Thousands of pages of newly released British Ministry of Defense documents show a vast array of dealings with the UFO phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world.
The reports include such topics as unexplained aerial phenomena, crop circles, ancient contacts with extraterrestrials and details of bizarre experiments. The pages include correspondence from the public, official reports, rare newspaper accounts, complete contents of rare books, handwritten letters, notes and memos, photographs and drawings, all previously held in top secret files.
Details about mysterious top secret projects such as the Ormus device, covert operations, scans of original handwritten and typed accounts of unexplained sightings, photos of UFOs from around the world, illustrations of biblical UFO sightings, correspondence from UFO groups and ufologists, pictures of extraterrestrial beings, plus annotations by the National Archives explaining selected documents create a foundation of documentation for many controversial subjects which have been hotly debated elsewhere.
The documents feature plenty of redaction, compliant with the UK’s “Section 40″ law on personal data. However, so much of the text has been left in an intelligible state as to leave the reader breathless from scrolling through the massive compilations. The documents cover incidents dating back to antiquity. Browsing through the documents is akin to rummaging through file cabinets at a real-life “X-Files” office.
As Sir Winston Churchill asked in July 1952, “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?”
The truth is out there. Under the auspices of the U.K. Freedom of Information Act, the U.S. First Amendment, and the Fair Use Doctrine, a complete assemblage of the British documents and media files from the British National Archives is being arranged here on Flickering Torches for reader study.
Included in this present article is the backgrounder written by Dr. David Clarke, consultant to the British National Archives UFO Project and author on Fortean subjects, giving readers a quick guide to some of the contents of the files, combining official government reports and eyewitness interviews to reveal the incredible inside story of UFOs and other mysterious phenomena. Although the links in Clarke’s analysis mostly lead to pages at The National Archives (TNA) where the underlying document requires a fee to access, they have been left intact because the TNA pages do provide some insight to what each document referenced was about.
In addition to this eleven page article (note: the navigation numbers for following pages are below the Amazon ads and Related Posts sections), Flickering Torches is compiling the complete release of the British UFO files in PDF format, plus MP3 podcasts on UFOs and government secrets, for free streaming and direct download. A separate article will announce their availability.
The history of British government UFO investigations
By Dr. David Clarke
The first reports of ‘flying saucers’ being sighted were on 24 June 1947 from the Cascade Mountains of Washington state, USA. A private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing nine strange objects that moved at tremendous speed across the sky ‘like a saucer skipping on water’. His sighting triggered a wave of similar reports from observers in North America and across the world. On 8 July 1947 a report came from Roswell, New Mexico, that a disc-shaped object had landed on a remote ranch and had been removed for examination by officers from the US Eighth Army Headquarters. The age of the flying saucer had arrived.
This is a reproduction of the UFO poster that hung in FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder’s basement office on “The X-Files”. (The truth is out there. Click here for the proof and/or to buy a poster. Thanks!)
The acronym UFO is an abbreviation for the US Air Force term ‘Unidentified Flying Object.’ It was coined in 1950 by Captain Edward Ruppelt of ‘Project Blue Book’, the USAF’s official ‘UFO project’, to replace flying saucers, a term that was widely used by the media and public. A flying saucer is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a disc or saucer-shaped object reported as appearing in the sky and alleged to come from outer space’.
Although for the public and the media UFO has since become a synonym for ‘alien spaceship,’ for the military forces of the world it is simply refers to something in the sky the observer can see but does not recognise. In the vast majority of cases, investigations have discovered ordinary explanations for UFO reports such as bright stars and planets, meteors, artificial satellites, balloons, aircraft seen from unusual angles and space junk burning up in the atmosphere. However, there are some cases on record where no common explanation can be found. For the Ministry of Defence, these types of report remain ‘unidentified’ rather than ‘extraterrestrial’. Some branches of the MoD, such as the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), prefer the term UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) to describe those UFOs that remain unidentified. UAP does not imply the existence of an ‘object’ of extraterrestrial origin.
Related Reading:
Related posts:
