NP: It was very difficult. The first thing to understand is - the whole job that I did had been really treated with no importance. It was absolutely a very limited resourced post. So it was just one person trying to do his best with a 300, or so, reports each year.
When we had any sighting, the first thing I would do would be to try to use some common sence and say well, what does it sound like it could be? The first thing I would do was to try to eliminate all the most likely things. And there was a series of checks that I could make. I would check with airtraffic-control authoritys, both civil and military, to try to correlate the sighting with any airtraffic activity. I could impound radartape. More often I would simply ask airdefence-experts, I would give them the coordinates and the time and ask them could you check if it was any unusual in that area at the time?

But that intended to be difficult because, ofcourse, most of the military radars on the eastcoast of Britain looking east... and you're not expecting something to come strait down like that! So to a certain extent radar would not be of much use to the UFO-sightings that I got.
Another problem was that the attitude of the radarexperts. If they got something on their screens, and less it behaves like a regular aircraft, they would write it off as a ghost in the machine, an unusual meteorolgical condition or something like that. So, the whole mindset of these people is much geared against specific threats. They are looking for bears and badges coming in from the northeast on particular flightpath behaving in particular ways and anything else would get a blip, it could be a flock of birds?! I mean, it has happen. Radar has not been as helpful as I think many people think. I mean, a lot of people expect that radar is gonna give them a yes or no answer...

CS: Were you in the position where you could order them to send you the tapes?

NP: Yes I was. I did it one or two ways. Most usually I would ask somebody else to check the data. But on a few occasions, if I had a very high profile-sighting, I would ask that the tapes impounded were send to me because they are reused very quickly and the radardata is transfered on to a VHS video-cassettes and they keep them until they comes back to front of the que and sticks out and goes back in... So, unless you act quickly the data won't be kept.

CS: Were you ever denied information?

NP: No. My impression was that mostly the RAF were as interested as I was and trying to find out about this and they were very keen to help. And people would send me the radartapes, but they would make a point and say: -I had a sneaky preview and I can't see anything...
     A lot of that is becuase RAF-pilots has seen UFO's themself, but there's a lot of under-reporting there. If you think that, for a civilian, there are restrains to make a UFO-report, the fear of ridicule, the fear of...you know, it won't do your career much good. Think how things will be in the RAF! And when I socialized with the RAF, or when I met them on courses, they were fascinated in my job and they take me aside and say: -Hey look, I've seen UFO's from my cockpit...

CS: What did they see? Would you give us an example.

NP: A lot of them just see vague lights or shapes in the sky. But there was some poeple who had seen definite unidentified structured craft. One of my favourite cases, I take it briefly, is a squadron of Tornado-craft coming back over the northsea, and they were just overtaken by speed by a UFO (laughter)... All they could think of to say on their report was maybe it was a stealth but it didn't look like it (this was in 1990). Generally speaking, you would expect the RAF, who are very good on aircraft­recognition, to say: -That's a F­117A Stealth Fighter, or -A B2 Stealth Bomber.

CS: How many of the UFO-reports would you say were military-reports v/s civilian reports?

NP: Most of them are civilian. The military ones are aprox. 1% of that. They are very reluctant to come forward, but the one that we do have are very interesting, like Redlesham-forrest with all the military witnesses...

CS: Was that incident recorded by radar?

NP: Well, the story gets a bit difficult. I have never come across any radar-data, but, it's my understanding that it was that period between christmas and new year that a lot of systems were down for repair and offline. So, it's just that sort of time when someone could get away with it and not get picked up on radar.

CS: Where does the rumour come from that it was recorded on radar? Was it a military source?

NP: No, probably the UFO-lobby. We met a RAF fighter controller who sid that about a month before the Rendlessham-forest incident he tracked an unknown target in that general area. And they had an RAF-Phantom aircraft that was ordered to intercept the UFO, and it was going up as they were looking at it on the radarscreens from 30.000 feet to 35.000 feet, 40.000, 45.000, 60.000, 70.000...forget it! (laughter)