The Gatwick Incident, 1966
On the morning of July 20th, 1966 flight 729 returned from Madrid to Gatwick airport, only to be forced to abort its attempted landing due to an obstruction on the intersections of runways five and two. The pilot reported the presence of a police box on the runway, prompting air traffic control to dispatch police. Police chased away four strangers, and the police box was collected from the runway. Control initially believed it to be the product of a practical joke. If only they knew what they were in for that day…
If you were a student in 1966 looking for a cheap gap year, Chameleon Tours were your best budget option. For just £28, Chameleon Tours offered people between the ages of 18-25 a package holiday to any one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe: Zurich, Rome, Athens, Dubrovnik, and Freiburg, Madrid, and Baden-Württemberg. It was a popular choice, with 50000 young people taking to Europe from Gatwick via Chameleon Tours, who operated four of their own planes from the airport.
Fifty-thousand young adults left Gatwick for various European flights, and not a single one returned. One of those people was Ryan Briggs, who took a Chameleon Tours flight to Rome. Everything seemed normal to his family at first. Ryan caught his flight, and sent back a hand-written postcard shortly after arriving. However, that was the last the Briggs family heard from Ryan for some time. His sister, Samantha Briggs, implored the authorities for help, but was unable to get anywhere with them. She contacted the hotel at which Ryan was supposed to be staying, only to find he had never checked in. Police in Rome found no trace of a Ryan Briggs, and neither did Rome's international airport. Inspector Gascoigne was the first to take Samantha's worries seriously and, on the 20th of July, arrived at Gatwick to investigate. While airport security was dealing with the matter of a police box and four trespassers, Gascoigne was investigating the private Chameleon Tours hangar. That is where his corpse was later found, his clothes singed as though he somehow died by electrocution.
A police box on a runway, a missing young man, and a murdered police officer. You would think things were already as strange as they were going to get, but you'd be wrong. Two people arrived at Immigration and Customs attempting to report a dead body. They arrived with no passports, despite coming from the arrivals gate. One was a scruffy-looking gentleman in a frock coat and the other a boy with a Scots accent wearing a kilt. When interviewed by journalist James Stevens, Samantha Briggs would describe the scruffy-looking man's accent as "blurred," and referred to him as "a short man with a mournful face and dishevelled clothing." He seemed to her to be "incredibly well informed." Everyone seemed to call the man "Doctor," as though it were more of a name than a title. The Scots boy wearing the kilt went by the more conventional name of Jamie. Curiously, a white-haired man also calling himself "Doctor" was present with Sir Charles Summer in South Kensington at the time, seemingly involved with the on-going War Machine threat caused by the activation of WOTAN.
The airport manager, Charles Gordon, was called to satisfy the Doctor's demands to see a figure of authority about the body, and escorted the mystery man and Jamie to the Chameleon Tours hanger, where they found nothing more than a crate of plastic cups. Unamused by the Doctor's claims, Gordon tried to have trespassers arrested, only for them to escape.
It was around this time that Samantha Briggs arrived at the Chameleon Tours kiosk to make enquiries about her missing brother Ryan Briggs. She found the representitive entirely unhelpful but ended up meeting with Jamie, who promised that he had a friend who might know how to help her, and mysteriously asked that they meet later. It was Samantha that made an important discovery in the case of the missing passengers - Chameleon Tours had their customers fill out postcards before leaving on their flight. The postcards were collected at the kiosk, sent out to Chameleon Tours facilities at the country the flights were supposed to go to, and then posted back by Chameleon Tours to the families in the UK as if from the passengers. Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Crossland arrived in search of his missing collegue: Detective Gasgoigne.
Inspector Crossland was able to convince Charles Gordon to humour the Doctor further, and it appears some members of Gatwick staff were starting to come around as it was the manager's assistant Jean Rock who made the next key discovery. Having called around the various international airports to which Chameleon Tours were chartering flights, she discovered that Chameleon Tours only ever picked up passengers but never dropped them off. It was as though the passengers disappeared mid-flight.
Gatwick usually only monitors flights for around fifty miles before they drop off the radar, otherwise they would have too much traffic to monitor. It was not unusual that Chameleon Tours flights disappeared from their radars after fifty miles, as they simply weren't looking that far. Manager Gordon could not have expected to see what he did when he requested the RAF to tail the 1530 to Rome, however. As the Chameleon Tours flight to Rome reached the edge of expanded radar range, the RAF jet was seen to go completely out of control and crash into the sea, disappearing from radar. The Chameleon Tours flight then appeared to stop moving, something that could only indicate that it was dropping straight down. The plane then disappeared off radar.
The initial assumption was that the two aircraft had collided, dropping into the ocean. When rescue services found the wreckage, however, there was only wreckage of the RAF fighter jet and no sign of the 1530 to Rome. The pilot was found electrocuted in his seat. So where did the Chameleon Tours flight go? Where do all the Chameleon Tours flights go? Perhaps the plane did not drop out of the sky, but instead shot directly upwards beyond the scope of radar, into space. Maybe that sounds farfetched, but how else do you explain an aeroplane hovering in the same spot on radar but without leaving wreckage in the sea below? Admittedly, many wrecks are lost at sea, but then how do you reconcile the fact that the RAF flight, which went down at the same time, was found while the Chameleon Tours flight was not?
Let's break down what was happening. Chameleon Tours planes would leave from Gatwick carrying a cabin filled with young people. They would fly fifty miles out of the UK and disappear. The flight would then return without passengers. Postcards from the passengers, filled out before the flight, would be sent to the plane's supposed destination and then posted back to the UK to make it appear as if the passengers arrived safely. But to what end?
The reports of DI Crossland simply refer to "holiday fraud," and while there are no police reports regarding the recovery of the fifty-thousand missing people, they started to turn up on delayed flights for the rest of the evening, trickling back into society as if they hadn't gone missing at all. Twenty-five members of staff at Gatwick airport recall waking up lying on the concrete in the carpark, missing hours of time with no recollection of how they got there.
Some theorise that Chameleon Tours were a cover for a human trafficking ring and even though they were busted the whole thing was covered up so London's second biggest international airport could save face. Others theorise that it was a money laundering front involving simply moving the same group of people around to make the company look busier than it really was. More outlandish theories include Chameleon Tours being a result of C-Day and the computer WOTAN trying to wipe out humanity, a system of alien abductions replacing people with shapeshifting duplicates, and a government test of international security where they abducted real people and wiped their memories before returning them later.
Whatever the truth was behind Chameleon Tours, there are plenty of witnesses to the presence of "the Doctor" and it features one of the most convincing blue box sightings in history as it comes from a pilot.
