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

Re:British English

[4D6963]

Whoooch

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.

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.

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 :-)