Former US Air Force fighter pilot Milton Torres is convinced he had an encounter with an alien spaceship in the skies over England in the 1950s.
He was warned to keep quiet about the incident, but eventually talked about it 31 years later, the newly-released Ministry of Defence files show. On the night of May 20 1957, Dr Torres, then aged 25, was on standby at RAF Manston in Kent when he received an urgent order to scramble.He was told to intercept a UFO with "very unusual flight patterns" over East Anglia that ground radar operators had been tracking for some time. It was so cloudy he could not see anything, but the object showed up clearly on his radar as similar in size to a B-52 bomber. He was then ordered to fire a full salvo of 24 rockets at the object - something that came as a sobering shock to him.But before he could carry out this instruction the UFO suddenly darted off and disappeared from his scope in a matter of seconds.
The next day a man claiming to be from the US National Security Agency threatened him with losing his flying status if he told anyone what happened. Dr Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, Florida, said he was flying at about Mach 0.92, while the UFO was travelling at over Mach 10. He said: "I think it was an alien spacecraft. It had a propulsion system that was beyond us - either magnetism or anti-gravity."
Until 1967 the MoD had a policy of destroying UFO files every five years because they were considered of "transitory interest".