Is the British royal family obsessed UFOs?
Various anecdotes and witnesses suggest that a fascination with UFOs runs in the British royal family. Here, we dive into several of the surprising claims.
Image: Lorna Roberts / Shutterstock.com
Have aliens visited our planet? Almost half of Sky HISTORY fans think so, even if more than half don’t perceive UFOs as a threat to humanity.
For decades, the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) collected and analysed masses of reports about UFO sightings. Though the MoD has since closed its UFO desk and released files about its findings, many Brits believe in a government cover-up of UFO information.
What UK politicians do know about UFOs might even have spread to the royal family. Sky HISTORY’s investigates the monarchy’s longstanding interest in UFOs and what it could mean for our future understanding of the universe.
A UFO lands on Lord Mountbatten’s estate
Mark Christopher Lee has filmed his own intriguing documentary, The King of UFOs, looking into what British royals evidently know about the UFO phenomenon.
Lee hasn’t just focused on the current generation of royals, either. He points out that Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert wrote a diary entry about noticing strange, inexplicable lights in the sky.
However, the seeds of the current royals’ interest might have been sown by an especially peculiar UFO descending upon a royal estate in 1955.
The estate in question, Broadlands in Hampshire, belonged to Prince Philip’s uncle Lord Mountbatten at the time. Though labourer Fred Briggs was actually the one who originally reported the sighting, it is thought that Mountbatten later relayed the story to his nephew.
Prince Philip’s secretive interest in UFOs
Was the Mountbatten UFO tale the initial spark for Prince Philip’s keen interest in extraterrestrial matters? Either way, it’s a passion that largely went unnoticed until after Queen Elizabeth II’s spouse passed away in April 2021.
According to former MoD employee Nick Pope, Philip subscribed to various UFO-themed periodicals, including Flying Saucer Review. He also asked an equerry, Sir Peter Horsley, to report back to him with accounts of purported alien encounters.
Pope acknowledges that Philip had especially good reason to keep these activities hush-hush. His open-mindedness contrasted with the UK Government’s stance that UFO sightings did not hold any major implications for British national security.
Did Prince Philip plan to meet an alien?
This is another story you might have heard on the grapevine. Again, Horsley came into play here, conversing with a mysterious, supposedly extraterrestrial entity called ‘Janus’
who professed to wanting to meet Prince Philip.
According to Lee, Horsley met Janus in a Chelsea flat in 1954. Reportedly, the purported alien ‘had an ethereal otherworldly quality’ and could ‘extract information about flying saucers,’ Lee told Metro.co.uk.
On reflection, Janus now seems likely to have been a Russian spy looking to get close to Prince Philip for nefarious reasons. Philip himself turned down the opportunity to meet Janus, aware of the scandal that could otherwise result.
Was a royal spotted flying a prototype UFO?
In The King of UFOs, Lee interviews Dan Costello, who claims to have seen a British royal piloting an apparent prototype aircraft in 1975. The royal in question was the future King Charles III, with the alleged sighting occurring in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
According to Costello, the craft had helicopter-style dual rotor blades, but could hover in the sky without them whirring. There was also ‘no sound of propulsion, just a faint crackle of electromagnetism’.
Queen Elizabeth II was fascinated by the Rendlesham incident
The Rendlesham UFO incident has been dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’. It occurred in December 1980, when servicemen stationed near Rendlesham Forest were convinced they saw otherworldly lights dancing above the trees.
In The King of UFOs, former CID detective John Hanson recalls Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip corresponding with him about the incident. Hanson had previously co-written books with Colonel Charles Halt, one of the key witnesses at Rendlesham.
The late Queen’s curiosity about crop circles
These days, crop circles aren’t always seen as mysterious. In fact, many of them are now attributed to human pranksters without a second thought.
It was a very different situation in the 1980s, when a spate of elaborate-looking crop circles popped up in fields across the UK. Had these imprints been left by aliens? One person apparently keen to find out was Queen Elizabeth II.
She even once sent her chief scientific advisor out to inspect a crop circle in Wiltshire. Researcher Colin Andrews was already at the site, having got word that the Queen was intrigued by this particular circle’s formation.
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