British To Release UFO Files

Sean Stidman writes "Looks like the Brits are planning to release their secret files on many UFO sightings, including the famous Rendlesham Forest incident. These files should be ready for download by the end of this week, which I guess means by tomorrow. Are their servers going to be able to handle the load?"

Comments

Slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are their servers going to be able to handle the load?"

If the /. editors can refrain from duplicating this story tomorrow then nobody will remember the link.

Release UFO info?

[Quasar1999]

What they will finally admit that the royal family is actually from some distant star system? I knew it!

Re:Release UFO info?

[tuxedo-steve]

I would have thought the blue blood was a dead giveaway.

This will never go through

[I Am The Owl]

Even though the British government has been collecting information on its citizens for quite some time and violating their Constitutional rights to online privacy with their big government databases, they have nothing on the US.

Do you think for a second that the NSA and the Alien Studies Administration (a secret, classified offshoot of the CIA) will ever let this come to light and compromise the Roswell coverup and numerous other incidents throughout the decades that have helped the government implant thought-tracking devices in the heads of key international figures in exchange for allowing the aliens to abduct a fixed quota of non-desirable citizens each year? Fat fucking chance! They are still out there, in their black helicopters and UFO-saucers, aiming their laser rifles at all the fuckers who think they have them beat. I can block their radiation brain wave modifiers with a special metal I concocted in my basement.

I can't prolong this transmission because they are getting a fix on my location. Please, please, listen to me and believe me when I say that you need to steal this for the short time it is up before THEY realize it is there. Fight the power!

Re:This will never go through

[Malc]

Britain does have a constitution, but it's not a single written document - it's an uncodified constitution. It comes from several sources including statues such as the Magna Carta, Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, political conventions (laws and customs of parliament) and case law (common law). There are two basic principles: rule of law, and the supremacy of parliament

Re:This will never go through

[JamesCronus]

sorry to break this to you, but as a british citizen, until the recent human rights act, i didnt have ANY rights, at all. and not only that, i have no constitution either.

in britain, the queen owns my ass. though in practice because of our civil war (yes we had one, and guess what its was before yours too!) she cant actually do very much with it.

brain wave modifiers? hello?

Re:Does anyone think...

[caluml]

I'm British and I have absolutely no idea what you mean by "redacted out".

In other news, London is covered in fog all the time, it never gets hot in the UK, and Sherlock Holmes is close to catching Jack the Ripper.

only if

[malana-cream]

Are their servers going to be able to handle the load?

only if it's an x-fileserver.

Nice touch from the Brits

[product byproduct]

Letting the Americans have one last turkey feast before announcing the alien invasion.

Re:Does anyone think...

[RussGarrett]

To redact is just another word for edit, it comes from a latin derivation so it's not an Americanism or anything :).

It's used in this sort of context to mean blanked out or removed - something they don't want to release (this is the irony in most freedom of information legislation - the government are allowed to redact whatever they want).

Alien Haiku

[Angry White Guy]

The aliens land,
taking all the hot women.
Slashdotters are greived.

Other sites for Rendlesham UFO Info

[MoThugz]

http://www.rendlesham.com
http://www.io.com/~nelson/rendlesham.htm
http://www.debunker.com/texts/RidpathRendlesham1.h tml
Tape Transcript: http://www.skiesare.demon.co.uk/bentwatr.htm

Actually, the truth is...

[Cap'n Canuck]

I believe it's not just other countries that have UFO-coverup stories; other planets have them, too.

- This side of the river is intentionally left bank.

Interested but skeptical

[aaronhurd]

This will definitely be interesting to see, but as always with governments releasing "secret files," I am skeptical. Certainly these files, if they are legitimate, are not the complete collection, but rather very carefully selected tidbits from the massive archives of British intelligence.

UFO != Alien Life

[peterprior]

I wish people would stop thinking "UFO! OMG! Aliens!"..

A UFO is exactly that... an Unidentified Flying Object. It doesn't mean it's from another planet, it just means there was an object in the air, and some bystander with a fuzzy camcorder at best couldn't work out what it was.

Re:obligatory X-files reference

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't you mean: The truth is out there, ol' chap!"

Drop the stereotype and walk away slowly, with your hands behind your head!

Andyboy_H

Just in time for Spielberg's "Taken"

[trentfoley]

I'd like to see just how much money Universal / USA Network / SciFi Channel have put in to promoting Mr. Spielberg's upcoming 20 hour mini-series. So far I've seen:
1. Bombardment of ads for the show.
2. Ads for freedomofinfo.org (checkout the whois)
3. The Abduction Diaries ???
4. A Geraldo style show about Roswell
5. And now, paying off the Brits to unleash their hype^H^H^H^Hinfo.

It all seems pretty expensive to me.

Humorous anecdote...

[httpamphibio.us]

When I was a kid I overheard my dad talking about how my mom was applying for citizenship because she was an alien. Of course when I heard "alien" I assumed the outer space kind (or as I said back then, "out of space") because I had no knowledge of the foreign kind. The next day at school I told everyone I knew that she was an alien, it went over quite well. :)

Aliens *did* land in Britain...

[mtec]

but were successfully repelled by the local cuisine.

Analysis of the /. effect

[jki]

Are their servers going to be able to handle the load?

Finally this is NOT not off-topic :) Here's an analysis of the slashdot effect. In the UFO files case, I believe the effect will be tens of times powerful in terms of distinct visitors than the case I analyzed and hundreds of times stronger in sense of data transferred, as they are probably going to serve fat media. I believe they will go down.

Re:Rendlesham Forest Disclosure

[buswolley]

Rendlesham Forest Disclosure:

release from British Freedom of Information Act excerpt: "According to witnesses ---- ------ ----- there ------- ---- --- are --- ---- ---- -- no ---- such ---- ---- -- thing ---- as ----- ----- -- UFOs.

Re:Does anyone think...

[Zemran]

The word is not in common usage so therefore is not what would be said in England. Just because it is of latin derivation (as are many English words) does not mean it cannot be an Americanism. Many words that are used in the US are not used in the UK but were once used in the UK and therefore have their normal derivation.

The word means 'to put into literary or publishable form', re-edit, new edition.

Bored? Alien invasion in your own home town!

[TrevorB]

Bored on a sunny day? Get a huge tank of helium, and about a thousand oblong silver balloons.

Then drive around following them, pointing "What's THAT?!!".

Great fun.

Rendlesham ain't your father's UFO

[Wraithlyn]

Have you read this transcript and report? This is a military report, drawn from multiple eye witnesses, and includes scientific measurements of depressions, abrasions, and radiation levels.. this is not some hick in a trailer park trying for 15 minutes of fame.

Furthermore, I think it's a bit dismissive in this case to call it "just some object in the air", like it could be a weather balloon or swamp gas or something. This is an object that moves and behaves like no known terrestrial phenomenon.

What do you think it could be? Ball lightning? Its movements seem too deliberate. Secret American or Russian aircraft with magnetic/gravitic propulsion and stealth tech? About as hard to swallow as aliens.

I'm not saying OMG! Aliens! ... But, I think this is pretty damn interesting.

Re:Rendlesham ain't your father's UFO

[Wraithlyn]

Thank you for responding. Yes, I've read the lighthouse theory. It's good, and raises some questions, but it simply can't explain all the observations, and it dismisses any observations that cannot be explained by its hypothesis as being "a marvellous product of human imagination."

Here is a very logical and well written essay on UFO skepticism. In particular, I would like to direct your attention to the section entitled, "Occam's Razor and the Skeptics", roughly two thirds of the way down. I shall quote it here:

"Occam's Razor and the Skeptics

The UFO skeptics don't understand Occam's Razor, and they abuse it regularly. They think they understand it, but they don't. What it means is that when several hypotheses of varying complexity can explain a set of observations with equal ability, the first one to be tested should be the one that invokes the fewest number of uncorroborated assumptions. If this simplest hypothesis is proven incorrect, the next simplest is chosen, and so forth.

But the skeptics forget two parts: the part regarding the test of the simpler hypotheses, and the part regarding explaining all of the observations. What a debunker will do is mutilate and butcher the observations until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses, which is the inverse of the proper approach. The proper approach is to alter the hypothesis to accommodate the observations. One should never alter the observations to conform with a hypothesis by saying "if we assume the object was not physical, despite the level of evidence that would imply the solidity of a conventional aircraft with near-certainty, then we can also assume the object was not moving, was not exhibiting the color orange, was not 50 feet in diameter as described, and then declare that it was really Venus."

Do you see what I'm getting at? The lighthouse hypothesis could explain a light appearing to move in the forest, but it doesn't explain how they observed what they described "as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high." It doesn't explain how it could have "bank(s) of blue lights underneath". It doesn't attempt to explain why "the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy." It doesn't explain how the object vanished and was spotted again "an hour later near the back gate."

It can account for the presence of radiation, the depressions on the ground, and the tree markings, but it can't explain the relationship... ie WHY they recorded a "peak reading in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle formed by the depressions. A nearby tree had moderate (.05-.07) readings on the side of the tree toward the depressions." Is it just a coincidence that the radiation levels from cosmic rays and whatnot are measurably strongest in the depressions and centre of the 'landing zone', and the side of the tree facing it? Perhaps. Unlikely though.

It doesn't explain how "At one point it appeared to throw off glowing particles and then broke into five separate white objects and then disappeared." It doesn't explain how "three star-like objects were noticed in the sky. Two objects to the north and one to the south [which] moved rapidly in sharp angular movements and displayed red, green and blue lights.", or "The objects to the north appeared to be elliptical through an 8-12 power lens. They then turned to full circles.", or "The object to the south was visible for two or three hours and beamed down a stream of light from time to time." (Yes I know it mentions these last observations. Saying the above is "probably" just stars is NOT an adequate scientific explanation for these very specific and detailed observations corroborated by multiple eye witnesses)

So, in conclusion, the lighthouse hypothesis attempts to 'mutilate and butcher the observations until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses'. This is NOT the Scientific Method.

I wonder what happens

[Sarin]

if the ufo aliens post their story about earth on the intergalactic equivalent of slashdot, will earth be slashdotted by hundreds of millions of ufo's?

cool

[zogger]

--glad to see the brits *maybe* releasing some info. will remain to be seen how hokey or how real it is. Spain and some other nations have released a little as well.

Link url to blackvault, the largest UFO site on the web, among other things contains thousands of US freedom of information act documents, and yes, there's a boatload of redacted out content, as in "nothing to see here, we just blacked this out because... uhhh... ya see.. I mean..., well because we can!" This site is BIG, well done, and thorough, I recommend it to serious researchers and enthusiasts AND skeptics.

http://www.bvalphaserver.com/

the Black Vault

The web master started this site I *think* when he was 16, I've been visiting off and on for years.

Here's my disclaimer. Some of ya'all might have noted my frequent reference to "government" as more or less a pack of liars. One of the two primary reasons (initially that is) I have held this position most of my life is because of "ufos". when I was a teenager some friends and I saw one very close up, very close. Nope, no drugs or booze involved to dispel any trolling. It was not swamp gas, nmoon on a ducks back, some helicopter, or any other explanation other than -no explanation. Some seriously advanced flying "something'. To describe it , it was a large glowing oval shaped whatever, it flew down the block just above the houses, stopped over a house closeby, hung out, then slowly went down the block, toward the end it started to climb then WHAM took off like mach bignumber and was gone. Tell ya whut you just do NOT forget things like this. So, I start reading about UFOs,and I notice the government more or less says they don't exist except as various lame reasons. Well, too bad, 'cuz I know this is a whopper. Score one for destroying a yong man's trust in government, already shaken by the kennedy whack, then oswalds rubout which was obvious to anyone with an iq above 50 as "eliminating some embarassing evidence".

government=liars when it comes to certain things. This is IMO of course, but in the decades since I have seen no evidence to persuade me otherwise, in fact,I'd say the evidence FOR ufo's as being something "other" is better than for "honesty in government".

Exactly what they are, no idea, demons to secret nazi craft, time travellers to interstellar visitors, angels to secret gov blackops-no idea, none. I tend to more think the correct answer is "all of the above".

Re:cool

[geek]

" Exactly what they are, no idea, demons to secret nazi craft, time travellers to interstellar visitors, angels to secret gov blackops-no idea, none. I tend to more think the correct answer is "all of the above"."

Or it's none of the above and YOU'RE the liar. I trust elected officials with college educations and clean background checks with top level security clearance a lot more than 16 year old kids running websites.

No offense, maybe you are right, maybe they are right, maybe I am wrong. I know it doesn't matter since you can't prove any of it. When you can I'll eat my words.

Re:Does anyone think...

[Idarubicin]

I would assume any actual ET sightings would be "redacted out", as the Brits would say.

First, it would be "redacted", not "redacted out".

Second, "to redact" is a verb that is used regularly in certain specialized areas--often in law, for example. Literally, it means to "edit". In practice, it usually refers to the censorship of private documents for release to the public. It is not a Britishism.

What about the one listed in...

[fuzza]

... the documentary book entitled The Philadelphia Experiment?

No, I'm not talking about the movie (well I guess I am sort of), but this was a documentary on possible US Navy research into invisibility, just as in the movie.

Most of the book is about that (I think; I haven't read it all yet), but in line with the "government conspiracy" angle there was a very interesting UFO sighting and subsequent follow-on (or is that redundant?) .

I might post it here tonight when I get back home if anyone's interested; it's about 2 pages, which from a typical novel is probably little enough for fair use.

(Then again, maybe it's online somewhere...)