Slashdot Mirror
British "X-files" Released to Public
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."
...you exhibit a serious lack of imagination. Human history is but a leaf in the wind compared to the ocean of time and space. All of the purported alien encounters are so similar to what we experience on Earth so that it's not even funny. It's like religion, overly antrophomorphic.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The AF came out a few years ago and admitted to spreading rumors about aliens in Roswell and other places to cover up their experimental aircraft projects. As an intelligence analyst with a top secret and above clearance (some of the classifications have names which are themselves classified) working in "the system", I'm pretty sure there's not much more. We tend to overclassify things just to be on the safe side, classify things out of habit, overestimate the importance of what we're doing, underestimate how much is already known, etc, but to suggest there's a conspiracy to cover up UFO sightings is ridiculous. You need an act of Congress to get the CIA and FBI to talk each other. What makes anyone think the US government is competent enough to pull off a conspiracy?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The History Channel spends an inordinate amount of time on this sort of crap. Before I changed the channel, I once heard a guy ranting about how the Air Force had an officer who reported to Johnson about ufos and what a big conspiracy it was. My first thought was that of course they were keeping track of sightings of unidentified aircraft, they had aircraft that they wanted to remain unidentified. It was disappointing that they show didn't bother with that obvious angle.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
UFO nuts: Release the secret document that prove aliens are here!
(UFO documents are released)
UFO nuts: Those documents don't offer the evidence we wanted! Therefore, there must be more documents somewhere that do! Release more documents!
(rinse, repeat)
This cycle has been going on for 50 years. If there was anything to this, some country somewhere would have released documents proving something by now.
And just because the government investigated UFO sightings, it doesn't mean aliens are visiting. The government investigated ESP too, and it's still hogwash.
I also don't have any evidence of the nonexistance of the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, fire-breathing dragons, and magical unicorns. Does that make them plausible too?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.