Boston Stump radar incident (1996)

The episode

The sightings began in the early hours of 5 October 1996 with reports from police patrols at Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast. Shortly afterwards, a controller at the Neatishead radar station noticed a stationary "blip" on the civil air traffic control radar at Claxby, near Market Rasen, in the position of Boston. RAF Waddington's radar later picked up a second return elsewhere. Lights were also reported over The Wash, the tidal estuary between Lincolnshire and Norfolk.

The official explanation

The Ministry of Defence attributed the radar return to St Botolph's church spire in Boston. The spire, known in aviation circles as the "Boston Stump", appears on some radars under certain propagation conditions. The visible lights were put down to other sources, including the bright star Sirius and Venus, though the lights over The Wash were harder to account for. A 23-page RAF report completed in November 1996 concluded that the RAF's low-key response had been fully justified. The report described the Wash lights as possibly "a distant celestial source".

Later disclosure and dispute

The MoD's UFO files were released to The National Archives in the 2000s and 2010s, and newspaper coverage of them revived the case. A 2017 report claimed that RAF officers had been "overruled at the highest level" over how the sightings were handled. That is a newspaper characterisation, and it has not been checked against the primary documents here. Sources also disagree on details, such as whether the radar base was in Lincolnshire or Norfolk, and whether the radar return or only the lights were the main feature.

Assessment

The case is notable mainly because it shows the British air defence system treating an unexplained radar return as a live alert, and because the RAF and the MoD gave a documented prosaic explanation for the radar element. The lights over The Wash remain the part with the least clear account. This entry relies on press summaries of the official material, so details should be checked against the National Archives catalogue before anyone relies on them.