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.

Comments

Lameduck release. RTFA carefully

[freedom_india]

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.

Re:Lameduck release. RTFA carefully

[goldaryn]

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.

This, ladies and gents, is fascinating. Ordinarily, to varying degrees, governments use fear to keep the populace in check and maintain the status quo. This is every government, to an extent. To state that doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, does it? Even honourable causes use fear as a motivator. So. Why surpress this?

There is a school of thought which says "In order for people to set aside their differences, they need a common enemy". E.g. If France started saturation bombing Northern Ireland tomorrow, you can bet they'd pull together. It works to a global scale. Movie metaphors: Watchmen or, more alieny but cheesy example, Independence Day.

My point (I have one) is: Surpressed forever... is it us they really fear?

UFO stories from airline pilots

[Alaska Jack]

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

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[4D6963]

There's a plethora of UFO reports out there from civil and military pilots, as well as air traffic control staff, radar operators, military base personel, and yes, even astronauts who went to the Moon.

That's the irony of the UFO vs SETI situation, we as a whole just sit on a shitload of easily available information and better yet easy oppotunities to find out more about what could possibly be alien life artifacts flying in our own atmosphere, yet we insist to ignore it all, throw it in the loony bin and rather look for radioscopic needles in the haystack of the stars that are tens of light years away from us.

Methinks rather than pointing radio telescopes at the stars 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, but no, no one cares, most shockingly not even scientists, who obviously have no interest in explaining the unexplained that occurs frequently in our atmosphere.

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[4D6963]

Yes, let me break down what you're doing here: you're dismissing all UFO reports because the majority are dismissable. Sure, reports from people who say they saw moving lights in the sky after a couple of beers in their backyard don't sound very compelling, but among all these worthless reports you have military reports such as these. What are you gonna do with those? Are you going to "totally explain it" or are you just going to dismiss it as "that probably was just a seagull and the F-4 pilots were out of their mind".

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[4D6963]

When you can't tell what something is, you should look for an explanation for it

Fixed it for you. Contrarily to a popular myth, not all UFO reports are easily dismissable. What do you do when you have pilots reporting chasing an object flying past Mach 10 and that it's backed by ground radar? Do you try to look for an explanation, whatever it may be, or do you sit on it? Well you're gonna like this, cause what we do is just sit on it, and make sure to not tell anyone.

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[digitalchinky]

And the explanation in your particular case is this:

We roll your eyes at yet another made up story. Simple as that.

Why? Because electronic warfare (ELINT) drones like me know how few RADAR systems are actually capable of measuring velocities that high. We also do the math. We sit down with our EW kit and build a real life fingerprint for the specific emitter that 'tracked' this alleged UFO. We tell you that your PRF / PRI, pulse duration, duty cycle, and your cute little pseudo random stagger pattern make your RADAR physically incapable of tracking anything above XXXX knots. We know this beyond any doubt because we have ego's bigger than your average fighter pilot. We know exactly how many pulses per paint it takes to put a little dot on your PPI because we count them, and not just theoretically, we grab a couple of those fighter jocks and have them run a few supersonic passes at the same time. We sit right there next to the scope with you and gloat as we say "I told you so!", pointing fingers at our scrawled out algebra. In terms of 'UFOs', we don't care about little green men, we actually care about "Non allied sucker popping up out of the waves doing mach 2 over our sigint station for some photographs, and then vanishing in a puff of sonic booms to who the hell knows where"

We leave the X file stuff for people back in the MoD, who then retire a couple of years later and hit the lucrative public talk circuits.

When the psych asked me why I wanted to work in a TS security field, I kid you not, I said "because I wanted to know if UFO's really exist" - we both laughed, but I was actually serious :-)

1967

[moosesocks]

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.

In a completely unrelated note:

[kms_one]

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

More nfo here

[Bearhouse]

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."