Welcome aboard, Tide Riders, to our third installment of our Anomalous Airports saga. This week on Strange Tides, we’re taking off from familiar runways and heading straight into the weird skies above London Heathrow. Sure, it’s Europe’s busiest airport, a place where millions of travelers shuffle through terminals every year—but behind the duty-free shops and endless security lines, Heathrow has been quietly collecting stories that don’t fit neatly onto a departure board. We’re talking strange radar echoes, glowing lights pacing passenger jets, and that eerie bowler-hatted phantom said to haunt the runway edges, briefcase in hand, as if he’s still waiting for a flight that never comes.

Pilots, controllers, and ground crew have all had their brushes with the unknown—craft that appear and vanish without explanation, shadowy figures caught on security cameras, and whispers of encounters that never quite made the official reports. Some chalk it up to stress, fatigue, or good old British fog, while others say Heathrow sits on stranger ground—a liminal zone where aviation meets the unexplained.

And of course, we’ll save room in the Tinfoil Teepee to pull these threads apart: Could these sightings be misidentified drones or atmospheric quirks? Are the ghost stories echoes of Heathrow’s tragic past? Or is something stranger camping out in the skies above London’s biggest hub? Tonight, we’re unpacking the cases, the legends, and the theories—because at Heathrow, high strangeness always seems to be waiting at the gate.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Heathrow_disaster

https://www.aviation24.be/airports/london-heathrow-lhr/73-years-after-the-crash-of-a-sabena-dc-3-the-ghost-of-a-passenger-looking-for-his-lost-briefcase-still-haunts-heathrow-airport/

https://www.spookyisles.com/haunted-heathrow/

https://www.spookystuff.co.uk/HeathrowGhosts.html

https://news.ncac.mn/uploads/bookSubject/2023-04/644a09430b190.pdf

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/jet-in-near-miss-with-ufo-close-to-heathrow-546888

https://www.tiktok.com/discover/heathrow-ufo-london

https://www.yahoo.com/news/slow-death-strange-afterlife-heathrow-150000856.html