The background
Alien tourists may have paid flying visits to the UK as part of a holiday from their planet, according to declassified Ministry of Defence (MoD) documents released today. The secret files, released to the National Archives, show that a investigation into “unidentified aerial phenomena” was launched in the 1990s to establish that if the many reported “sightings are not of this earth” then what was their purpose. One report concluded: “There has been no apparently hostile intent and other possibilities are: a) military reconnaissance; b) scientific; c) tourism.”
Expect one genuine alien visitation every 1,000 years?
The documents “don’t provide a definitive smoking raygun for alien abduction theorists,” sighed The Times (£). However, the newspaper flagged up that a 1978 MoD assessment “calculated, on the basis of the number of potentially inhabited planets in the universe, the number of planets worth visiting and the distances involved, that one genuine alien visitation might be expected every thousand years.”
What the heck are UFOs if they’re not visiting aliens?
Possible explanations offered by the investigators for the general public’s UFO sightings include mass hallucinations, hoaxes, natural phenomena including ball lightning, as yet unexplained plasmas and rare cloud formations, ultra-secret US military aircraft programs as well as extra-terrestrial visitations, noted The Times (£). In the files, the MoD speculated that in at least some instances triangular UFOs seen over Europe were flights by the then classified American F117 Stealth fighter.
Who are the UFO spotters? Lovers?
The Telegraph highlighted that the files reveal that most sightings come from the peculiar grouping of “farmers, policemen, doctors and lovers.”
The best UFO info is all on Google
The files reveal that, for some time, there was a dedicated MoD UFO desk manned by one unidentified civil servant. He or she got the boot in 1998 in a round of MoD cost-cutting. In the files, the civil servant noted that his job is “a generalist, non-technical, post with emphasis on correspondence with the public … Finally, and somewhat ironically, given the assumed pervasive dark role of the MoD, whilst I have naturally built up some degree of knowledge of various UFO cases as part of my tenure in this post, I often find the best source for information is simply to Google the internet!”
Files provide a ‘snapshot of an unexplored aspect of contemporary social history’
Dr David Clarke, UFO consultant at the National Archives and university lecturer, quoted on The Telegraph, said: “These files also detail the background to the MoD’s decision to release these files to the public in the first place, something I had been campaigning for over several years under the Freedom of Information Act. Now they have been released at The National Archives they will provide future generations with a fascinating snapshot of an unexplored aspect of contemporary social history.”