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

British English

[linuxci]

Britain definitely does not have a Ministry of Defense and we also don't have a TV License either.

Re:British English

[4D6963]

Whoooch

Re:British English

[jedrek]

We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.

That's why it's a TV license and not a BBC license.

Uh-huh.

[martin-boundary]

Nick Pope used to work for the British Ministry of Defense and for 3 years headed up their UFO project.

And then, in 2002, they transferred him over to the MOD Iraq Intelligence Gathering Service...

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

[grumbel]

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 is well and true, it however has a little problem: Those are UFOs in the literal sense, they are "unidentified flying object", not extra terrestrial spacecrafts. When you can't tell what something is, it simply means you don't know, it doesn't confirm that aliens are involved.

When it comes to hard evidence, there is simply nothing that points to E.T. Blobs of light in the sky can be lots of things, clouds, planets, satellites, floating lanterns, lense flare, insects and tons of more stuff. How many clear non-blurry pictures are there of alien space crafts? None. You'd guess in a time where every mobile has camera people would come up with some good pictures, but that hasn't happened.

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[Yvanhoe]

In fact, every strange sighting is recorded and studied and, in most of the cases, totally explained. I have watched a lot of movies and pictures of UFOs. The number of insects, weather balloons, clouds, or even moon shots is staggering.

A professional astronomer was making the following remark : "it is our job to observe the sky and find uncommon things. Occasionally we do, but it is impressive to see how a professional with good tools is less likely to observe UFOs than an amateur with bad tools is."

UFO = Unindentified Flying/Floating Object. It does not mean "Alien spaceship". When an astronaut says "hey, I saw something passig by there !" it is classified as a UFO because no one wants to take the time to find the identification of the debris he observed.

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[AmiMoJo]

Of course the MoD wants to find an explanation. Something flying past at mach 10 could be a new type of missile or experimental aircraft.

The MoD was never looking for aliens, they were looking for new weapons that could be used to attack the UK.

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[grumbel]

But they tend to focus on average Joe's UFO sightings rather than the well documented and really hard to explain ones.

You miss the point. If you want to prove the existence of alien spacecraft you don't have to find hard to explain cases, you have to find the opposite, well explained ones. You need clear pictures and well observed objects, not anomalies in the sky that you couldn't identify.

And my appeal to authority is justified in that you'd think that a highly trained elite pilot who's flown for years and even been to space would know what he's looking at when he looks in the sky around him.

The human visual system is build to measure distances and velocities at small scales. When you fly high up in the air you have the exact opposite, huge velocities, great distances and worst of all nothing to use as reference. No amount of experience will help you when you encounter an unexpected thing in the sky, as it becomes nearly impossible to judge size or velocity just by sight.

Re:UFO stories from airline pilots

[TheRaven64]

As a scientist, something that is unexplained is intrinsically interesting. Astronauts have to undergo a lot of psychological testing and are familiar with most of the things that might be visible. If they are seeing things that they can't explain then it means one of the following is true:

• Some aspect of their environment is affecting the human visual system in a way that we have not studied.
• They are seeing something real, but we don't know what.

Even knowing which of these is the case would be interesting. Beyond that, knowing exactly what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, is worth knowing.

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.

Re:Lameduck release. RTFA carefully

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the article carefully? Amazing, your brain turns off at all the sections that would counter your conspiracy-theories.

Some quotes:
"I never authorized the destruction of a UFO file and following the 1967 ruling, nobody should."

"The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act (passed in November 2000 and coming fully into force in January 2005) effectively reversed the default position and the presumption now is that information is released, unless any of the formal exemptions apply."

Another interesting tidbit: they are so busy with FOI requests, they can't spare the time to investigate new incidents.

You also say "What has been released are sightings that can be/have been proven to be false sightings". Now we could presume a huge conspiracy and alien underground bases dominating the British government, OR we could presume there really isn't much to see here... Occam's razor makes this an easy one. And that is if you consider that your statement is correct in the first place, which it isn't. Unless you can prove the following sightings to be false sightings (as stated in the article, which you "read so carefully")

"Some of the more interesting incidents included: 26th April 1984: Members of the public report a UFO in Stanmore. Two police officers attend the scene, witness the craft and sketch it.
13th October 1984: a saucer-shaped UFO is seen from Waterloo Bridge in London by numerous witnesses.
11th September 1985: 2 UFOs tracked on a military radar system travelling 10 nautical miles in 12 seconds.
4th September 1986: a UFO passes an estimated 1.5 nautical miles from the port side of a commercial aircraft.
"

Apparently you can prove them to be false sightings - I'd recommend you contact the British MoD and tell them the good news.

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."

Careful on using "deliberately"

[aepervius]

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.

Don't bother

[Sycraft-fu]

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.