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British "X-files" Released to Public

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the insert-mark-snow-score-here dept.

Smivs writes "Britain's Ministry of Defence has just released files regarding investigations into UFO sightings between 1978 to 1987. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the National Archives. The first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long, is available today. The Guardian newspaper details many of the events in question, some interesting and many just bizarre. A similar release of UFO files by France's national space agency last year attracted more than 220,000 users on its first day, causing it to crash. To avoid such problems, the National Archives is using an external hosting company which can add extra capacity as needed to handle the web traffic."

5 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Evidence of non-existence by mangu · · Score: 5, Informative
    They had an interview with a "UFO Expert" who suggested that they had only released the files that contained no real evidence and that they were holding back much more than they had released.


    Everything regarding UFOs, paranormal effects, and such, is like that. They always claim that something is being hidden, and how can you possibly prove that some file is not being hidden somewhere?


    I once tried to counteract that, asking for an UFO expert to give me the very best case they had for UFOs. He answered with a case that is cited in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as being one of the most reliable cases for the existence of UFOs: in August 13, 1956 RAF jets were sent after some objects that were detected by radar, coming from above the Soviet Union at very high speed. Those objects disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. My answer: that sighting coincides exactly with the Perseid meteor shower. Those UFOs had the same behavior that would be expected from a meteoroid. And that's one of the "best established and most puzzling" UFO sightings, according to the Britannica.


    To sum up, we cannot prove that "real evidence" isn't being hidden somewhere. But if one of the most respected publications in the world cannot give us one single example of an UFO sighting that cannot be trivially explained with five minutes of research, then I really cannot believe that any stronger evidence exists.
     

  2. Re:Don't forget by the_rev_matt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Jimmy Carter was on the Skeptics Guide podcast not long ago and they brought up the UFO incident, as he is often cited by the conspiracy theorists as 'proof' that aliens are among us and the government is covering it up. No, I can't explain their logic. Carter was unaware that he'd been coopted in this manner and quite forcefully noted that what he saw was indeed a UFO because he couldn't identify what it was, making it unidentified. He was at the same time quite sure that it was likely not an alien craft of any sort. It's one of the few times I've heard someone make the point that because you don't know what it is, then by definition it's an unidentified flying object. A conclusion that has no relation whatsoever to the *nature* of the object (e.g. alien, human).

    --
    this is getting old and so are you

    blog

  3. Take off the tinfoil hat by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hey Mulder, here's a scoop. They weren't trying to cover up aliens, they were covering up their secret spy aircraft. Why do you think most of these "UFO cover-ups" involved strange craft spotted near air force bases at the height of the Cold War? Project Blue Book wasn't about little green men, it was about making sure no one had gotten a good look at their latest prototype stealth planes and also checking to see if any hillbillies might have actually spotted any Soviet spy planes in the area.

    No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  4. Re:UFO Expert by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Informative

    Heh. It's often thought that many alien abduction stories (which are very different from UFO's, but anyways . . .) stem from ASP, or Awareness during Sleep Paralysis. It's essentially a waking dream where you can't move but you can hallucinate things (you eyes see the real world but you mind, still in a dreamstate, can superimpose a dream over the real world).

    Some people see aliens (a common modern thing), many see ghosts. When researching this (I suffer from this disorder myself) I found out that in earlier times many people would see a succubus or demon raping them.

    These episodes can be lucid if you work at it (I can lucid dream but I've never been able to have a lucid ASP episode), so you could actually make your alien babe abduction fantasy come true ;).

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  5. Re:parent poster is right by Kelbear · · Score: 5, Informative

    Article from May 13th regarding Catholicism and aliens:

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_aliens