sparkling tube, sort of like between 2 o'clock to 8 o'clock at an angle in the sky.
And it was sparkling.
I thought, that's a bit strange.
So I had to look at it once again through my binoculars.
This was before the second sighting, in 2007.
This would have been about five or six years beforehand.
And I looked at it through the binoculars, and it was sparkling, and it was definitely something there.
And there were clouds going in front of it, and clouds going behind it.
So it's something definitely there.
And there's a relatively thick area of cloud, about five octased, about five eighths cloud, but I could still see parts of the surface.
And then getting closer to it, once again looking through the binoculars, it's getting fairly close.
And it's funny enough, around about 4,000 feet, 5,000 feet.
And a cloud went in front of it.
And then when the cloud disappeared, the object had disappeared.
Now getting closer to that point, and very unusually, for about two or three miles off of the south coast of the Isle of Wight, near the needles, about almost south of the needles, about three, perhaps four miles off, was, and I'd never seen that before or since, was a Royal Naval Frigate underneath where this object would have been.
So, hey, you tell me.
Okay, let's get back to Ray Boya in the Channel Islands.
And Ray, thank you for doing this because over the years, you haven't really done a lot of interviews about this, have you?
was a whole period where you were very reluctant to go back to this?
Yeah, it was...
And also articles.
But I don't know whether your audience will know, but this is a very, very big industry.
The ufologists in the USA is a big industry.
And I'll be pretty honest with you, and also to a small degree in the UK, a very different scenario there.
But the American ufologists tend to be in it to make a living.
And that is not what I had in mind.
I think it demeans the whole process of...
You know, there are a lot of people who are very sincere researchers, and we speak with them here.
But I understand what you're saying.
There are conferences, and there are things that are organized commercially, and of course, people do have to make a living.
But I get what you say.
Now, after this happened, you said that it choke you up.
You needed a cup of tea.
Did you try?
Which is a very British response, isn't it, really, to this situation?
Did you try and contact, reach out to people who knew about these things?
Did you try and contact people at the Ministry of Defence or even people who'd seriously investigated UFO cases?
Well, I didn't have to reach out to them.
They all came to me, to be honest, and they still are.
And I met with so many different people all over the UK, also in America, on this subject.
And I learned a huge amount and really stuff I didn't even know about.
You know, things like I'd spoke to a chap at the conference in Washington.
He'd been abducted.
I spoke to lots of military pilots, one of which had shot at a UFO in Chile and hit it.
And lots of other people involved in the industry.
And as you quite rightly pointed out, Not all are in it just for the money and the sensationalism.
There are actually genuine people out there that are wanting to know what went on.
I've certainly spoken to many of them, but were any of them able to give you a handle on what it is you might have encountered?
I think everyone's disparate.
Everyone's story that I spoke to, especially at that particular Washington meeting back in 2007, was different.
But they all had a sort of a similar background to them, except for the abduction cases, of course, they were quite strange.
But the military ones, suddenly there's a chap, Amiri flying in Iran, he wanted Iraq, no Iran, sorry, he was going to fire missiles at this particular UFO, and his missile system failed.
Really?
And the chap in Chile, who I mentioned, Santa Maria, he did a rather interesting flight maneuver because he couldn't catch this thing.
Do you want me to tell you very briefly about this chap?
Yes, it's a bit of a diversion, but it's a good one.
Okay, his commanding officer said, can you see that ball hanging over the cliff, over the mountain over there?
Go and shoot it down.
And it had been there for apparently quite a long time, a day.
And so he took off in this Sukhoi-22, it was a very fast, powerful Russian jet, and got up to it.
And this thing then suddenly took off in front of him, just keeping out of range of his cannon.
And then he put on maximum power, and this thing would go to 1,500 miles an hour and just stay out of range.
And getting quite short of fuel, as these things have only got about a 20-minute endurance, he thought he would try something different and gave it full power, but then climbed immediately vertically.
And then at the top of about 60,000 feet, he told me, and my Spanish isn't brilliant, but he's got a wife that speaks good English, he came down on top of this UFO and fired 22mm cannon at it.
I think it was 20, 30mm cannon, I can't remember, whatever it was, devastating firepower.
He could see the explosions in the desert all around this thing, and he saw a number of these shells hit it, hit the UFO.
But nothing happened.
It either just absorbed it, but there was no damage, there's nothing hit, nothing came off of it.
And you think, I must have annoyed this thing now.
So anyway, he's going back to base.
He's got to go back because he's out of fuel.
In fact, he dead-sticked it, what's known as dead-sticking.
He ran out of fuel on the way back.
It's very common.
And he's getting lined up on the runway without any power, nothing he can do.
He's got to land.
And he noticed on his right wingtip, there is this ball literally on his right wingtip.
He told me, I thought I was going to die, it's just going to tip me over, and that was it.
He actually landed, he deployed the parachute, and this globe stopped with him on the runway and then disappeared over to hang off the cliff again.
Now, that's hang off the mountain, rather.
These sort of individual stories are quite...
They've got...
Mine was totally different, though I did speak to a man, a French captain, and a 747 flying into Paris and had a very similar sighting to what I had.
He didn't say that it was as big as the thing that I saw, but yeah, so everyone's story is quite different.
Raymond, there's nothing worse in life.
Sorry to jump in, but there's nothing worse in life than lack of closure.
If you go through a situation and you're not sure what caused it, you haven't got the closure on it, then it can cause you sleep at night.
It can cause you problems.
Did you take comfort in the fact that other people have had, they weren't the same, but analogous or similar experiences?
Well, I don't get stressed.
I don't get stressed personally.
It's not in my family's nature.
But there is possibly another chapter to the story.
Because I think it was around about 2008 or 9, they ripped out the old radar system from Jersey Air Traffic Control.
And all of the controversial tapes, as they called them at the time, that were kept in a separate cupboard, were, I thought, they're all thrown away, along with the old radar system, which Windows and all the other modern radar systems can't read.
It was a French system called Alvira.
Anyway, they got rid of that, took it down the tip.
However, it would appear that in, I believe it was 2016, that one of the air traffic controllers kept the old tapes.
No way of reading them, but he kept the tapes.
And there was a chap in France, a chap called Luc Dini, D-I-N-I, was wanting to have a look at the case again.
And I mentioned about the radar, and it had disappeared.
He got in touch with Jersey Air Traffic.
They put him onto an ex-air trafficker, and he and his shed plucked out this tape and delivered it to Luke and his team.
And it's been a long, long, long time, years, each plot has got to be done individually by hand.
But I understand I got an email, I think it was last Tuesday, to say that they're getting, interestingly, getting some new results and also some traces of other things that were in the sky at the same time as those two big items that I discussed.
There's lots of, there's two other very distinct traces, just primary contacts, not secondary.
So they're not commercial, they're not light aircraft, but two primary contacts going over the top of these other two.
So there may have been, there's more interaction.
I think the story is not yet finished, simply because this will be a radar trace at real time with, and also we can lay on top of that the air traffic control speech.
And we should be able to publish that, I think, maybe within a year, perhaps two years, when all this work is completed.
Well, that is astonishing.
I mean, that kind of suggests, although we don't know yet until it's properly analysed, that there may have been...
That's conjecture.
I wouldn't know anything about motherships.
I've seen lots and lots of videos where small objects are going into a big object, which is not identified.
I think what it boils down to is that If you were to take a general radar trace of the world at any certain given time, you're going to find things like this.
I think it's a lot more prevalent than people actually believe.
There's a lot more happening that people aren't even noticing.
And it may have been accidental.
It could have been that these other two objects were in conjunction with the two lower objects at 2,000 feet.
We don't know.
But this information, I think, is going to throw a new light, perhaps a new era, on this particular case, which has had a 167-page report written about it by a university group that I actually got involved with, and they could find no answer for it.
They actually said it could be ships on the sea, which is pretty interesting.
But anyway, we discussed.
Yes, I was going to put that to you, that there were people who suggested it was some kind of strange, almost atmospheric phenomena that reflected back a bigger picture of a ship that was on the sea.
Yeah, and an actual fact, when you look at the last traces of the northernmost object, it is actually from a straight line from the radar head to the object, it goes through Sark.
Now, Sark's about 300 feet high of rock, and had it been a ship, the radar trace wouldn't have, there would have been a shadow, if you like, behind Sark, and you wouldn't have been able to see it.
So in that particular respect, I discounted that personally because as a straight line, the VHF signal can't bend, although it does to an extent, but it won't, if there's a rock in the way or a mountain, you get a thing called hill shadow behind it.
And it would have appeared that the last sighting of the UFO, whether it was actually near Casket's lighthouse, was actually shadowed from the radar head in Jersey from the rocky outcrop, which is Sark.
However, the Guernsey radar was still picking it up, and so was the Jersey radar.
So it would indicate to me, because they were in different colours, I've got the colours here right in front of me, there were the red and green, and they were both picking up objects, or the object at the same time.
That tells me that it wasn't on the surface.
I would have seen it if it was on the surface.
It wouldn't have been hiding just in the top of the haze layer where I last saw it.
How extraordinary.
Did that happen?
Lots of loads of people tried to call emails through the company.
I mean, Arena got fantastic publicity out of it, millions of pounds worth all over the world.
My mother, who was in New Zealand at the time, she said, what's all this about?
So how'd you hear about it?
It's in the Auckland Post or something like that.
So they got fantastic.
But no, yes, hundreds of emails, requests to speak.
Can you go on this TV programme?
Blah, blah.
That was probably what I was expecting first, but nothing.
To this day, nothing from the CIA and nothing from the military whatsoever.
And the other captain that saw the object in his 7 o'clock flying into Jersey, he was silenced, let's put it that way, not in a deadly sense, but he was stopped from talking about it by his company, Blue Island.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
That is interesting.
Listen, one very quick final question.
We've only got 60 seconds, but Tracy has asked, just sum up how your life has changed since this happened.
Dramatically.
It put me on the road to research, and I've researched the banking system, the health system, politics, especially American politics, and it's opened up a completely new world.
And I think we're going to be changing into a new world very shortly with what's going on at the moment in America.
Well, I think there'll be a lot of people agreeing with you there.
And no regrets about talking about it.
None at all.
No, and I'm glad to be able to do it because in America you can't.
It's a career-ending activity.
If you speak about UFOs whilst you're flying an airplane for a company, you're out of a job.
And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to highlight this in America and speak about it in the press rooms in the USA to encourage American pilots to speak out about it.
The South Americans, it makes page five in the paper these days because there's so many sightings.
But in the USA itself, there's very little commentary.
Wow.
Ray Boyer, thank you very much for telling the story and also for telling us that there's going to be an update about this, the new analyses.
Please take care, look after yourself.
Thank you very much.
My thanks to Ray Boyer.
My thanks to Nick Pope.
We'll continue to do our job here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, more great guests in the pipeline.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe.
Stay home.
Stay calm.
And whatever you do, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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