Russia, Drones, and the UFO Narrative
Liberation Times Opinion & Insight
Written by Franc Milburn - 5 February 2026
Note: This article draws on a detailed paper titled ‘Russian Hybrid Operations Part One’, which you can download here.
November to December 2024 saw some fascinating events at many strategically important Royal Air Force bases used by the Americans in the UK.
They had all the ingredients for a genuinely anomalous UFO mystery: strange lights in the sky, multiple locations, repeat incidents, nuclear weapons, deployment of Special Forces, unknown actors, with the major East Anglia base cluster in a region already steeped in UFO history around airbases and nukes.
But were they really the makings of a perfect UFO mystery - an invitation to investigate calmly and open-mindedly - or did the story become framed as UFOs too quickly?
Beyond a truly fascinating video of a UFO taken by a police helicopter that has turned out, thus far, to be an F-15, there has been no other validated (private, commercial, or government) data evidence showing genuine Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) associated with the bases during the timeframe.
Elements of social media immediately jumped on the incidents as ‘proof’ of genuine, anomalous activity – especially given the perceived ‘UFO and nuke’ connection and reinforced by a lack of immediate answers from the UK Government in terms of downed drones, lack of officially arrested perpetrators and an official explanation, beyond announcement of the opening of an investigation by Ministry of Defence (MoD) Police in December 2024.
The result was some people engaging in what my first article described, thus:
“Unfortunately, X / Twitter has been rife with misinformation and erroneous speculation, mostly due to accounts seeking to boost engagement… I am not ruling out presence of more exotic technology or UAP, but rather attempting to put forward a more prosaic assessment in light of the information we do have.”
I wrote that I was keeping an open mind – human or genuinely anomalous – whereas some online discussions quickly settled into fixed positions.
To me, these were unpersuasive on the evidence available at the time, and have since been proven such by the official attribution of Russian drone activity by MI6 last December.
I also recommended at the time:
“At the same time, given the limited official or expert information available, one must keep an open mind and use logical deduction and context to determine the most likely explanation.”
A common argument I’ve seen is this:
“If Russia had technology like that [as seen at the UK airbases in late 2024] they would not be losing the war in Ukraine.”
The inference here is that the objects over the UK bases constitute ‘game-changing’ technologies of the kind that I have written peer-reviewed, globally-ranked university think tank papers about.
It’s worth checking what the Ukrainian military drone experts and professional Western analysts are saying about Russian drone unit capabilities: the Russians are currently winning the drone war over land in Ukraine in terms of the number of attacks and overall attrition.
The operational impact is widely reported, including by Ukrainians living through winter strikes and front-line accounts. Battle damage assessments are available - and ask anyone in Ukraine living without power and heat in winter, or the soldiers on and well behind the front line.
“The UFO crew are being really silly, really daft,” is how a former senior NATO civilian intelligence officer I spoke to described the situation.
My working assumption from the outset was that the investigation concerned criminality and national security, as the UK minister responsible for the Ministry of Defence Police announced that they would be leading the investigation.
Genuine non-human UAP would be investigated by Defence Intelligence (as was the 2000 ‘Condign’ report) – which I`ve discussed at length – and potentially, by other agencies, according to what I’ve been told, but which remains unverified.
The MoD Police announced that no suspects had been identified as they concluded their investigation, which means they didn´t identify anybody committing a crime or arrest anybody.
In my first article, I also identified the other police, military and national investigative bodies, British and American, that would likely be involved in an investigation of such magnitude and serious security breaches. Liaising with such agencies was part of what I used to do back in the day.
The Lakenheath ‘UFO and nukes angle’ didn´t hold water either, as I pointed out in a second paper, despite repeated claims.
“There was no UFO and nuke situation last December, given that Lakenheath is still being readied to receive nuclear free-fall bombs,” I wrote at the time, extensively quoting a Federation of American Scientists report:
“As of February 2025, there are no known public indications that nuclear weapons have been deployed to Lakenheath. Our assessment is that the return of the nuclear mission to Lakenheath is intended primarily as a backup, rather than to deploy weapons now.”
Varied open sources indicate nuclear weapons may have returned to Lakenheath mid-2025, following upgrades to facilities.
The UK is seeing large numbers of drones near sensitive sites for hostile actors to take advantage of.
The UK Government is also preparing to give Defence personnel more powers to deal with drones instead of having to rely on the civilian police.
UK Defence Secretary John Healey has said:
“Through the Armed Forces Bill, we’re giving our military greater powers to take out and shoot down threatening drones near bases. And stepping up investment in counter-drone technology to keep Britain secure at home and strong abroad.”
So, we see them gearing up to counter the drone threat – not UFOs. We also don’t know what might have come down inside the bases.
My paper here presented, covers what we know now about the UK airbase events of late 2024, with official attribution for drone operations to Russia from the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, the company that counters unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS) for the UK Ministry of Defence, Heathrow and Gatwick airports (amongst others); the EU and European NATO member states; and a new analysis I´ve done correlating Kremlin threats against the UK and European states with Russian intelligence activity at the bases.
Follow-on papers will cover: officially-attributed Russian drone espionage in the Nordic countries and strategic High North in 2022; Russian Shadow Fleet ‘ghost’ drone operations; the Russian-attributed European drone wave of September to October 2025; and also, a mini feasibility study on the UK drone ops of late 2024.
The themes presented draw extensively on both the history of Russian intelligence activities stretching back a century, expert commentary on Russian drone use in hybrid warfare, as well as documented reporting and official attributions blaming Russian intelligence services.
I will also look at commercial and military C-UAS and highlight the difficulties of detecting, tracking and engaging drones, especially around critical infrastructure, airbases and urban areas.
Last but not least, I’ve been comparing official UK and European attributions of certain drone incidents to Russia with some of the commentary circulating on social media that frames these events as UFO-related.
The aim is straightforward: if we want the public to take genuinely anomalous reports seriously, we need to apply the same standards of evidence and intellectual rigour when incidents appear to involve drones.
