Arm All Weapons and Fire on Sight: The Milton Torres UFO Incident

By Bill Knell

It all began on the night of April 27, 1957, when a twenty-four year old United States Air Force Lieutenant flying a F86D military jet was ordered to “Arm all weapons and fire on sight.” Milton Torres was an American fighter pilot stationed at RAF Manston in Kent. His target was originally judged to be an unknown and potentially hostile Russian aircraft flying in the skies over England. That assessment quickly changed after the object displayed some unusual flight patterns on radar and very little movement (actually remaining motionless over Ipswich).

Lieutenant Torres said that he was really “pumped up” after being ordered to fire all twenty-four of his rockets at the object. That was the kind of order that a pilot would expect to receive in the event of war. It was sometime after 11pm when Milton was able to track the UFO on his own radar and begin the process of interception and attack. While traveling at 700 mph, the top speed of his F86D, the object suddenly vanished off his radar screen. After ground radar confirmed the object’s disappearance, Milton was ordered to return to his base.

Torres realized that he had not been dealing with a conventional aircraft during the incident. “I was smoking, as fast as I could go,” he said. “This thing had a different propulsion system. It was not an airplane.” The object appeared to be larger than an American B-52 military aircraft on his radar screen. Lieutenant Torres said, “The blip was burning a hole in the radar with its incredible intensity. It was similar to a blip I had received from B52s and seemed to be a magnet of light. It had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier.”

If things were strange in the air, they got stranger after Milton got back on the ground. Torres describes what happened the next day:

“In the Squadron Operations area, one of the sergeants came to me and brought me into the hall way around the side of the pilots' briefing room. He approached a civilian, who appeared from nowhere. The civilian looked like a well dressed IBM salesman, with a dark blue trench coat and a National Security Agency identity card... He immediately jumped into asking questions about the previous day’s mission. After my debriefing, he advised me that this would be considered highly classified.. I should not discuss it with anybody, not even my Commander. He threatened me with a national security breach if I breathed a word of it to anyone. That was that as far as I was concerned… I have not spoken of this to anyone until recent years.”

Torres first decided to reveal his story in 1988. At that time he was contacted by a British Solicitor with an interest in UFOs. The solicitor was trying to track down various UFO encounters that occurred in the UK in order to officially report them to the British MOD (Ministry of Defense). He took Milton’s statement and submitted it. Now seventy-seven years of age and a retired professor of civil engineering living in Miami, Milton Torres decided to come forward and tell his story to the public after the MOD announced that they would release their report on his 1957 incident and other UFO events this week.

The experience of Milton Torres is unique in the files of the MOD because he was the only pilot ever officially ordered to shoot down a UFO in the skies over the UK that came forward and admitted that fact to them. Although he never actually saw the object, Milton now says he believes that the target he was chasing was a UFO of alien origin. The MOD report allegedly backs up his story and claims through other sources.

David Clarke, a self-proclaimed UFO expert and apologist for skeptics, says that what Torres experienced may have been part of a CIA program called Palladium. Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, claims that the secret program involved advanced equipment that was used to create simulated radar blips close to Soviet airspace. He does admit that “this doesn't explain why Milton Torres was scrambled and ordered to open fire.” Clarke also recently cast doubt on the story of an encounter between a Police Helicopter and a flying disc in Wales earlier this year. He claimed that the UFO may have been nothing more than one of several Chinese lanterns released in the sky for a wedding, despite video and eyewitness testimony to the contrary.

Milton Torres recalls that the object he was ordered to shoot down was “…the best target I could ever remember locking onto.” Commenting on its speed, Milton said, “My impression was, that whatever the aircraft or spacecraft was, it must have been traveling in 2 digit Mach numbers, at least Mach 10, to have done what I witnessed on radar.” Ground tracking stations located at RAF Bases in Norfolk and Bentwaters confirmed what Torres described. This hardly sounds like some kind of shadowy CIA radar trick or false return.

RAF Bentwaters has had its own interesting encounters with UFOs, including one which became famous after it occurred on December 27, 1980. On that night highly trained USAF Security personnel witnessed a bright flashing light through the trees outside of the gate to the base. This happened in the Rendlesham Forest region of Suffolk, England. At the same time, radar screens at Bentwaters and RAF Watton in Norfolk tracked an object which suddenly disappeared in that area.

It was initially assumed that the object was a crashed conventional aircraft of some sort. Security personnel were dispatched to investigate and several discovered a triangular shaped craft that had landed in the woods. The object was emitting static electricity, eventually separated into five bright red lights and disappeared. Several more strange events involving UFOs occurred over the next two nights. Events culminated in a special debriefing session similar to what Lieutenant Torres experienced where witnesses were threatened and told not to talk about what happened.

It’s easy to dismiss UFOs as misidentified aircrafts, flocks of birds, secrets projects, ball lightening, Chinese lanterns or hallucinations. It’s not so easy to dismiss UFO Witnesses like Milton Torres that are highly trained and whose stories are backed up by the military tracking systems of the USAF and the RAF. Skeptics and their apologists should remember that before attacking the credibility of UFO incidents involving military personnel.

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