Further Claims Of A British Recovery Squad Of “Non-Human” Vehicles: The Franc Milburn Account

Leaked documents, whistleblower testimony, and the potential for UFO disclosure are topics that have swirled in UFO circles for decades. However, over the last several years with the Pentagon’s apparent shift, albeit fractional, concerning its stance on such matters, the idea of disclosure has dangled for the wider public once more, with many now requestioning just how many of the alleged leaked truths will prove to be exactly that. And in this atmosphere of cautious anticipation, further whistleblower claims continue to surface, including that governments have recovered downed alien craft and stored them away behind closed doors.

While these claims have been prevalent in the United States for some time, such suggestions of such activity in the United Kingdom, although not non-existent, are certainly not as widespread. In early 2024, however, a former British soldier made claims that a one-time special forces operator had informed him of an elite recovery team of “non-human” vehicles, whose mission sometimes included tracking down and securing the occupants of these otherworldly crafts.

He claimed to have come forward now as he wished to support the very similar claims that have been made at the Pentagon hearings in the United States. And while it might be easy to dismiss the claims initially, a closer look should perhaps make us all think of such notions a little more seriously.

The Increment – An Ultra Discreet Elite Unit

In an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper, former British soldier, Franc Milburn, a member of the British Army’s elite Parachute Regiment, claimed that he had been informed by another veteran of the British Armed Forces, specifically a member of the special forces who he named “John”, that he had been part of a top-secret recovery team that recovered “non-human” crafts. ^[1] Furthermore, Milburn also claimed that he had spoken to members of the Royal Air Force who told him that they had not only pursued a disc-shaped object traveling at high speed, by they had opened fire on it.

The recovery unit in question, according to Milburn, is covertly overseen by MI6 and operates in absolute secrecy. Further according to Milburn, this unit was referred to in closed quarters as “The Increment” and was made up of specially recruited members from across the British special forces – the Special Air Service (SAS), the Special Boat Service (SBS), and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).

John himself was recruited in just such a manner shortly after his service in the Falklands War in 1982. And while he conducted several “high-risk” missions around the world in the years that followed, it was an encounter that occurred in the north of England in the late 1980s that would change his life forever.

It Was “Obvious There Were Occupants Who Had Fled!”

According to what John told Milburn, his unit – made up of between 20 to 30 Special Forces operators – was told to stand by for deployment, with the only other information being that the RAF had told them that “a craft which wasn’t Russian, British, or American had been downed.

John and his unit were promptly and discreetly flown to the scene where they were “tasked to secure and retrieve the craft”. Upon arrival in the vicinity, his unit cordoned off the area, allowing them a large perimeter to work within.

Following this, they then proceeded to approach the downed craft. Although John didn’t describe the craft to Milburn in any great detail, he did offer that “it was obvious it was non-human”. Perhaps of interest is that it was also “obvious that there were occupants who had fled the scene on foot”.

While a part of the unit secured the craft before its transportation, the remainder of the unit went about “tracking down these beings to try to bring them into custody”. Some of the men went on foot, while other road in 4x4s or on quad bikes. According to John’s accounts, there were even several helicopters overhead lending assistance.

Although it isn’t clear if these entities were tracked down or not, a short time after the unit had secured the location, “scientists and technicians came in and it was completely out of our hands”. The unit was taken away by helicopter and there was no mention of the mission after that.

A Fully Credible Source

Although John didn’t provide or even show any proof to Milburn to back up his claims, he stated that he fully trusted his word. Not only had he worked with him outside of the military, but he had checked out John with other SAS veterans that he knew, with all reports coming back that he was a very trustworthy person and not prone to falsehood or exaggeration.

Milburn’s own assessment of John was that he was a serious person who had fought in “some of the most brutal engagements” of the Falklands War, and not someone who said things in jest. He had, in fact, become friends with John before he unloaded the account onto him, offering that he “became like a brother to me”.

Ultimately, one night John simply told Milburn his bizarre account, stating that he was “sick of keeping this big story bottled up”, although, at the same time, “he knew he couldn’t tell anyone who wasn’t ex-Special Forces”.

Milburn himself worked with British intelligence for most of the nineties before going on to work with the United States Special Forces and as a contractor in Iraq. Following this, and at the time of making his claims, he works for an Israeli university think tank, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

During his time in this position, he has written multiple papers revolving around the disclosure of information on UFOs. With this in mind, given the gravity of his claims and the risk such claims might do to his reputation, we might imagine there is more truth in what Milburn says than many would have you believe.

It should also be noted, and perhaps as we might expect, the military – essentially, Milburn’s one-time employers – firmly deny any such program exists, or ever has done, elaborating in an official statement that they were “not aware of any salvage operations with materials of unexplained origin”.

Not A Lone Claim

Milburn went on to detail other encounters he learned of during his time in the Armed Forces, including one particular account he learned of while working in intelligence during the 1990s. He claimed that he was told of two pilots and two navigators from two separate jets who were ordered to pursue an anomalous object and then to open fire on the craft.

He claimed the pilots told him that after they had been ordered to pursue the anomalous objects, after getting to within 20 nautical miles of it, they were orders to “shoot them down”. He continued that “they had radar homing missiles” and that after they “achieved lock on” they were fired but “failed to impact the craft”. They attempted several times to down the craft, but each time the missile failed to hit their target, or more specifically, they “had no effect on the craft whatsoever”.

Also of interest, the pilots informed Milburn that although they could see the craft visually with their own eyes, they didn’t initially pick it up on their radar. Even stranger, as they got closer, their radars did indeed pick up the strange craft, but at the same time, it was lost on the radar at ground control. Was this some kind of intentional blocking by the intelligence behind the mystery object, or just some bizarre coincidental consequence?

Ultimately, moments later, the objects simply “disappeared” or, as Milburn describes it, they “just skipped off at hypersonic velocity far beyond what the jets had”. Milburn offered that he asked the pilots what they thought the objects were”. According to Milburn, they responded that they were “nothing we have, nothing the Russians have, and nothing that the Yanks have”.

Milburn went on to state that the pilots in question were experienced had all served in the first Gulf War and had performed numerous missions over Iraq in the following years. In short, they were “no strangers to intercepting aircraft”.

Claims Of Retrieval Units Going Back Decades

As wild and outlandish as Milburn’s claims might be, the fact is very similar claims have been made for years by several different researchers and investigators. And of even further interest, these claims state that the program in question began during the years of the Reagan-Thatcher years of the 1980s, with some even offering that such programs as the Star Wars Project was, in fact, a cover of sort, at least on part, for the real, elite joint operations that were secretly taking place.

What’s more, much like in Milburn’s accounts, these recovery teams were often on a moment’s notice to deploy, often being told that an “unknown” craft had crash-landed and that it was their job to recover it. Some particularly interesting claims from anonymous whistleblowers have stated the units often got a pre-warning of an “incoming” craft – essentially, knowledge of a UFO either about to crash land, or that was about to be shot down. On these missions, they would often be there ahead of time, often seeing the impact of these otherworldly crafts.

We might question, if these programs were indeed in place and operational in the 1980s, might they have continued under subsequent American presidents and British Prime Ministers? We might imagine, especially once connections to national security are made, that these programs would continue regardless of who might be in each country’s respective office.

What makes these claims, as well as Milburn’s, even more compelling are further claims from former American pilots who claimed they had also been involved in similar retrieval missions.

Claims Of Other Retrieval Missions Around The World

According to an online article in November 2023, three separate sources stated that retrievals of crashed UFOs had been taking place around the world for decades, and were coordinated by a “secretive CIA office”. ^[2] One of these sources put forward that they were aware of “at least nine” such missions, all of which were to recover “non-human craft”, two of which, they continued, were “completely intact”.

Between them, the three sources stated that the Office of Global Access oversaw the operations, who were a branch of the CIA and had done so since 2003. What’s more, these claims are just some of the recent claims to have surfaced in recent months about covert retrieval missions. Indeed, we have written of several alleged missions that have taken place, not only in the United States and the United Kingdom, but in Mexico, various countries in South America, and South Africa.

Of course, if these claims are true, then it really does suggest some kind of discreet, secretive international cooperation that stretches back decades, and very likely still in place today. With this in mind, we might imagine that any potential disclosure that many are hoping for will be an exercise in the strict control of information.

Just What Is Going On Behind Closed Doors?

If there is any truth to any of these claims, if only in part, then we might ask, where are these seemingly otherworldly craft now, and perhaps even more important than that, where are the occupants and where did they come from and why? Indeed, if there are any truths in these admittedly outlandish claims, then more questions than are already swirling around UFO circles will be thrown into the mix.

Is there, for example, a coordinated effort between multiple countries in not only keeping knowledge about UFOs limited but also details of a potentially alien craft in human possession? And what is the purpose of these retrieval missions? Are they merely to back-engineer such vehicles in order to weaponize them for ourselves? And if so, who are these weapons to be used on – “unfriendly” nations here on Earth, or a force that is coming from much further away?

Or might it be that rumors and claims of contact – at an official level – might have already taken place? Could it be that there really are top-secret bases deep under the ground in various places in the United States and the United Kingdom, not only containing recovered alien vehicles, but also aliens themselves? And are these aliens working alongside human scientists for reasons unknown? There just could be, for example, more to the claims of “alien battles” taking place in underground bases such as Dulce than most, even in UFO circles, would like to believe.

An Already Murky Picture Becomes Murkier

Whether Franc Milburn’s claims prove to be accurate or not remains to be seen. The notion, however, of a discreet, elite recovery team securing downed alien vehicles is perhaps, as mind-blowing as it might be, not that much of a stretch of the imagination. If these UFOs are non-human vehicles, then should one crash to Earth it would be understandable that the military would go to retrieve it for a whole host of reasons, not just security and the potential back-engineering of it, but due to general safety concerns to the public.

It would further make sense that governments friendly to each other would work closely together on such secret projects. And this would certainly have been the case during the Cold War when this alleged international elite unit was first put into operation. While the public more than deserves to know the truth about such matter, and most certainly should be told, it is, albeit begrudgingly, understandable that there would be concerns of such information getting into the hands of a nation that is not on such friendly terms.

It should be stressed that this is not a defense of UFO secrecy, but it is perhaps easy to see why the grounds become a stumbling block of sorts when the notion of advanced technology falling into the hands of a nation that might wish another nation harm. Ultimately, if there is any truth to Franc Milburn’s claims, if only in part, then the waters of the UFO and alien question are likely to get much murkier before they clear.

The short video below looks at the idea of recovered alien technology in a little more detail.