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The Real British X-Files
blakeharris snips from a site called The X-Journals: "Nick Pope used to work for the British Ministry of Defense and for 3 years headed up their UFO project. His remit was to investigate UFO sightings reported to the British government, looking for evidence of any potential threat, or anything judged to be of any 'defence significance.'" Some very interesting anecdotes in here, as well as some background on how certain files about these sightings came to be preserved in the first place.
Britain definitely does not have a Ministry of Defense and we also don't have a TV License either.
And then, in 2002, they transferred him over to the MOD Iraq Intelligence Gathering Service...
After reading the article carefully it is clear:
1) All UFO related files from 1950s and early 1960s were destroyed, deliberately.
2) All UFO related files from 1967 (when it peaked) have been "deemed" classified and the Eurocrats in collusion with MoD has voted NEVER to release those details.
What has been released are a few harmless sightings which can be/has been proven as false sightings.
All the perfectly good material, from 1950s onwards have been either wiped or still kept hidden from public eye.
As one modern philosopher said: "Statistics are like Bikinis. They reveal what is known and hide what is vital."
Same here.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I've heard that lots of airline pilots have UFO stories they won't talk about, since questions about their psychological stability would be the kiss of death in that particular career field.
I don't know if that's true or not. It sounds like a good book opportunity would be to go around and interview a bunch of *retired* airline pilots.
- AJ
The UFO sightings in the 1960s were most likely stealth aircraft (such as the Lockheed A-12, the deployment of which matches the dates in the article very conveniently)
No word on why an A-12 would be in Britain, although odds are that any Cold War era UFO sightings were experimental aircraft that the government didn't want anybody (read: the Soviets) to know about.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The article makes no mention of either black oil or sexy redheads, both known to endanger world security. :P
"We don't believe in Martians, but we do believe in Russians"
My dad flew commercial passenger aircraft for 30 years. In his youth he was walking home one night, in the suburbs, and saw a UFO i.e bright light traveling very quickly, came to complete stop then zoomed off again. That's the only UFO he has ever mentioned seeing. He's a hardcore athiest, non-spiritualist etc.
I'd actually question his psychological stability now, but that's another story.
Remember to wear your tinfoil hat when you go outdoors, and don't forget to tell everyone that we never landed on the moon. Paranoia and distrust of the Government should only be taken so far.
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
Finally it will turn out that Torchwood is for real.
TFA repeats itself a lot, and doesn't really contain any interesting information, other than a few brief outlines of UFO encounters, none of which contain any more details than the summarised eye-witness reports.
The third batch are at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/ and then there's a link on the right two the first two batches.
It's fairly interesting that as with the US documents there's no smoking guns here but there are a lot of 'yeah that was experimental or military but we couldn't admit it at the time' and the rest is 'we have no idea what that was.' So either they're playing a meta-game here or there really is nothing but 'man that unidentified thing sure was... unidentified.' I think it's unlikely that two such incompetent entities could do such a brilliant job of covering up something as huge as decades (or millenia) long alien visitations, but this won't prove it either way.
My favorite UFO tales are the paintings and carvings of spaceships that have appeared across the millenia. Like these: http://www.alien-ufo-pictures.com/alien_photos5.html
Wrong. Paranoia and distrust of the Government should be unlimited, both on principle and for very good reasons of precedent.
That is separate from one's level of confidence in the data though.
You can totally distrust government while still having a rational head on your shoulders when dealing with evidence. A scientific approach to analysing UFO reports (and only stating what you know, not what you imagine) isn't optional, except to those who are more interested in fiction than in reality.
Interestingly, they decided to release the files due to the sheer workload of responding to individual requests for information. The article states that they got more requests for info about UFOs than about Iraq for Afghanistan...anyway, you can get to the files here:
"All these files and more besides are now available on the MoD website, www.mod.uk. Go to the Freedom of Information section and search the Publication Scheme and the Disclosure Log, using keywords such as UFO and UAP and itâ(TM)s all there, alongside documents and files on a vast range of other fascinating subjects including MoDâ(TM)s 2001 remote viewing study."
I thought this Nick Pope character had been long since exposed as a fantasist who doesn't have the credentials he claims.
Somebody might think it was a conspiracy or soemthing sinister to destroy proof or something. Actually as the article wrote :
QUOTE:What this meant was that prior to 1967, few UFO files had survived this process and with a few exceptions, UFO files from the Fifties and early Sixties had been destroyed.There was nothing sinister about this and such decisions were made all the time on a wide range of subjects
emphasis mine. Furthermore the reading of your post make it sound as if there was something to read that it is intentionnaly kept from eye as something sinister. but the conclusion of the author is different :
QUOTE: I am always reluctant to use the word disclosure, because in ufology the word is often associated with the work of Dr Steven Greer, whose Disclosure Project has become something resembling a political campaign (as has Exopolitics) aimed at ending the UFO cover-up in which many conspiracy theorists believe. But I do use the word (with a small d and not a capital letter!) because in a very real sense, disclosure is precisely what the MoD is doing in relation to documents and files. Much has already been released and there's more to come. These are exciting times.
Emphasis mine. You sound more like thos conspiracy theorist he speaks of in his conclusion than somebody open to all possibilities, including the very highly probable possibility that there is indeed NOTHING really important to be disclosed, except data for a sociologic/psychologic study.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They spend defense money on this?!
If some sentient being has the technology to fly light years and to poke around the our globe, what is the chance that any earthly defensive measure is going to matter against agreesion? Looks like too many in Parliament are watching Torchwood.
The answer is : "I don't know" and without more data this is all you can say, the only things I can say is that only of such sighting I know of there was a glitch in the hardware used (yeah even vaccuum bulb can glitch). And routinely human sees things going at tremendous speed, but in reality are trick of shadow/light. Was it the case here ? I don't know. No data available. And this is the only SANE proposal when data is not avialabe...
But from the tone of your post, you seem to have reached a conclusion. Care to share it ? Andby which methodological path you used to come to that conclusion, with which data, and what tolerance in the data ?
The UFO conspiracy nuts will NEVER be happy. It isn't a matter of finding the truth, it is a matter of religion for them. They want to believe there are aliens visiting the Earth so they'll just keep on making up reasons why it could be happening. They'll ignore contradictory evidence, etc, etc. It is an argument you can't win. It is like the Creationists or any other nutty group like that. They have a view point they wish to be true, and so they'll only pay attention to things that would show that. They ignore or dismiss anything they don't like. There is no reasoning with the because it isn't a position based on reason.
Goes double since I imagine the truth is real boring. For example I'd personally bet on the high speed radar UFOs being glitches. As good as military radar is, it isn't perfect. It can get confused and display false positives. That is actually the idea behind active radar jamming. You send out strong signals that cause all sorts of false readings, so they can't tell where the real aircraft are.
Well that's not very exciting at all. Much more exciting to think it is some kind of alien craft that is so amazing it can travel at FTL speeds across the galaxy, yet can't even avoid primitive radar, something human planes can do.
All connections via the RSS Feed are rejected...? Conspiracy to commit advertisments? Broken Server??
I think many people forget that in science, and really in all facets of life the burden of proof is on the claimant. You make a claim that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth, it is then incumbent on YOU to provide good evidence of that fact. You don't get to say "Well here's something that isn't explained, thus it must be an ET UFO." No, if it isn't explained it isn't explained. That isn't evidence. You have to provide some real concrete evidence to back up your theory.
The "Well you can't explain it so I must be right," crap is the same thing the religious fundies pull. "Oh evolution doesn't explain everything about the state of organisms on this planet, so god must have created us." "Oh the big bang doesn't explain where the universe came form so god must have created it."
Those are not legit arguments and neither is "You can't explain what this is so it must be an ET UFO." Nope, I don't have to provide an explanation or evidence. You do. If you are sure it is of extraterrestrial origin, then you need to furnish the proof of that fact. Otherwise, in the absence of sufficient evidence we have to write it off as a "Don't know."
That is actually what UFO means: Unidentified Flying Object. It simply means an object seen in the sky, that the observer(s) were not able to positively identify. That does NOT mean it is an alien craft. The nutjob movement has co-opted the term and has tried to twist it in to "Anything in the sky we can't immediately explain is an alien craft."
So for all you UFO nuts out there: Put up or shut up. Let's see proof, and not the kind of BS fake proof the creationists trot out. Let's see some real, valid, empirical proof, not wild speculations. If you can't provide that, then shut your yap.
Nick Pope has written two science fiction books about alien contact, Operation Thunderchild and Operation Lightning Strike.
I've read Operation Thunderchild and enjoyed it a lot. It is set in Britain, which is nice for us because so much of the other material is set in the US and copies from itself so much that one film is like another. It also deals quite well with the whole difficulty that governments have in working out what's happening from lots of confused reports, deciding how to tackle the problem, understanding the intent of the ufos and when and what to tell the population.
I like it because the humans have a hard time and I think that's likely.
This is all just my personal opinion.
1. You misuse Occam's razor.
2. It makes you look like an idiot.
3. Stop doing it.
4. Profit!!!
" a scientific skeptic attempts to evaluate claims based on verifiability and falsifiability rather than accepting claims on faith, anecdotes, or relying on unfalsifiable categories." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_skepticism
Mr Pope is not Mulder and that was a work of fiction. The advent of the mobile phone with built in camera has demonstrated the ability of ordinary individuals to photograph events as they happen and distribute them to the news media. The use of this facility to distribute all of the breaking news on UFO's, The Bigfoot, Men in Black, The Secret Warehouse of Post Office Rubber Bands and anything else you care to mention from the lexicon of Grand Conspiracy, is observed by the remarkable phenomenon: Deafening Silence.
British Civil Servants regularly despatch important material (The Web Of Fear) and unimportant material (student essays) to the shredder, for a wealth of reasons but I am sure if there were any real evidence of any of the above conspiracies, human nature being what it is, they would have published a book by now. The lecture tour of American, would be worth at least $100 million. Yet here we are on slash dot where "information wants to be free" having the regular custard pie fight about something that the protaganist blame their failure to present any demonstrable evidence supporting their "hypothesis" on an equally absurd conspiracy of silence. Change the subject to Intelligent Design and see if you can tell the difference.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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we should point more modest telescopes at whatever's flying in our sky. A few automated stations around the world that would observe the sky for moving objects automatically and record anything about the unidentified ones would offer great insight on the nature and characteristics of whatever those unidentified objects are
~...and within 15 minutes after you publish your data on your web sites, a bunch of men in suits come knocking to your door and accusing you of being a terrorist and compromising national security, because 99% of all those unknown object you just mapped happen to be secret military satellites~
More seriously, it's been actually done before, and most of the time the spotted object are military satellites indeed.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Of course they do, because the Twenty-First Century is when everything changes.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
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I vote most pointless job ever!
weinersmith
It's lovely that they're going to try to assess sightings for potential threat, but I'm sort of curious what they would plan to do about an invading race that has interstellar travel capabilities. Just knowing how you're going to die isn't terribly useful--is anyone better off since the discovery of global warming, topsoil loss, groundwater toxification etc, many decades ago?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
but from what I remember of it there was nothing earth-shaking in it. Reading the article only yields that the MoD has released even more material, but so what if there are lots of UFO sightings? An UFO is exactly what it says . . . unidentified, not "alien spacecraft".
I can't count how many times I've had to tell people that most observations are very likely yet-unknown atmospheric phenomenon. Though I'm also quick to point out that there have been cases that do suggest intelligence. Part of the problem is that the word 'UFO' has never achieved an officially agreed upon definition. Depending on its usage the word UFO can mean a number of things.
Some people use Dr. Hartman's definition (the stimulus for a report made by one or more individuals of something seen in the sky ... which the observer could not identify as having an ordinary natural origin, and which seemed to him sufficiently puzzling that he undertook to make a report of it).
Others imply Dr. Hynek's usage (a UFO is a report the contents of which are puzzling not only to the observer but to others who have the technical training the observer may lack).
However by far the most common definition is the ET hypothesis or alien spacecrafts.
Analyzing all the usages it becomes obvious UFO actually means "a process to identify an unidentified aerial sighting."
Fig. 1 - http://wiki.razing.net/index.php/Image:UFO_definition.png
The problem at the moment is there are very few bodies that are willing to do "official" evaluations to complete the "official escalation of explanation" loop.
What I find compelling is that the US government was confronted by many scientists who agreed average people were reporting a "true unknown" phenomenon throughout the '40s and '60s (Drs. Mirarchi, La Paz, Hynek, Thayer, Shough, J. E. McDonald, R. Leo Sprinkle, Garry C. Henderson, Roger N. Shepard, Robert Hall, James Harder, Robert M. L. Baker, Frank Salisbury, Seymour Hess, Charles B. Moore, Al Cameron, Robert M. Wood, Eugene Epstein, Gordon MacDonald, Robert Wilson, etc). In response to this the USAF / AFSAB started Twinkle and escalated to Project Sign, Grudge, Blue Book and finally the Condon Committee.
Unfortunately Dr. Edward Condon's report was "authoritative" enough to render all opposing viewpoints moot despite 30% of the reviewed cases remaining unknown after spending $500,000 of taxpayers money. Even scientists with an anti-UFO position considered the report rubbish (ie/ Thornton Page) because the "Conclusions and Recommendations" and "Summary of the Study" didn't accurately reflect the contents of the study.
Sadly I think history is going to have a very poor view of Dr. Condon for one simple reason. As humans we know that we don't understand all of reality and thus we accept the following Venn diagram as true (obviously the percentages vary).
Fig. 2 - http://wiki.razing.net/index.php/Image:Human_understanding.png
Effectively by shouting down the study of UFOs Condon was stating that there was nothing new in our skies that is "truly unknown" that could be learned through the anecdotal testimony of the average person. In Dr. Condon's words,
With the help of hindsight we can prove Dr. Condon wrong.
Sprites, large scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, were documented "with anecd
The Telegraph posted some some good pictures a while back. This is part 3 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/3458222/UFO-sightings-140-years-of--UFO-picture-Part-III.html
You *HAVE TO* pay it if you own a screen, a computer (even without a capture card), a 3G mobile phone, etc..
If you state you don't have any of those, they will come by your house and check it.
And if you have an old crt monitor unplugged that you only once in a while to connect to your working laptop, somewhere in your living room, you pay a huge fine plus the license :(