Britain puts formerly secret files of reported UFO sightings online

Reuters and staff

May 14, 2008-LONDON -- Their craft come in all shapes, sizes and colours but their occupants are uniformly green, as in little green men. That's according to just released files from Britain's Ministry of Defence concerning public sightings of, and occasional reported encounters with, unidentified flying objects.

The archives (www.national-archives.gov.uk/ufos) are the first batch of a four-year release program of all the ministry's formerly secret UFO files from 1978 to the present day.

The ministry dismisses 90 per cent of the reports as having mundane explanations and leaves 10 per cent with a question mark and the assurance they are no defence threat.

Furthermore, it notes that UFO sightings in Britain doubled after the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977. A 1983 report from a 78-year-old out fishing at midnight tells of following aliens in green overalls on to a spaceship and then being told to go away because he was too old and decrepit for their purposes.

Two years later, a typewritten letter to the ministry tells of an alien spaceship being shot down in the Mersey River in northern England by another spacecraft and of the author developing a warm friendship with an alien called Algar.

Written at the top of the letter is the terse comment: "No reply."

The ministry has files on 11,000 sightings going back to the 1950s. A few of the sightings made it into the national press and all were checked out in case they were Soviet aircraft probing Britain's defences during the Cold War.

"Clearly some reports remain unexplained but we have found no evidence that these phenomena represent a threat to national security and therefore cannot justify devoting defence resources to their investigation," said an official letter in 1985.

The term "unidentified flying object" was coined in a U.S. Air Force report three years after the description "flying saucer" was applied to a sighting in Washington State in June, 1947.

In Britain, so worrying was the spate of reports that a Flying Saucer Working Party was formed to check them out in 1951. It operated under such secrecy that its existence was known to very few and wasn't revealed until 1988.

The working party concluded that flying saucers could be explained as misidentifications of ordinary objects or phenomena, optical illusions, psychological delusions or hoaxes. It concluded: "We accordingly recommend very strongly that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available."

In 1952, as Cold War tensions increased, so did UFO sightings, prompting Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ask the air minister: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience." Churchill was told that "nothing has happened since 1951 to make the air staff change their opinion."

But not all sightings can be easily dismissed as the working of overwrought or intoxicated minds. In the newly released files, Royal Air Force personnel, civil aviation pilots and air-traffic controllers reported sightings and radar tracks that remain unexplained despite high-level investigation.

'I was compelled to look into the sky'

This letter was sent to Britain's Ministry of Defence from a woman living in Barnstable, Devon, in southwest England.

I would like to relate to you an experience that happened some three months ago which I think you may be interested in.

On May 16, 1985, as I was in my back garden planting some tulips, for some reason I was compelled to look into the sky. Approaching from the direction of nearby Ilfracombe, I saw a large cylindrical-shaped object, with a light at each end, travelling east.

The object stopped some distance from my cottage, turned on its axis and vanished.

I will admit that I have had an interest in UFO reports, hence I wrote to you, but this experience really shook me up.

Now I have related my experience to you, I hope that that will be the end of it.

(Name blacked out)

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