Police, a Tanker Crew and a Radar Plot over the Wash

At about 02:05Z on 5 October 1996 a Skegness police officer on patrol at Addlethorpe saw stationary blue, green and red lights low in the east. Officers at Skegness station videoed flashing red, green, blue and white lights. Police at Boston saw a fixed bright white light about 40 degrees up until dawn. About eight miles east of Skegness the crew of the tanker MV Conocoast saw two sets of flashing lights, one to the north and one to the south. A stationary plot with no height sat on the National Air Traffic Services radar at Claxby, over Boston, from about 02:25Z.

What is on the record

Eight files in the UK MoD's UFO papers at the National Archives cover the night. The core is loose minute D/DAO/1/13 of 13 November 1996, the result of eight working days of inquiry after Martin Redmond MP wrote to the Secretary of State. It found that only the first sighting was unsolicited. The rest followed calls from Great Yarmouth Coastguard. By 04:00Z the officer at Addlethorpe thought his lights looked "very similar to the rest" of the stars.

The radar plot appeared on Claxby and on no other radar. Three aircraft later flew through its position and saw nothing. The MoD judged it a permanent echo, "highly probably" the 273-foot spire of St Botolph's in Boston, the Boston Stump. The Royal Greenwich Observatory gave Venus, then exceptionally bright, as the probable source of the Boston and Skegness lights. The minute adds that "no explanation can be offered" for the two sets of lights seen from the Conocoast.

The press told it differently. Newspaper cuttings in the files describe a radar-correlated object. The MoD's own press lines called that coverage "incorrect, ill-informed and speculative". Eberhart's chronology says RAF Waddington also had a target. The minute calls that "inaccurate reporting of a separate permanent echo". Press transcripts give 03:14 for the Skegness police call, where the minute puts the first sighting at about 02:05Z.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD: a released government record names who saw it. The file redacts personal names, so the witnesses go by role: the Skegness and Boston police on duty, the Conocoast's crew, Great Yarmouth Coastguard and the radar controllers. Nothing outside the MoD's papers speaks for the night here. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What the tanker crew saw is not resolved here.