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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
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."
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
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.
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.
Paranoia and distrust of the Government should only be taken so far.
Paranoid may or may not be justified. However considering the sort of people you find involved in government, especially national governments, distrust by default is the only rational position.
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.
" 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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Yeah, right, a fucking glitch. Do glitch appear simultaneously in different machines and people at the same time into showing something consistent? Didn't think so..
You just got troll'd!
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.
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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".
Well that's annoying, "post anonymously" was set by default! FWIW's I wrote the parent post.
Would love peoples comments.
What do you get when you cross a mountain-climber with a mosquito? Nothing! You can't cross a scaler with a vector.
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 :(