U.S. Fighter Jets Tried to Shoot Down UFO in 1957

Newly declassified documents released by the U.K. government reveal that two U.S. fighter planes were scrambled and ordered to shoot down a UFO over the English countryside in May 1957.

One of the pilots, Lt. Milton Torres, reportedly got to within 15 miles of the object and was preparing to fire upon it, when the UFO suddenly vanished from his radar screen. Upon returning to the Royal Air Force base in Kent, where he was stationed, Torres was confronted by a U.S. government official who ordered him to tell no one about what had happened.

The incident — believed to be the only time that military aircraft have ever attempted to bring down a UFO — is described in a written account that Torres provided to the U.K. defense ministry in 1988, at the urging of a British solicitor interested in UFOs. It was released along with U.K. defense documents detailing dozens of other reported UFO encounters.

Torres, now 77 and a retired aeronautics professor living in Miami, told The Times UK that he will never forget the otherworldly experience. "For the past 50 years, I’ve been waiting for an explanation, but I’ve never had one," he said.

According to Torres, after the Royal Air Force picked up the UFO on radar that night, he and another pilot were sent aloft in their

F-86 Sabre fighter jets with orders to arm all weapons and fire on sight. Torres noted that it was the first — and the last — time in his military career that he received such a grave command.

As Torres flew eastward, he spotted the blip on his radar, which indicated the presence of a immense UFO in the vicinity. The object moved erratically, ranging from moments of near motionlessness to speeds of more than 7,600 miles per hour.

"I had a lock-on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier," Torres wrote in his account. "The larger the airplane, the easier the lock-on. This blip almost locked itself."

Torres wrote that he was within seconds of firing a salvo of rockets at the UFO when it suddenly vanished from the radar.

Torres returned to the base. By his account, the next day he was debriefed by an unnamed civilian who "looked like a well-dressed IBM salesman."

"He threatened me with a national security breach if I breathed a word about it to anyone," Torres recalled.

The documents released by the U.K. defense ministry contain no official explanation for the incident, which occurred at the height of the Cold War tensions between the U.S. and its allies and the Soviet Union. During that period, aircraft were poised constantly on standby at British bases, in anticipation of a possible Soviet attack.

UFO researcher David Clarke told Reuters that the sighting may have been part of a secret U.S. project to create phantom aircraft on radar screens to test Soviet air defenses.

"Perhaps what this pilot had seen was some kind of experiment in electronic warfare or maybe it was a UFO," he said. "Something very unusual happened."