Other governments kept files too

The US is not the only state that chased these objects with jets. Belgium scrambled F-16s during the triangle wave and got radar locks on targets that out-accelerated them. Spain sent a Mirage after the lights that diverted flight JK-297 into Manises. In England the RAF vectored Venom night fighters onto radar targets over Lakenheath and Bentwaters that stopped dead and moved off again, and three Ministry of Supply radars tracked echoes over Luce Bay climbing to about 60,000 ft.

Some of the strongest material comes from the archives themselves. The Italian Air Force publishes its OVNI records, and Denmark released a 329-page Air Force file in 2009. The British file on Calvine shows a diamond-shaped object photographed beside a jet. In 1985 Papua New Guinea's intelligence service asked the US embassy to explain a night of lights its own pilots had tracked.