UFOs

The report represented an attempt to undertake a proper, in-depth scientific study that was going to look at all the evidence the MoD had amassed over the decades and come to a definitive view about the UFO phenomenon. My opposite number in the Defence Intelligence Staff, who was my main DIS contact and my gateway to this secretive organization, had first discussed this with me in 1993. Like me, he seemed intrigued by certain UFO cases in our files and our discussions about UFO aerodynamics and propulsion systems were like something from a Star Trek script. Nothing was said openly, but when conventional explanations for some of the most compelling UFO cases were eliminated, fingers were pointed suggestively upward. And whenever the question of who was operating these UFOs was mentioned, the marvelous phrase “these people” was used. More often than not, these were private meetings between the two of us, at which no notes were taken. However, on one occasion my boss accompanied me and sat in silence for most of what turned out to be a particularly surreal briefing. “What did he mean by the phrase ‘these people’?” he asked, in an exasperated fashion, on the way back to our own office.

But how were we going to get a study commissioned when so many of our colleagues thought the MoD should drop its UFO investigations altogether, as the United States Air Force had done in 1969? One of our tactics to pull this off was a simple linguistic sleight of hand: We banned the acronym “UFO.” One mention of a “UFO,” and people’s prejudices and belief systems kick in, be they skeptics or believers; the term was too emotive and had too much baggage. So we devised “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP) as a replacement, and tried to use this in all internal policy documents, retaining the phrase “UFO” only for our dealings with the public.

It worked. With the term “UFO” having been quietly dropped, we pushed to get a study approved. To my surprise and delight, given some of the more skeptical voices in the department, resources were eventually obtained. I assessed the formal proposal when it arrived and recommended to my bosses that the study be commissioned; against my expectation, my recommendation was accepted. However, the project was subsequently delayed, and in 1994 I was promoted and posted to a different section. Accordingly, I played no part in the study and am certainly not—as has been alleged on the Internet—its anonymous author.

So what did we get? After four years and 460 pages of analysis, had we solved the UFO mystery? Well, no, we hadn’t. What we got was a comprehensive drawing together of some existing research, coupled with some exotic new theories. “That UAP exist is indisputable,” the Executive Summary states, before going on to say that no evidence has been found to suggest that they are “hostile or under any type of control.” But by its own admission, the report has not provided a definitive explanation of the phenomenon: “The study cannot offer the certainty of explanation of all UAP phenomena,” it says, leaving the door open.

One of the most contentious aspects relates to what the report refers to as “plasma-related fields.” Electrically charged atmospheric plasmas are credited with having given rise to some of the reports of vast triangular-shaped craft, while the interaction of such plasma fields with the temporal lobes in the brain is cited as another reason why people might feel they were having a strange experience. The problem with this is that there’s no scientific consensus here, and as a good rule of thumb one shouldn’t try to explain one unknown phenomenon by citing evidence of another. In other words, you can’t explain one mystery with another one.

The report also deals with flight safety issues. There are numerous UFO sightings involving pilots, and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has records of some terrifying near-misses between aircraft and UFOs. In one such case, on January 6, 1995, a UFO came dangerously close to hitting a Boeing 737 with sixty passengers on board on its approach to Manchester Airport. The CAA commended the pilots for reporting the UFO, yet the official report states that both the degree of risk to the aircraft and the cause were “unassessable.” Numerous RAF pilots have seen UFOs, too. I have spoken to many such witnesses, not all of whom made an official UFO report. Project Condign has an intriguing recommendation when it comes to such aerial encounters: “No attempt should be made to out-maneuver a UAP during interception.”[124]

The Public Informed… the Public Denied

When I joined the MoD in 1985, it was a closed organization with limited public and media interface. But the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) came fully into force in 2005, and the department I left in 2006, after a twenty-one-year career, was virtually unrecognizable from the one I’d known when beginning there over two decades ago. The section where I worked was now so busy dealing with FOI requests that this had taken precedence over the research and investigation that was done in my day. Few UFO sightings were investigated in any meaningful sense of the word, and most sightings elicited little more than a standard letter. If the witness was a commercial pilot or a military officer, the incident was at least investigated, but not to the extent that had previously been the case.

By 2007, the workload involved in dealing with FOI requests about UFOs on a case-by-case basis was becoming intolerable and I know that staffs were getting increasingly frustrated. Accordingly, because of this administrative burden, the MoD decided to proactively release its entire archive of UFO files. The French government had done so in 2007, and MoD officials hoped that the move would assuage accusations that the British government was covering up the truth about UFOs. Indeed, both the MoD and the National Archives expected that this would be a good news story about open government and freedom of information. The MoD confirmed to me in December 2007 that the final decision had been taken and I duly broke the story in the media.

The 160 files, some of them containing hundreds of pages of documentation, comprise tens of thousands of pages in all. Each page has to be considered for redaction to ensure classified information and personal data aren’t released. The first batch of eight files was released on May 14, 2008, and within a month there had been around two million downloads from the National Archives website. So far, many of the UFO sightings detailed are mundane, but there are some extraordinary accounts by civil and military pilots and sightings corroborated by radar evidence. The release program is expected to be completed in 2011.

The MoD was midway through its ongoing program declassifying its UFO files when it made the decision, in December 2009, to close its office for receiving reports from the public—the well-known UFO desk—much to the disappointment of many. I was surprised that there was no announcement in Parliament and no public consultation about the change in policy, which ended all correspondence with the British people about UFO sightings. Instead, the news was slipped out in a way designed not to attract attention, through an amendment to an existing document, “How to Report a UFO Sighting,” in the Freedom of Information section of the MoD website. The new text stated that “in over fifty years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom” and went on to say that “MoD will no longer respond to reported UFO sightings or investigate them.”

On the face of it, this looked like the termination of the MoD’s UFO project, mirroring what had happened to Project Blue Book in the United States. But the real situation was subtly different. An MoD spokesperson told the press that “any legitimate threat to the UK’s airspace will be spotted by our 24/7 radar checks and dealt with by RAF fighter aircraft.”[125]

This confirmed what I already knew: Behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny, the really interesting UFO sightings would not be ignored. Sightings from police officers, UFOs witnessed by civil or military pilots, uncorrelated targets tracked on radar—all these things will continue to be looked at, albeit outside of a formally constituted UFO project.

This should come as no surprise. After all, where evidence suggests that UK airspace has been penetrated by an unidentified object, this must automatically be of defense interest. Thinking and acting on a position of disinterest just because the intruding object is an unconventional aircraft would be dangerous. Like many countries, Britain remains vulnerable to espionage and terrorist attack. What if the “UFO” turns out to be a prototype spy plane or drone? What if it’s a hijacked aircraft with its transponder turned off, as we saw on 9/11? Given the current security climate, this is not the time that we should be taking our eye off the ball, simply because of the baggage associated with the term “UFO.”

I have mixed feelings about this recent and controversial development. On the one hand, cutting out the public seems a retrograde step in terms of accountability and open government, and perhaps even patronizing. On the other hand, UFO sightings in the UK were at a ten-year high, and the MoD was receiving more FOI requests on UFOs than on any other subject. Disengaging from this and concentrating on sightings from pilots and on uncorrelated radar targets may represent our best chance of making progress in our investigation of the UFO