LONDON LETTER: British officials dealing with reports of UFOs required a great deal of patience, papers show
THE QUIET exasperation of British ministry of defence officials tasked with dealing with reports from the British public of UFO sightings is evident in thousands of pages released today by the National Archives in Kew.
The number of reports of strange lights and noises in the sky peaked in 1996 and 1997 at 609 a year, although they have fallen dramatically since, to just an average of 130 a year between 2001 and 2006.
The heightened interest in UFOs about 1996-97 was put down to the 50th anniversary of the so-called “Roswell incident”, where the US military were alleged to have recovered a spacecraft, complete with alien, in New Mexico in 1947.
In the decades since, the US has consistently maintained that all that was recovered in the desert was debris from an experimental high-altitude balloon, but UFO believers have never accepted that version of events.
Faced with extra callers, the Ministry of Defence set up a hotline – since closed down – to which the public could report alleged sightings, with “documented, corroborated and timely” cases being sent higher up. Just 12 cases were investigated further between 2001 and 2006.
In January 1997, defence intelligence staff set up Operation Condign – classified as “Secret: UK Eyes Only” – to study “unidentified aerial phenomena”, although the lead official insisted he wanted “to keep a low profile”.
In 2000, Condign was completed, when it concluded that there was no need for any further involvement by defence intelligence staff in such matters after 50 years of perusing reports from the public.
In one file, the ministry of defence showed interest in examining debris found on a golf course in Eastbourne and in north Wales, where a woman was woken up after something crashed on to her roof at 5am.
Local police carefully gathered up the material and sent it onto Whitehall, where the Eastbourne find was subsequently declared to be only “a piece of molten scrap metal” and the north Wales case was similarly dismissed.
The files offer an intriguing insight into a September 1967 case, which mirrored for a few hours the concerns created by Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds 1930s radio programme, when he terrified listeners with “a Martian invasion”.
Early on September 4th, local police and RAF bases from the Bristol channel to the Thames were flooded with calls from the public after they found small “flying saucers”, some complete with “beeping” noises.
One of the saucers was taken to be inspected urgently by military scientists in Aldermaston, while another was blown up, said Dr David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, who has long studied the subject of UFOs.
Four police forces, army bomb disposal units and intelligence officers were all mobilised before it emerged that the saucers had been made from fibre-glass resin by Farnborough Technical College engineering students for a “rag day” prank.
In October 1996, lights were seen over Lincolnshire, along with press allegations that the lights had been filmed by police, while “blips” were also alleged to have been recorded by radar at nearby RAF Neatishead base.
The incident prompted parliamentary questions to defence secretary Michael Portillo, who was asked by a local Labour MP why the RAF had not been scrambled to investigate an apparent breach of British airspace.
For his sins, an RAF wing commander spent eight days interviewing witnesses before concluding that the lights seen by police were bright stars, while the radio blip was a permanent echo that was caused by a tall church spire.
A file from October 1999 gives a London man’s testimony that he had been abducted by aliens after a craft had hovered over his home, leaving him unable to explain “a period of missing time” the following morning.
Displaying some patience, the official charged with replying assured the man that the craft he had seen was most likely an airship, while the missing time was explained by the fact that the clocks had gone back on the night in question.
There are repeated sighs from officials that their explanations are not believed by recipients, who are convinced of their own truth and equally convinced that the ministry of defence is covering matters up.
Sometimes, of course, the ministry fuelled such beliefs. In September 2002, it was alleged that HMS Manchester crew had made a sighting during exercises off Norway three years before. Later, it emerged that the ship’s log had been “blown overboard by a gust of wind”.
In December 1980, there were repeated sightings of unknown craft landing at a US air force base in Rendlesham Forest, near Woodbridge over a three-day period, a phenomenon that has since known as Britain’s Roswell.
Even military officers insisted something had happened at Woodbridge, but the ministry refused to investigate, to the fury of a former chief of the defence staff, Adm Lord Hill-Norton.
He said it was a nuclear weapons base and that anything that happened there, or was alleged to have happened there, was a matter of national security until shown otherwise.
Official files subsequently examined in 2000 by MoD officials showed that the Rendlesham Forest files had disappeared, even though files from before and after the period held in the same place were perfectly intact.
Urging that the discovery of the missing papers be kept quiet, senior officials warned that if this “apparent anomaly in the records” were to become known, “it could be interpreted to mean that a deliberate attempt had been made to eradicate the records”.
