Sighting record / 1971
Summer 1971. A Tuesday afternoon at RAF Sopley, a radar station in a converted wartime bunker in Hampshire. On the screens, a line of blips appeared. Six or seven of them, each about six miles apart, moving south-east. Each one climbed from about 3,000 feet to beyond 60,000 feet. Then it vanished. Almost at once, a replacement appeared at the point of origin. Duty Military Supervisor Alan Turner watched it for about twenty minutes, with ten controllers in the room. Heathrow saw it too. A Canberra was turned towards the targets. A few days later, two unidentified men told everyone not to talk. Turner kept his silence until 2008.
RAF Sopley sat near the village of Sopley, Hampshire. Once a wartime GCI station codenamed "Starlight", it had worked as an air traffic control radar station since 1959. In the summer of 1971, Alan Turner was its Duty Military Supervisor. It was a Tuesday afternoon.