True story, but apologies in advance for length.
You remember the UFO flap a few years back, when we had Nick Pope "Britain's Own Fox Mulder^tm" telling us about major UFO incidents in the UK?
Well, there's one story that he kept trotting out about a UFO being spotted at a major UK airfield. This story he said, MUST have been a genuine UFO incident because it had been spotted by the base's guards and also, critically, by Air Traffic Controllers and a trained Meteorological Observer, who would therefore be ideally suited to gauge the height, size, and speed of the object in question (having been well experienced in gauging cloud heights and weather balloon heights and speeds).
Unfortunately however, this incident turned out to be more a case of how easy it is to fool even an experienced observer. Or, more accurately, how people tend to see what they've been set up to expect to see.
Over the previous couple of weeks there had been major airtime and press coverage of UFOs over England. When the first calls were made to the Met office on the night in question the observer shrugged them off. However after the gate guards also rung up to tell him they'd seen the UFO he went outside again and saw what he described as "Three lights at the angles of a very large triangular object, moving extremely quickly to the south of the airfield, after a few minutes a fourth beam of light appeared from the object directed to the ground."
The "Extremely large" object he'd actually seen was a Police Helicopter, as was later established from it's flight log. However, because he (and the guards for that matter) was subconciously expecting to see a UFO, that's what he reported. The airfield had been closed for the night as it was a weekend with no night flying scheduled, so there weren't actually any Air Traffic Controllers on duty. Had there been they would undoubtedly have been able to contact the UFO, bursting the myth there and then.
( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Sat 5 Jul 2008, 1:42, 3 replies)

This story would get a lot more attention if you pretended to be female and offered indiscriminate cyber-sex to anyone desperate enough to ask.

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Sat 5 Jul 2008, 1:52, closed)

Or the lights in the woods
outside a suffolk base. Flashing on an off, hovering above the ground. Kind of what lighthouses do, like the one nearby you can see through the trees.

Squaddies arn't the sharpest knives in the draw.
( buffet_the_appetite_slayer ٩(●̮̃•)۶ jacked in to the ICE on, Sat 5 Jul 2008, 16:10, closed)

ATC
My old man was on duty in air traffic at RAF Wattisham the night of the USAF Bentwaters incident.

He told me, 'something' unexplained definitely entered UK air space and was clearly visible in that area on that occaision.

He also said that Project Blue Book filings were a very regular occurrence, enough to become a joke 'oh, file it to Blue Book'.

Previously, in the early '70's while underground on radar at RAF Northwood, on more than one occaision, duty ATC staff watch 'squadrons of disc shaped contacts' in triangle formation moving at high altitude across London.

I can't corroborate this, because he's dead now, maybe he was having a joke with us, but I'll never forget the Bentwaters flap, he came home quite visibly shocked and full of the mystery 'incident' at the time. I believe that something unusual happened there, unusual enough for intelligent RAF ATC staff to be perplexed, put on alert, file reports etc.
(p0zitr0n - phunarmically charged particle, detected at, Sat 5 Jul 2008, 18:41, closed)