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

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

[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."