Cosford / Shawbury Incident — DEFE 24/1962 (March 1993 multi-witness sightings)

Brief

The 297-page file originates from the UK MoD's Secretariat (Air Staff) and covers the March 1993 Cosford/Shawbury incident — over 100 witnesses, including RAF military police at both stations, reporting a large silent triangular craft traversing the West Midlands — with Nick Pope's internal minute described in the war.gov listing as concluding the events were 'of considerable defence significance' and as originating from this file. The 15 extractable pages do not include the Cosford/Shawbury witness statements or Pope's minute; they instead contain the Halt Memo (Lt Col Charles Halt's official USAF account of the Rendlesham Forest December 1980 encounter with a metallic triangular object, including physical trace evidence and radiation readings), standard MoD UFO report forms with handwritten witness entries, a House of Lords debate establishing that the MoD's sole stated interest in UAP is airspace security, and a News of the World article on the Rendlesham incident. The House of Lords exchange also reveals that before 1967 the MoD routinely destroyed UFO reports after five years, and that official figures on how many sightings were genuinely unidentified were, in the words of a government spokesman, simply unavailable. The file was declassified and released on 13 August 2009.

Metadata

Agency

UK Ministry of Defence / RAF / Sec(AS)

Release

2009-08-13

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

297 pages

Classification

Not determinable from extractable pages; released UNCLASSIFIED 2009-08-13

Tags

triangular craft, silent, multi-witness, West Midlands, RAF Cosford, RAF Shawbury, 1993, Rendlesham Forest, RAF Woodbridge, 1980, radiation readings, animal disturbance, angular movement, DEFE 24/1962

Key points

• The primary subject of this file — the 30-31 March 1993 Cosford/Shawbury sightings with over 100 witnesses including RAF military police, and Nick Pope's internal minute concluding the events were 'of considerable defence significance' — is described in the war.gov listing but is not present in the 15 extractable pages.
• Page 163 contains the Halt Memo, Lt Col Charles Halt's official USAF memorandum documenting the Rendlesham Forest encounter of December 1980, included in this 1993 MoD file as apparent comparative context for the Cosford/Shawbury investigation.p.163
• The Halt Memo describes a metallic triangular object in Rendlesham Forest that hovered or rested on legs, illuminated the surrounding forest with white light, displayed a pulsing red light on top and blue lights underneath, then maneuvered through the trees and vanished as USAF patrolmen approached.p.163
• Physical trace evidence documented by Halt includes three ground depressions approximately 1.5 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter found the next day, and radiation readings recorded by geiger counter with peak values at the depressions and at the center of the triangle they formed.p.163
• On a subsequent night at Rendlesham, a red sun-like pulsing object appeared to emit glowing particles before fragmenting into five separate white objects; additional star-like objects in the sky displayed rapid angular movement with red, green, and blue lights.p.163
• Viscount Long's government response in the House of Lords debate (page 84) establishes the MoD's sole stated interest in UFO reports: whether they reveal a defence implication — such as an unidentified or foreign aircraft breaching UK airspace — and explicitly excludes scientific investigation.p.84
• The Lords debate transcript shows the government confirming that before 1967 UFO reports were routinely destroyed after five years, and that the number of sightings which remained genuinely unidentified was not tracked.p.84
• Pages 116 and 132 contain standard MoD printed UFO report forms with handwritten witness entries; the forms request date, time, duration, object description, observer position, observation method, direction, angle, distance, movements, and meteorological conditions.p.116
• Page 169 is a News of the World newspaper article on the Rendlesham incident, indicating the file was assembled with press coverage alongside official documentation — a common MoD filing practice for high-profile UAP cases.p.169

Verbatim

• The object was hovering or on legs.

  p.163

Most interesting

• The Halt Memo on page 163 is one of the most reproduced primary-source UAP documents in history; its inclusion in a 1993 MoD UFO desk file suggests analysts were drawing explicit parallels between the Rendlesham 1980 and Cosford/Shawbury 1993 cases — both involving large triangular objects near active RAF installations.
• When Lord Kimberley asked in the Lords debate how many of the year's 600 reported sightings were genuinely unidentified, Viscount Long replied that the figures 'disappeared into the unknown before we got them' — meaning the MoD's own internal tracking did not isolate true unknowns from conventionally explained cases.
• Viscount Long acknowledged that before 1967 the MoD routinely destroyed UFO reports after five years, creating a permanent gap in the official archive for all pre-1967 sightings regardless of significance.
• The Halt Memo notes that animals on a nearby farm 'went into a frenzy' as patrolmen approached the object — an animal-disturbance detail that appears consistently across UAP encounter reports spanning multiple countries and decades.
• The star-like objects observed on the second night at Rendlesham are described in the Halt Memo as moving 'rapidly in sharp angular movements' — a kinematic descriptor that recurs with notable consistency across military UAP reports from the 1980s through the 2020s.
• Lord Paget of Northampton asked in the debate whether any sighting had ever suggested a genuine menace to UK defences and characterized the entire inquiry as 'an awful lot of time being wasted on this nonsense' — a dismissal that stands in direct contrast to Nick Pope's 1993 internal conclusion that the Cosford/Shawbury events were 'of considerable defence significance.'
• The file runs to 297 pages but only 15 carry extractable text, indicating the bulk of the file — including the Cosford/Shawbury witness statements — remains in scanned image-only format and was not machine-processed at the time of the 2009 release.