一(5)

This is where things started to get weird. The target, whatever it was, since I wasn’t told, was not detected on the equipment I was operating. However, the BAE technician, the ‘Boffin’, did ‘see’ the target on his equipment and was voice reporting target information. To cut a long story short: The target came in from an extremely high altitude, which I later deduced (time/speed/distance) had to be in excess of 200 miles, i.e., coming in from outside the earth atmosphere and at an incomprehensible velocity, and most certainly outside spectrum of the kit I was operating. Now, this wasn’t some sort of UFO as the ground operators were actually talking, clearly, to someone inside the target throughout the exercise. Later the ‘Boffin’ said, “don’t worry, its one of ours!” I recall saying, “Thank f**k for that! because I didn’t see a Scooby!” He said, “Well, you were not meant to see anything and if you did, then we would have had some serious snags”. Later, I thought, I had been engaged in a tracking exercise against a missile with an extremely low radar echoing area, launched from a platform in orbit. This was not so since, as I discovered, the target was most definitely piloted, manoeuvring, and came to an abrupt stop at the end of the range. I instinctively knew better to ask anymore questions about this. Instead I was more resolved to see if I could pick the bloody thing up on my kit – as a matter of professional pride. I never managed to pick it up. We conducted several more runs against this type of target and it sounded as if there was more than one of them and not just the same target repeating the runs.