FOUR-MINUTE WARNING UFO

During the Cold War the three radome golfballs at RAF Fylingdales on England’s North Sea coast became a sinister symbol of the dreaded ‘four-minute warning’. This was all the time the British government believed we would have from the moment its radars detected the approach of Soviet ballistic missiles before warheads impacted on their targets.

Today the Soviet Union is just a memory and the golfballs have been replaced by one single powerful phased array radar encased in a three-sided truncated pyramid (pictured below). Yet RAF Fylingdales continues its key role in the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) that links it and sister bases in to make them a formidable tool for tracking any UFO that enters Earth’s atmosphere; but as Allen Hynek’s protégé Allan Hendry discovered during research for his , NORAD has a narrowly defined defence mission. It exists to guard the route across the Arctic Circle that would be used by any future Russian attack and its radars “are located , looking skyward; they’re situated along our perimeter looking to the horizon.”