The Swiney/Crofts CASE OF 1952
BURIED AWAY IN the National Archives in Kew Gardens, London, is a file containing the Operational Record Book for the Central Flying School (CFS) at RAF Little Rissington, Gloucestershire. An intriguing entry for 21st October 1952 is included within these documents and it reads in its entirety as follows:
“Flight Lieutenant M. J. E. Swiney, instructor, and Lieutenant D. Crofts, R.N., student, sighted three mysterious ‘saucer shaped objects’ travelling at high speed at about 35,000’ whilst on a high level navigation exercise, in a Meteor VII. Later, A.T.C.C. Gloucester reported radar plots to confirm this, but Air Ministry discounted any possibility of ‘extra-terrestrial objects’.”
Gloster Meteor T Mk.VII WA742 was allocated to No.226 Operational Conversion Unit and used to train pilots how to fly the twin-engined “Meatbox”. The instructor sat behind the pilot in a tandem cockpit. An aircraft from the CFS at RAF Little Rissington (coded “N”, serial number unknown), was being flown by a couple of witnesses to three UFOs in October 1952. (TSRL, Creative Commons)
Tantalising details of this encounter can also be found in Peter Horsley’s autobiography, titled Sounds From Another Room. Horsley was a wartime Mosquito pilot and subsequently Extra Equerry to Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. In 1953 he became the Duke’s full-time Equerry, remaining in the post until 1956. He shared Prince Philip’s interest in UFOs and, using his connections in the RAF, was apparently privy to certain details which resulted from various encounters. In his book, Horsley mentions the event that involved the crew from RAF Little Rissington:
“An instructor and his pupil instructor were carrying out a high-level sortie in a tandem-seater Meteor VII – the pupil in the front seat, the instructor in the rear. The front pilot observed a circular flying object some distance away, dead ahead, filling about three inches of his windscreen which was approximately two feet across. He had no previous knowledge of or interest in UFOs.
The object was so strange that he immediately assumed that he had oxygen failure and informed his instructor who took over control and turned the aircraft through forty-five degrees. He then saw the object and the two pilots confirmed its description to each other.
Michael Swiney (on the right) was one of two aircrew witnesses to three circular objects over Gloucestershire, England, in October 1952. He is pictured here later in his RAF career. (Unknown)
The instructor immediately reported the incident to Little Rissington Air Traffic Control, who were not aware of any traffic in the vicinity of the Meteor and instructed him to approach closer. The crew turned again towards the object, opening up to full power. At Mach .8 they gained quite rapidly but when the circular object filled half their windscreen, it suddenly turned on its side ‘like a plate’ (their words) and climbed away out of sight at great speed. It was not possible to estimate its size because they did not know its distance. Their description was similar to other reports – circular and emitting an iridescent light around its edges.”
Horsley only mentions one object but there were apparently three. At first, Michael Swiney wondered whether they were parachutes. David Crofts described them as being elliptical shaped and looking like circular pieces of glass reflected by the sun. He subsequently learned that RAF Fighter Command had scrambled fighter jets to intercept the objects. Dr. David Clarke, journalist and Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, England, interviewed Swiney in 2004 and included the former pilot’s reaction in his book The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-Life Sightings:
“I was frightened, I make no bones about it. It was something supernatural, perhaps, and when I landed someone told me I looked as if I had seen a ghost. I immediately thought of saucers because that was actually what they looked like. I even put an entry in my logbook, which reads: ‘Saucers! 3 flying saucers sighted at height, confirmed by GCI’.”1
Both airmen were interviewed by Air Ministry officials a day or two after the encounter. It had happened nearly three months after Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s infamous request to the Secretary of State for Air regarding the UFO issue:
“What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.”2
David Crofts, the student pilot, recalled that he was told by the Air Ministry investigators that “they [Air Intelligence] had been in communication with every country in the world that was likely to have that sort of aircraft in the vicinity and drew a blank.”3 The same officials confirmed that the UFOs had been picked up on ground radar, fighters had been scrambled and that the objects had headed eastwards at 600 knots. The fighter pilots had seen nothing, though, so returned to base. The pilots were apparently told that the craft had been picked up by RAF radar sites at Box and Sopley, Hampshire. Box, later known as RAF Rudloe Manor, was the site of the Royal Observer Corps’ Headquarters, Southern Area, so details may have been passed there from a nearby radar site. (RAF Rudloe Manor would also feature in UFO lore years later, as an alleged centre for investigating UK reports under the cover of the “Flying Complaints Flight”4.) Of course, locating any evidence in terms of the statements the pilots made back in 1952 has been thwarted by a Ministry of Defence decision to destroy all UFO documents prior to 1962. The only surviving reference to the incident in official records seems to be the CFS Operational Records Book.
This was one of the first major RAF UFO sightings in the post-1947 period. There would be other famous cases, including those involving crews from West Malling and Bentwaters/Lakenheath, plus Flight Lieutenant Salandin’s sighting near Southend in 1954. These will no doubt be covered by Dave Partridge and myself when we come to discuss the 1950s in the next series of Unidentified Aerial Podcast.
References:
David Clarke, The UFO Files, 2009, pg.48-49.
PREM 11/855, Prime Minister’s Personal Minute, 28th July 1952, TNA.
David Clarke, The UFO Files, 2009, pg.49-50.
M. S. Morgan, What Do They Know?, 2020, pg.12.
