A brief 1953 UFO sighting over Kent drew official military attention and remains one of Britain’s most curious unexplained cases, writes NEIL NIXON
As long ago as 1951, Britain’s military were engaged in methodical research and review on flying saucers. Though officially denied for many years, the first report containing “details of the conclusions of a shadowy panel called the Working Party on Flying Saucers” became public knowledge early this century.
It drew mundane rather than mind-bending conclusions. A Guardian review of the report, after it was unearthed by researchers Dave Clarke and Andy Roberts, concluded it does “speak volumes about the scale of paranoia in Britain at the start of the Cold War.”
The most notable incidents of the 1950s included a strange object shadowing a military jet during the military exercise of Operation Mainbrace and the complex goings-on over East Anglia in 1956, often referred to as the Bentwaters Incident.
For less than a minute, Kent got a slice of this action. On 3 November 1953, a de Havilland Vampire jet piloted by Flight Lieutenant Terry Johnson and navigated by Flying Officer Geoffrey Smythe left RAF West Malling.
Around 10 am, Johnson spotted an unidentified object directly ahead of the aircraft. The weather was bright with minimal clouds. Johnson registered he was looking at a bright circular object, glowing more around its perimeter than its centre.
Both crewmen saw the object, which moved rapidly to the right, heading east of the plane. By the crew’s estimate, they were looking at something around a mile in the distance, and the entire event was over in around 30 seconds.
The pair reported for questioning, with the results making their way to Group Captain Peter Hamley. Hamley rose to the rank of Air Commodore but was known to have encountered foo fighters during the war.
The fleeting incident has historical significance after the Vampire crew were summoned to the Air Ministry to tell their story, the account making its way to the Duke of Edinburgh via his equerry.
The Air Ministry initially released details of the sighting, Britain’s first official military confirmation of a UFO incident. Other similar cases were soon reported, and the press began to explore a pattern of events before more prosaic explanations – including a misidentification of a weather balloon – were offered to explain some of the reports.
Interviewed by the Kent Messenger in 1996, Johnson was adamant that “what he and Smythe witnessed was not a weather balloon”. By then a businessman, Terry Johnson was clear that the speed of movement he witnessed made it obvious to him it was something strange.
Whilst the other reports around that time, including a sighting that day at Lee Green near Greenwich, offered radar returns, at no time during the fleeting West Malling incident did the object give a radar echo to the Vampire jet.
The truth behind this brief but vivid moment in our military history is elusive, but its impact remains on record. The sighting was discussed in Parliament when Lt-Col Wentworth Schofield, Conservative MP for Rochdale, asked about it. His colleague Nigel Birch, Baron Rhyl, Secretary of State for Air, offered up the weather balloon explanation.
When Project Condign published its report on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region” in 2006, it drew on over 10,000 reports, going back to the days of the West Malling incident.
It concluded that the presence of UFOs was beyond dispute. The report saw misidentifications of the mundane – like balloons and aircraft – as the most common cause of UFO reports but also isolated some as the result of meteorological phenomena not fully understood by science.
Condign was sceptical to the point of dismissive about the chance any reports were prompted by extraterrestrial craft, so for those truly hard-to-explain incidents – like West Malling – the implication is they came from strange atmospheric events.
Coincidentally, whilst the major witnesses are now dead, I chanced upon a previously unknown witness as recently as February 2025. Giving a talk on the World of the Weird to a retired “Wine Circle” group in a Kent village, I found a feisty woman in her early 80s who’d seen the fleeting events from a nearby school playground when she was a young girl. Her account has now been collected by BUFORA.
Do you think the West Malling UFO was an atmospheric phenomenon or something more mysterious? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
