each of our Stations was being jammed by some clever Russian system which none of us had experienced before. It was only when we realised that the source of jamming was moving slowly towards the south that it dawned on us that we were picking up the sunrise! As the sun rose, Üdem picked it up, then it faded from our screens. After this we came to expect it during clear summer mornings.
In August, during the hot weather, when it was almost impossible to sleep during the day because of sweat trickling across my back, it was a pleasure to go on evening watch into the cooler conditions down the hole. On one watch, I was actually sitting at a PPI myself when, at the far north-east of our coverage, at what must have been great altitude, I watched as a series of paints headed across part of the Baltic Sea and over Denmark at a speed far in excess of anything I had seen before. I was not able to pick up the track on the Type 13 so could not get a height. My estimate of the speed was in thousands of knots. I thought it was interference, but the heading was steady. I checked with Brockzetel. They had seen it, too, and it was too high for them to pick up on a Type 13. Our theory at the time was that we had seen some sort of meteorite as it was entering the earth's atmosphere.3
On later watches we started to see tracks over the border which were moving rather more quickly than we would expect, and behaving peculiarly. These interested us. Sometimes they were at great altitude, and were beyond our understanding. Group became interested too, and arranged for a visit by a gentleman in civilian clothes whose name and status we were not told. He questioned us about these paints and tracks. A short while later one of our PPIs was fitted with a cowl to which was attached a time-lapse camera. The film cassette had to be exchanged each morning for a new one. The completed films were sent away. This was one of those times when so-called flying saucer activity was appearing in the press.4 It was evident to us that someone at a higher level of authority was taking an interest in what we could see.
Weeks later we had a return visit from this civilian gentleman. He brought with him one of the films, and arrangements were made for it to be projected on our rest room wall. Those Officers who had regularly been on nights were shown it but all others were excluded. The film was definitely 'ours' because we could recognise the shape of our PEs. It seemed that one picture was taken after each four sweeps of the trace, thus the afterglow of previous paints was still visible and provided data from which course and speed could be determined by analysis. When projected at normal speed these paints appeared as very fast-moving aircraft tracks. Even though the film was run through several times it was difficult to get a grasp of what we were looking at. Certainly none of us saw anything interesting. We asked questions, but were given evasive replies. After the gentleman left we had the impression that something was being kept from us, and that we had been conned in order to assuage our curiosity. We felt dissatisfied, but this was spiced with a determination to pay even more attention to anything we thought was unusual or couldn't understand.
One night when it was Plt.Off. Clive Sabel's turn on watch, the usual Met balloon rose up in its normal way and must have entered the jet stream to be carried off eastwards at a great rate of knots. He told me next day that the Russian response was quite extraordinary. Apparently, all sorts of paints appeared across the border and climbed to intercept it! He also said that Group became quite excited as the interception point was not that far east of the frontier.
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3 With the benefit of hindsight, this may have been a test firing of one of the experimental Russian inter-continental ballistic missiles which had maybe gone wrong. The Russians announced the successful firing of an ICBM later in the month.
4 Flying saucer was the popular term for UFO = Unidentified Flying Object, into which category our sightings of 'Angels' also fitted.
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