Rudloe Manor: what was actually under Corsham

RAF Rudloe Manor, near Corsham in Wiltshire, spent the 1990s with a reputation as the centre of British UFO secrecy. Researchers described it as the real home of the subject, distinct from the MoD desk in Whitehall that answered public letters.

The claim was not invented. It was a reasonable inference from something true, and the truth underneath it turned out to be a different secret altogether.

What was true

Rudloe Manor housed the RAF Provost and Security Services — the service's police and security branch.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed that its Flying Complaints Flight, based there, handled reports of unusual aerial activity until 1992, when the function moved. Reports from the public that reached RAF stations could be routed through it.

So there genuinely was a unit at Rudloe that received UFO reports. Researchers who said so were right.

The larger thing underneath

Beneath Corsham lie enormous former stone quarries, used from the Second World War onward as underground storage, factory space and headquarters.

One part of that complex, known at different times by names including Burlington and Turnstile, was built as the Central Government War Headquarters — the site to which the British government would relocate in a nuclear war.

It covered roughly a square mile underground, with accommodation for thousands, its own power, water, telephone exchange and a BBC studio. It was kept operational for decades.

Its existence was officially acknowledged and declassified in 2004, and it has since been documented and photographed.

What the UFO files release actually contained

Between 2008 and 2013 the Ministry of Defence transferred its UFO holdings to the National Archives — around sixty thousand pages, released in tranches and freely available.

They include public correspondence, RAF reports, radar assessments, internal minutes on how to answer parliamentary questions, and the Project Condign study.

They also include the material on how reports were routed internally, which is where the Rudloe question is answered.

What Project Condign concluded

The MoD’s own classified study of unexplained aerial phenomena, completed in 2000 and released in 2006, found no evidence of hostile intent or of extraterrestrial origin, and attributed a proportion of reports to poorly understood atmospheric plasma effects. Its plasma explanation has been criticised as unsupported. It remains the only serious British official assessment, and it is public.

Why the two got confused

Because the area was genuinely, heavily secret, and because secrecy does not come labelled.

Researchers correctly detected that something very large was being concealed around Corsham. They attached it to the subject they were investigating. The concealment was real; the subject was wrong.