North Sea RAF Intercepts

The North Sea, 1970. RAF interceptors on Quick Reaction Alert stood ready to meet Soviet aircraft. At RAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire, No. 5 Squadron flew the Lightning.

A one-line entry on Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom, dated 25 January 1971, says that "during October 1970, Pat Otter, the assistant editor of the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, had claimed" that "many Quick Reaction Alert RAF aircraft were sent up to investigate mysterious objects over the North Sea". The activity was said to be "culminating in many aircraft being despatched in late January 1971".

Then the figures: "eighteen of these flying up to 87,000 ft at 4,700 mph". That is the whole description. No shape. No lights. No sound. The sentence does not say whether the eighteen were aircraft or objects, though 4,700 mph was far beyond any RAF interceptor of the time. No base, radar station or witness is named.

The entry cites the Grimsby Evening Telegraph of 6 August 1994 and the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph of 15 August 1994. It adds that the American TV series Sightings "investigated" the area in early August 1994. No episode guide lists it.

8 September 1970. Capt. William Schaffner, a USAF exchange pilot with No. 5 Squadron, took off from RAF Binbrook in Lightning XS894 at 22.06. Callsign Foxtrot 94. Shortly after 10.30pm he ditched. The wreck lay five miles south of Flamborough Head.

In 1992 Pat Otter wrote "The Riddle of Foxtrot 94". His source, an anonymous caller who said he had been on the RAF crash investigation team, claimed the target "turned sharply, increased its speed to a fantastic 17,400 mph, and vanished from the radar screens." A transcript later circulated in which the pilot saw "a bluish conical shape which was so bright he could hardly look at it."

The RAF Board of Inquiry, file DEFE 71/95, was completed in June 1972 and stayed classified for about 30 years. The MoD at first said it had been shredded. In 2005 BBC Inside Out brought Schaffner's brother Michael to read it.

Its story is plainer. Schaffner was on a TACEVAL exercise, and his "target" was an RAF Shackleton acting as a Soviet bomber, later identified as WR981. The transcript records "Contact with a set of lights in that area." A servicing fault stopped his ejection seat firing, and he opened the canopy by hand and drowned. David Clarke found "no 'live scrambles' to intercept UFOs during the week in which Schaffner died", and that the real scrambles later that month were against Soviet Tu-142 "Bears".

Clarke says the UFO version "has no evidence to support it other than the fact that Captain Schaffner did exist", and calls the transcript "fake". Otter, he reports, "was later to claim he never believed the man's story". Shackleton pilot Colin Pomeroy called the stories "real myth". John Nichol's Eject! Eject! (2023) is described as the definitive debunking.

The 1971 entry has no rebuttal of its own, because there is no primary claim to rebut. Clarke dates Otter's articles to 1992, yet the entry ties his claim to October 1970. Most likely the January story grew out of the Foxtrot 94 material, or routine scrambles against Soviet aircraft were later retold as UFO intercepts. It joins a long line of North Sea lore, from Exercise Mainbrace to the Tornado encounter of 5 November 1990. Until someone finds page 9 of that August 1994 paper, the eighteen at 87,000 ft remain a single line with nothing behind it.