Lightning XS894 and the UFO Story That Came Later

Lightning F6 XS894 of 5 Squadron RAF took off at about 22:06 on 8 September 1970. Its pilot, Captain William Schaffner, was a USAF exchange officer. The aircraft went down in the North Sea about five miles off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, and Schaffner was killed.

The UFO version appeared in October 1992, in Pat Otter's articles for the Grimsby Evening Telegraph and the Hull Daily Mail. It came second-hand: an anonymous source reached Otter through the aviation author Barry Halpenny, and the retired police sergeant Tony Dodd took it up. In that telling radar tracked a strange target and Schaffner went up from RAF Binbrook to chase it. An alleged transcript has him describing a bright, bluish conical light and something "like a large soccer ball" that looked made of glass. The radar blips merged, and he was ordered to ditch and was never found.

What is on the record

Two MoD files at The National Archives carry the substance of the case. DEFE 24/2019 holds two web printouts: a Nick Redfern column and a page from Nick Pope's book Open Skies, Closed Minds. Both retell the 1992 story. Pope is quoted as having read the full Board of Inquiry file and found "nothing UFO-related at all". DEFE 24/2037 holds the Directorate of Air Staff's papers of early 2003, which state that "Ufologists have taken an accident and made it into an elaborate UFO story". After a BBC Inside Out programme the directorate located the complete Board of Inquiry file. The accident report became AIR 2/19173.

Outside the government files David Clarke reports the inquiry's findings of June 1972. By his account Schaffner was on a tactical evaluation exercise shadowing an RAF Shackleton, which was his "target". The ejection seat had been wrongly serviced, and he left the aircraft after ditching and drowned. Clarke adds that the transcript in the accident file mentions only "a set of lights".

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD: released government records name the pilot. Schaffner is the only witness, and the files hold no report of an anomaly from the time. The chase rests on an anonymous 1992 source. An L4 grade rates the paperwork, and here the paperwork points one way: the record is of a fatal accident, and the chase is a story told about it later.