United Kingdom.Farnborough · test pilot Hubbard's discs

On 14 August 1950, at 11:27, Flight Lieutenant Stan Hubbard, a test pilot at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough (Hampshire), was on the airfield with two other officers when all three, according to the official report, heard "a subdued humming noise, like a model Diesel motor", and searched the sky. The weather was fine and visibility good. The other two saw nothing. Hubbard, the only one wearing sunglasses, stated that he saw almost directly overhead a flat disc, light pearl grey, about 50 feet in diameter, at an estimated height of 5,000 feet. He kept it in sight for 30 seconds, on a heading of 100 degrees, at a speed he put at 800 to 1,000 miles per hour, while it executed a series of S-turns and oscillated so that the light reflection moved from one segment of the rim to another.

On 5 September 1950, at 16:09, Hubbard was on the control tower with five other officers, looking south in anticipation of the display by the experimental Hawker P.1081 fighter. The sky was three-eighths covered by strato-cumulus with a base at 4,000 feet. All six saw, at about the same moment and at an estimated range of 10 to 15 miles, a flat pearl-grey disc "about the size of a shirt button". They described a rectangular path: a "falling leaf", a horizontal stretch "very fast", an upward falling leaf, another horizontal stretch, and so on, until the object dived to the horizon at great speed. They placed the pattern over the Guildford and Farnham area. Hubbard said it was the same object as in August, and the others that it fitted the description he had given them.

Both events were reported through official channels, and the officers were interviewed by members of the Flying Saucer Working Party, the secret group that the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence and the Joint Technical Intelligence Committee of the British Ministry of Defence had set up that year at Sir Henry Tizard's instigation. A DSI/JTIC committee minute, dated by hand 15 August 1950, approved setting up the group to investigate future reports, and the group first met in October. The group's final report, DSI/JTIC Report No. 7, "Unidentified Flying Objects", of June 1951, devotes its paragraphs 13 and 14 to Farnborough, alongside a third case, that of a Meteor pilot who landed at Tangmere on 1 June 1950. On the first sighting it writes that it has "no reason to doubt that F/Lt. Hubbard honestly described his own impression of what he saw", but that it finds it "impossible to believe" that so unconventional an aircraft could have crossed, at no great altitude, on a summer morning, a district as populous and air-minded as Farnborough without being seen by more than one observer; it concludes that Hubbard was the victim of an optical illusion or saw a normal aircraft and deceived himself about its shape and speed. On the second it concedes: "We have no doubt that all these officers did in fact see a flying object of some sort." But it denies any value to the identification with the August object, seen only at very long range, and concludes that they saw an ordinary aircraft manoeuvring at extreme visual range, led on by the earlier report: "an interesting example of one report inducing another". In support it adds, in its Appendix B, the experience of Wing Commander Formby, a member of the group, who on the Tipner rifle range followed a bright circular disc through a 20-power telescope for several minutes, until the object changed position, stopped reflecting the sunlight to the observer and turned out to be a normal aircraft.

The report stayed classified for half a century and was released by The National Archives in January 2002 (DEFE 44/119). In April that year Clarke and Roberts interviewed Hubbard, by then a retired Wing Commander, at the Royal Air Force Club in London. His account, given 52 years later, differs from the 1950 one on central points. He said he was alone in August, "contrary to what has been reported", and that the woman who ran the dispatcher's hut came running and screaming "Did you see that horrible thing?"; he gave about 100 feet across, about 500 miles per hour and a minute and a half to two minutes of observation, and said that at the first interview he was asked how fast it was travelling and "I had no idea", and that the angles he gave implied about 1,000 feet of altitude, not the report's 5,000; he added a rim of sparkling lights, a strong smell of ozone and no air displacement, none of which appears in the report. He said civilians from scientific intelligence questioned him the same day, that he told them the thing was not made on this planet, and that he was ordered to speak to no one. Of the second event he recalled a fully overcast sky, Wimpy Wade returning from the first flight of the P.1081, his civilian boss Jack Spencer and seven or eight minutes of observation, with binoculars that arrived later. Of the report he said: "They didn't get anything right" and "I was not reported correctly."

Farnborough is the core of the first official British study of flying saucers: two of the three cases reported officially by RAF officers that the report examines came from the same witness, a test pilot trained to estimate speeds and heights, and the second gathered six officers on the control tower of the country's main aeronautical test centre. That a scientific intelligence group wrote, of six professional observers, that it had no doubt they had seen a real flying object, and still closed the matter as an ordinary aircraft, is what gives the case its documentary weight. It is an official record of the period, with time, heading, cloud cover and the name of the main witness, not a reconstructed story.

The group's reading has concrete support in its own file. In August a single man saw the object, while the two officers beside him searched the same sky and saw nothing; estimates of size, height and speed for an isolated object in a clear sky depend on one another, and misjudging the distance is enough to turn a distant aircraft into a fast, low disc. In September the object was 10 to 15 miles away, with the apparent size of a shirt button, and the six saw it while they were waiting precisely for an aircraft display. Motor Sport's account of the Society of British Aircraft Constructors display at Farnborough, published in October 1950, describes how the P.1081 disappeared "to far places" before returning at 3,000 feet and diving along the runway, so display aircraft were manoeuvring beyond the airfield in those days. The glint of a distant aircraft can make it look like a shining disc, which is what the Formby episode shows; the falling-leaf motion they described would fit an aircraft banking and ceasing to reflect the sun.

The opposite reading has support too, and the report does not resolve it. Its main argument, that no one else reported such an object over a populated area, is an absence: the report does not say that other witnesses were sought or that the afternoon's air traffic was checked, nor does it identify any specific aircraft. In August the three officers heard a humming noise, which indicates there was something to hear. And the report does not say that the group compared the September manoeuvre with the P.1081 display programme, the easiest fact to check. In the other direction, Hubbard's 2002 version cannot be used to correct the 1950 one: it is late testimony that contradicts the contemporaneous record on the number of witnesses, the altitude, the duration, the cloud cover and the P.1081 flight, which according to Motor Sport had first flown in June, and it adds sensory details that do not appear in the report. There is no radar record, film or photograph of either event. What remains is an official report attributing both to an aircraft seen in poor conditions for judgement, a plausible explanation that no one actually checked, and six competent witnesses whose account the report itself accepts as sincere.

The case also shows how the group worked. For the Tangmere Meteor, a member of Fighter Command's Research Branch interviewed everyone involved and found a ten-minute gap between the pilot's sighting and the Wartling radar echo, a measured fact that allowed the two events to be separated. At Farnborough there is nothing equivalent: the verdict rests on an argument from plausibility and on an anecdote from one of its members. The report recommended no further investigation "unless and until some material evidence becomes available", and there is no record that these two events were later reviewed against the air traffic data for those days.