"If you believe former fighter pilot Milton Torres' story — and news organizations around the world are running with it — the U.S. Air Force was seconds from attacking an alien aircraft over England late one cloudy night in 1957.
Possible interstellar war was averted when the unidentified flying object sped away.
"It was not made of this earth," said Torres, 77, a retired Florida International University engineering professor. "I'd love to take a tour of that ... UFO, whatever it was."
Torres' account was included in thousands of pages of UFO-related documents recently declassified by the British Ministry of Defense and posted online by the British national archive.
To everyone's surprise, the truth was not just out there, but in Kendall, Fla., where Torres lives with his wife, Dorothy.
By the middle of the week, he'd done a television interview with Great Britain's Sky News and been featured on "Good Morning America." Nightline had cued up portentous X-Files-style music and panned across pictures of him as a young lieutenant. Reporters were calling hourly, and Dorothy was leaving the phone off the hook at night so they could get some sleep.
Some of the hullabaloo stems from a misconception that Torres' written account is part of an official disclosure by the British government.
In fact, Dorothy said, it stems from a conversation she had one day on vacation in England.
The guy standing next to her on the buffet line started talking about UFOs, which normally would have been awkward, but her husband's experience immediately came to mind.
The guy turned out to be Harry Harris, a UFO enthusiast of some note. Harris was so enthusiastic, he asked Torres to put his story down on paper. Harris sent a copy to the Ministry of Defense, along with a letter politely requesting an explanation.
Both documents were filed away for 20 years. Harris couldn't be reached, but it's unlikely he ever got the answer he was looking for. "The ministry examines reports solely to establish whether UK airspace may have been compromised by hostile or unauthorised military activity," a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said in an e-mail Wednesday, declining to comment on Torres' account. "Unless there is evidence of a potential threat, there is no attempt to identify the nature of each sighting reported."
Torres' account begins with him scrambling his F-86D Sabre jet from an airfield in Kent, near the southeast coast, to intercept what he has since called a UFO circling East Anglia.
He was 24, flying a plane designed to repel Soviet incursions.
Ground control vectored him in at top speed, around 700 miles per hour, and gave the order to "fire a full salvo of rockets at the UFO."
From 15 miles away, he locked on, which wasn't hard. The target on his radar screen was as big as an aircraft carrier. He was on course to intercept in 10 seconds but still hadn't seen the thing when it started to move away from him. He wasn't overtaking anymore — it was escaping at 200 knots, maybe faster, since that was the maximum speed displayed by the onboard computer.
Within seconds, the UFO was off lock; soon, it vanished from his radar screen and from ground control's, as well, with no one having actually laid eyes on the thing.
Back at the airfield, Torres was told the mission would be considered classified. The next day, an American civilian who looked "like a well-dressed IBM salesman, with a dark blue trench coat," debriefed him and warned that he would be breaching national security if he talked about what had happened.
Torres says he didn't breathe a word, at least at first. Dorothy said she might have heard something about it when they were dating, and might have heard more since.
"I've only been listening to it 31 years," she said. "I believed him — first of all, why would they send someone up to threaten him? ... They thought people would be upset by that information."
Torres did his 20 years in the Air Force and had a second career as an industrial engineering professor. He has grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Looking back on it all, he's glad he never got a shot off that night; surely a craft capable of moving as that one did would have had weapons systems to match. "I would have been vaporized," he said.
"Just a dumb little kid going to slaughter."
He's angry, convinced the British government and his own have information they're not sharing; and wistful, because he believes he'll never know the whole truth.
"We can't be alone out here," he said, and then the phone rang, CNN on the line."
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