This U.K Millionaire Is Looking For Someone To Help Fix Up A Cold War Era Radar To Look For UFOs

A tech millionaire, William Sachiti, is looking for expertise to fix a Cold War-era radar that scanned the skies for nukes many decades ago. It is lying around in an abandoned air base of the Royal Air Force. He wants to use it to look for unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or anything else it could be used for, Vice reported.

It was posted anonymously on Reddit by Sachiti, who is looked at as the Elon Musk of the UK and is popular for his self-driving cars delivering packages in Britain. 

Pictured above is an AMES Type 84 radar unit. At first, the radar appears pretty normal. The dish in the picture is over 60 feet (18 m) wide and over 25 feet (7.6 m) tall. Its unique feature was that it could pump out microwaves that reached over 250 miles (400 km).

The radar was operational between 1962 to 1994 and it was a part of an early warning system that used microwaves to scan the skies during the Cold War for nuclear weapons that may have been fired.

Sachiti plans to use the abandoned air base as a trial ground for technology that his company is developing, and the factories, roads, and bunkers at the site all fit with the company’s requirements. Included in the land parcel was the Type 84 radar, which is a “historical monument” and cannot be destroyed. Instead, Sachiti wants to get the radar working again.

Speaking to Vice, Sachiti said that when operational, the radar spun four times a minute and produced ionizing radiation that affected television sets in the area.

Sachiti hopes for it to be made operational with small desktop-sized devices using contemporary technology.

Sachiti added that a newspaper or TV advert can never attract the talent that Reddit does, and his inbox is now full of responses from experts.

The radar could be repurposed to scan the skies for UFOs, or Sachiti might even be willing to let students and universities use it to look for other things they might be interested in, the millionaire told Vice.