Beyond Area 51

by Mack Maloney

  Nick Pope told us there have been numerous UFO sightings in the area, leading some people to suggest that the new aircraft being developed at Warton Aerodrome have been back-engineered from crashed alien spacecraft.

  In fact, BAE found itself uncomfortably in the spotlight in 2009 when a “UFO” was reported to have hit a wind turbine in Lincolnshire. Ministry of Defence insiders suggested that a new stealth drone, code-named Taranis, might have been involved. This could mean that what people are seeing flying around Warton Aerodrome might be strange but are also of very earthly manufacture.

  Still, Warton Aerodrome makes the top three.

  2. PORTON DOWN

  Ostensibly a government and military science park, Porton Down is located near Salisbury in Wiltshire, again in the same neighborhood as Stonehenge.

  Most maps of Porton Down show “Danger Area” signs surrounding the entire complex, which at seven thousand acres is huge by British standards, and the place is definitely one of Britain’s most sensitive military facilities. Highly classified research, including defense against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear warfare is conducted there—and that’s just the work we know about.

  More important, though, Porton Down is associated with one of the strangest UFO stories in British history.

  Well told by Nick Redfern in Keep Out, this tale began on the night of January 23, 1974, when rumors spread through the British military establishment that something very strange had happened near a mountain in North Wales.

  That night, one particular British military unit in the south of England was put on alert and told to await orders. Soon enough, this unit was instructed to head toward Birmingham, England’s second-largest city, under strict instructions to make the journey as quietly as possible.

  As the unit was approaching Birmingham, it received a second set of orders—it was now directed to head at full speed toward North Wales. This they did—only to be stopped again on the outskirts of (of all places) the seriously haunted city of Chester. At this point they were told they would soon be participating in a military exercise and to stand by. But then the orders were changed yet again and they were told to drive to a place in northeastern Wales called Llangollen.

  There was much going on in this tiny village when the soldiers arrived. Townspeople rushing about, lots of British officers and officials in evidence, all while British fighter jets constantly flew overhead. Shortly before midnight, the soldiers were told to load two large boxes onto their vehicles. Then they were told to bring these boxes to Porton Down.

  Arriving at the highly secret facility sometime later, the soldiers delivered the boxes, still sealed, as ordered. But for some reason, the people at Porton Down opened the boxes in front of the soldiers, to reveal that they were actually coffins. Inside were two beings not of this Earth.

  The source of the story described the bodies as being five to six feet in height and humanoid in shape, but almost skeletal in appearance. The source said he and his other soldiers put two and two together and realized they’d just delivered the bodies of two ETs who’d been killed in a UFO crash up in Wales. This theory was later confirmed by other members of their unit. The source was also told that not all of the saucer’s occupants had died in the crash.

  But the story gets better. As noted by Nick Redfern, later on the British Ministry of Defence, in a bizarrely uncharacteristic move, agreed to provide the BBC with an enormous amount of technical assistance in the making of a science-fiction series called Invasion: Earth.

  As its title indicates, the series was about aliens attacking our planet, which made the MOD’s support so unusual, because many times up to that point the MOD had gone out of its way to discourage the idea that UFOs existed. Now, suddenly, it was throwing its considerable weight behind a series depicting UFOs invading Earth. Redfern said this got many people thinking. Was the British government attempting to get the general public in line with the idea of fighting against malevolent ETs?

  But maybe the strangest thing of all is that in Invasion: Earth a number of aliens retrieved from a crashed UFO are taken to… yes, Porton Down.

  “Did the MOD know something we didn’t?” Redfern remembered wondering at the time.

  Either way this is strange, top to bottom.

  But does this mean that Porton Down is Britain’s Area 51? It seems to fit the two main requirements: It’s a highly classified facility, and it has a connection to UFOs—in this case, a highly dramatic one.

  But there is one more place to look….

  1. RAF RUDLOE MANOR

  Rudloe Manor is an innocuous-looking RAF facility located in Wiltshire, again not far from Stonehenge.

  There are no three-mile-long runways or rows of modern fighter planes here. Rudloe Manor looks just as its name implies: It is a stately British estate that conjures up visions of fox hunts, the gentry, crumpets and tea.

  But like Megiddo, Rudloe Manor is good at hiding its secrets. Below it is nothing less than a vast underground city made up of hundreds of man-made caverns and tunnels, with room enough for an aircraft factory and a train station that secretly connects to the Tube in London, eighty-five miles away.

  But most interesting, Rudloe Manor has an intriguing, if unusual, connection to UFOs that puts it at the top of this list.

  * * *

  We know there’s a city beneath Rudloe Manor because a British TV news crew was allowed to film it back in 2000.

  This subterranean city’s origins date to World War II. During the early days of the conflict, the British built a huge network of bunkers under Rudloe Manor and the surrounding countryside. After coring out more than two million square feet of space, the British first built and then stored military hardware inside, far away from falling German bombs. The underground facility was so vast that an entire working aircraft factory was located there.

  When Britain’s Sky News was allowed into the underground city, sixty years after it was built, its film crew reported on the caverns, the miles of tunnels that included underground railway stations and a decommissioned nuclear command bunker. Sky News also transmitted pictures of massive underground ventilation fans the size of modern jet engines.

  While the British military insists that much of Rudloe Manor, or at least what’s below it, is no longer active, rumors over the years suggest the base is actually a key part of Britain’s secret investigation into UFOs.

  Yet, Nick Pope told us, “Rudloe Manor has been dubbed Britain’s Area 51, but I think that’s more because the old RAF base there was involved in MOD’s UFO project. There were rumors of secret, underground bases there. There certainly were a whole series of underground tunnels, bunkers and other facilities in the area, but this dates back to the Second World War and the Cold War and has nothing to do with UFOs or aliens.”

  Of course we must remember that Nick is still under the Official Secrets Act. If Rudloe Manor were still active, would he be able to tell us?

  Which brings us to what the late editor of UFO Magazine, Graham Birdsall, said about this subject of supposedly inactive British bases: “As recently as 1997, I learned how communication technicians were operating from supposedly mothballed bases in the UK whose location and means of access to underground facilities below must remain confidential. However, I can categorically state that one such access point was described as being in the middle of a plain-looking field.”

  This is where our search begins to make a little more sense. If the British military truly has an Area 51, as we think of it, clearly it has no wide and empty desert to put it in. A mountain installation is a possibility, except that the UK’s tallest mountains are in Scotland, where access is a little difficult and where it’s cold and damp a lot of the time. In fact, operating out of a mountain anywhere on the British Isles would seem to be a cold and damp proposition.

  But if there was ever a place where the British, on their strange little island, could do all kinds of secret things—including work on crashed UFOs or studies relating to
the ET puzzle—totally out of the public and prying eyes, what better place would that be than underground? And what better place to do it underground than in an underground city that’s already built?

  * * *

  There are other clues out there that, when put together, seem to point us in a certain direction.

  What follows are five reasons we think our search for Britain’s Area 51 ends at Rudloe Manor:

  1. THE MINISTER WHO ASKED

  On October 17, 1996, Martin Redmond, a member of the British government, asked a number of questions in Parliament about the UK’s investigations into UFOs.

  Redmond was subsequently given information on some classified military units, including one known as the Provost and Security Services, or P&SS. While on the face of it P&SS is an elite RAF unit that deals with things such as vetting of employees and issuing passes and so on, as Nick Redfern points out, some P&SS investigators are also trained counterintelligence agents who investigate such hot items as theft of classified material, acts of espionage and countless other things not known to the British public. Think of them as the RAF’s version of the FBI.

  And as Parliament Member Redmond found out during his UFO inquiry, at the time, P&SS had its headquarters at… Rudloe Manor.

  2. THE “GOOD” REPORT

  As detailed in Keep Out, several years earlier, in 1991, UFO researcher Timothy Good wrote of talking to a former P&SS special investigator who had specific knowledge of P&SS involvement with UFOs. Good’s story was backed up by a second former P&SS counterintelligence agent who stated that when he worked for P&SS, he had access to just about all of the agency’s top-secret files—except those he understood dealt with UFOs. He said an armed guard stood watch over the door where those files were kept… at Rudloe Manor.

  3. THE CIVILIAN WHO CALLED WHITEHALL

  In 1984, a British citizen who’d witnessed a UFO sighting phoned Whitehall, the center of the British government, to report the event. This was a bold move, the equivalent of someone in the United States calling the White House.

  But instead of giving the caller the number to the MOD Main Building—where we know civilian investigators were keeping track of UFO sightings at the time—the caller was given, possibly by mistake, the number for… Rudloe Manor.

  4. HOW LOW IS “LOW”?

  One unusual aspect of P&SS duties is its overseeing of the British government’s “Low-Flying Aircraft Complaints” department. As the name implies, this is where citizens can complain about planes that fly too low over Great Britain. But according to Timothy Good’s source, this was the same department that had an armed guard watching its door 24/7… at Rudloe Manor.

  That’s why a number of UFO researchers, Nick Redfern among them, believe this department is actually a cover to allow the P&SS to secretly investigate UFOs, and maybe much more.

  Add it all together: An inquiring government member is told that P&SS has a presence at Rudloe Manor, it being a place that sits atop an entire underground city. UFO researcher Timothy Good talks to two ex-P&SS counterintelligence agents who say you can’t get at P&SS’s Low-Flying Aircraft Complaints files being kept there. A UFO witness calls the top of the British government to report a UFO and is turned over to P&SS at Rudloe Manor.

  5. OUR FAVORITE: THE VERY BRITISH REASON

  But maybe the best clue that a British version of Area 51 exists at Rudloe Manor is a thoroughly British reason.

  After all, would it not be so typically British that the section of its military that secretly handles the UFO problem would be called the Low-Flying Aircraft Complaints department?

  11

  UFOs over Scotland

  It Takes a Village…

  About thirty miles west of Edinburgh, Scotland, lies the village of Bonnybridge.

  It’s a typical small place for the Scottish Midlands. The population is about six thousand; industries like brick makers, saw mills and iron foundries have called it home. There’s a large gravel pit on the west side of town, and Rough Castle, one of the most complete of the many Roman structures left in Great Britain, stands nearby.

  But there’s something very untypical about Bonnybridge: More UFO sightings have been reported here than anywhere else in the world.

  The British government receives at least three hundred UFO reports from Bonnybridge in an average year. Three thousand sightings were reported there in just the last half of the 1990s (beating out even the noisy village of Warminster, about four hundred miles to the south). Not only has more than half of Bonnybridge’s population seen a UFO; many have seen more than one.

  Most of these sightings came to light in 2008 when the British government released thousands of pages of UFO reports made to the military and local law enforcement over the years. Dubbed the “Scottish X-Files,” this material not only told of the many strange flying objects spotted by the citizens of Bonnybridge but also of giant UFOs landing near the town, of air traffic controllers at nearby airports tracking UFOs moving at impossible speeds on their radar screens and of airline pilots encountering bizarre flashing lights during takeoffs and landings.

  Maybe it’s no surprise that Bonnybridge is located inside the so-called Falkirk Triangle, a rough geometric area that stretches from Edinburgh to the towns of Stirling and Fife and back again. The Triangle is well known to UFO researchers for its many unidentified aerial sightings over the years, and the evidence seems to indicate that Bonnybridge just happens to find itself at ground zero for all this puzzling activity.

  But as we will see, Bonnybridge is not the only village inside the Triangle where lots of bizarre things seem to happen.

  * * *

  Just like Great Britain as a whole, Scotland is no stranger to UFOs. A survey published in 2002 found that four times as many UFOs appear over Scotland per year than over places like France or Italy.

  But why? And why are they concentrated over the Falkirk Triangle?

  We know there’s often a military element involved when a certain area experiences numerous UFO sightings—and a few military bases are located relatively close to the Triangle. RAF Tain is a weapons testing range, not unlike the Nevada Test Range, home to the Groom Lake facility in the United States. RAF Lossiemouth is a huge, bustling RAF air base located in the same general area as RAF Tain, about two hundred miles north of the Triangle. While that’s a four-hour drive by car, it would take just a few minutes in a supersonic jet—or a high-speed experimental aircraft.

  We spoke with researcher Andrew Hennessey, an expert in the unusual events happening within the Falkirk Triangle. He confirms that over the last decade or so there has been a huge amount of video footage and numerous witnesses in the area recounting events that cannot be easily explained.

  “The paranormal activity is ongoing as is the filming and witness reports,” Hennessey said in an earlier interview. “And if the Ministry of Defence is at least partly responsible for the flying of unmanned aerial vehicles or for regular vertical takeoffs and landings from local fields by large craft—well then, folks have a right to know what or who is disturbing their peace.”

  There have been claims that the ghostly CIA-sponsored Aurora stealth jet has been spotted flying over the area, complete with its unique “doughnuts on a rope” contrail trailing behind it. Who knows, then, what else could be flying overhead?

  Could the Falkirk UFO sightings just be top-secret military airplanes being tested inside the Triangle’s airspace?

  In a word, no—simply because while secret military aircraft might explain some of what people are seeing high in the skies above the Falkirk, they cannot account for the many up close and personal UFO sightings people have also witnessed in the area.

  So what’s going on here?

  Maybe the answer lies within another of the Triangle’s villages, a place that has endured events even stranger than those in Bonnybridge.

  * * *

  This village is called Gorebridge.

  About forty miles east of Bonnybridge and fifteen
miles south of Edinburgh, it is found deep within the Falkirk Triangle. With a population of about five thousand, the area is best described as rural and farmland, with a few industrial sites scattered about. Not much different in appearance from dozens of villages in the Scottish Midlands.

  But while Bonnybridge has had large numbers of UFO sightings, Gorebridge can boast its fair share of UFO incidents as well.

  For instance:

  March 1, 2012—A strange UFO is videotaped in the night sky over Gorebridge. Spherical in shape, it’s spotted hovering above the town, almost like it’s watching over it, or perhaps looking for something.

  March 3, 2012—The same object is seen over Gorebridge again, acting in the same manner. The only difference, this time the sphere has a weird reddish glow to it.

  January 1, 2012—A distinct triangle-shaped object is caught on video by many of Gorebridge’s residents. The UFO looks like the spinning lights on top of a police car, high in the sky.

  November 7, 2011—A large unexplained object is videotaped flying slowly over Gorebridge. Triangle-shaped with many bright blinking lights around its outer rim, a similar UFO is spotted over nearby towns later that night.

  May 2011—A video of a UFO sighting close to dusk clearly shows a round black orb flying over Gorebridge before disappearing behind a tree line.

  May 21, 2009—Two UFOs intercept an airliner flying over Gorebridge on its approach to Edinburgh International Airport. The UFOs are caught on tape ascending from the Gorebridge area and buzzing the airliner from above and below via a series of fantastic maneuvers.

  February 2009—Numerous reports are received of bright orange globes spotted over Gorebridge, flying in formation.

  In addition to these incidents, lots of black helicopters have been reported flying above Gorebridge in recent years. There have also been reports of strange silver domes parked in nearby fields and of residents meeting people they describe as the infamous Men in Black while walking in the local woods.