UFOs IN THE NEWS

British Ministry of Defense Releases Secret UFO Files

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) has begun releasing nearly 30 years of British UFO files, including sightings, reports, and secret internal correspondence. The first batch of files, covering thousands of sightings from the late 1970s to early 1980s, were released today, May 14, 2008, and the MoD will continue to release files in chronological order every other month for the next three years.

The released files will be housed at Britain’s National Archive and are available for viewing at their website: http://ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

In a podcast at the National Archives site, Dr. David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University spoke about today's release of the UFO files. He said the documents fall into four main categories: reports from members of the public, the police, and the military; internal correspondence between different departments in the MoD and Defense Intelligence responsible for UFO reports; Parliamentary correspondence and House of Lords debates; and background briefings and statements of policy by the MoD.

Clarke said there are many interesting highlights sprinkled throughout the released documents. Although, as is always the case with UFO sightings, the vast majority are explainable as natural or manmade aerial phenomena (meteorites, lights on aircraft, space junk burning up as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, etc.), a small but significant percentage of sightings remain unexplained. And many of these sightings were by trained observers of the skies, such as military or civilian pilots.

For example, the released files include a sighting from September 1985 by the crew of a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter. They tracked two unidentified objects on radar for 40 miles. In a memo to the MoD, they wrote they were certain from the radar performance characteristics these were “not spurious contacts”.

In 1984, three air traffic controllers in the control tower at a small airport witnessed a UFO actually touch down on a runway. The senior air traffic controller was talking the pilot of a light plane down for a landing, when the air traffic controller saw lights coming down on a different runway. He radioed the pilot that he was coming down on the wrong runway. The pilot radioed back that he was still in the air. The three air traffic controllers then watched an unidentified object come down at speed in a near vertical climb. It appeared to touch the runway, then it disappeared. The three controllers were so concerned they filed an official report, but there was no indication in the released papers that any follow-up investigation was ever done.

On September 5, 1986, the crew of a civilian airliner saw a UFO pass close to the port side of their aircraft. They described it as a long, black object. In their report, the crew wondered if it might have been an asteroid, space debris falling to earth, or even some kind of missile—but it was none of these. The object remains unidentified.

Overall, few of the sightings were investigated. Clarke said that while there were over 11,000 UFO reports in Britain from the public and armed forces since the 1950s, the Ministry of Defense was not concerned with the scientific significance of UFOs (whether or not they were alien spaceships), but only with their defense significance. In other words, all that really mattered to the MoD was whether or not the sighting was of an enemy (i.e., Soviet) aircraft. When it was determined that the sighting was not a Russian spy plane, the MoD was not interested in pursuing the matter further.

If a sighting report came from someone in the military, and it was made in good time, there was a better chance the MoD would investigate. In some cases, they would even replay the radar traces to see if the air defense system saw anything at the time of the sighting, but this was very rare.

Even so, Clarke found no evidence of a cover-up by the Ministry of Defense. If anything, these records show that the MoD simply didn’t know very much about UFOs at all. They collected these reports, checked them for defense significance, and that was was the end of it.

Whether this will end the public’s speculation that there is an on-going conspiracy, that’s another matter.

Do you think this will change anything in the UFO debate? Let me know what you think!

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