The Search for Mysterious Aliens

The Search for Mysterious Aliens

For half a century the Ministry of Defence (MoD) kept what it knew about sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects locked away in a secret archive. But with the arrival of the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) in 2005, the fascinating contents of “Britain’s X-Files” were revealed.

The public’s obsession with UFOs and alien visitors has continued to grow alongside man’s first faltering steps into space. For centuries people have speculated about visitors from other worlds. But it is only since the end of the Second World War that large numbers of people have believed alien visits have actually occurred and been concealed by world governments.

In recent years MPs, peers and some senior military figures have added their voices to the many ordinary people who have demanded that the Ministry of Defence opens its files and releases the information that it holds on this contentious subject. This pressure was reflected in the fact that when the FoIA finally arrived on 1 January 2005, UFO sightings were among the three most popular topics among the hundreds of requests they received from the general public.

So what do Britain’s X-Files actually tell us? The answer is disappointing for those who believe the British Government has been concealing evidence of alien visitors. But to social and military historians the files are a treasure trove of material. The papers contain details of 10,728 UFO sightings reported to the MoD between 1959, when statistics were first kept, and the present day. The largest number of reports (750) came in 1978 when interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial life reached a crescendo with the release of the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The vast majority of UFO reports logged by the MoD came from members of the public and could be easily explained. Records show that the most common causes of UFO reports were aircraft, satellites and space debris, balloons, stars and planets. Around nine per cent fell into the “unexplained” category. An intelligence report from 1954 states that resolving these cases was incredibly difficult because “ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the scent is completely cold” by the time reports arrived at Whitehall.

However, a significant proportion of reports in the “unexplained” category were made by trained observers such as RAF aircrew, air traffic control staff and civilian pilots. Some of the most puzzling involved seemingly solid objects moving at exceptional speeds and heights that were tracked by defence radars. On occasions these sightings have led the RAF to scramble fighter aircraft to intercept the mysterious objects.

During the Cold War, Russian reconnaissance aircraft (nicknamed “bears”) regularly probed NATO defences across the North Atlantic. Until the early 1990s British radars were continually on the look out for these Russian intruders and many so-called UFOs were later identified as Soviet aircraft. As one senior RAF officer explains: “Any object appearing on our detection radars was literally a UFO until identified. There were some that were never identified, but this must not be taken to mean that they were caused by phenomena from other worlds”.

The files show how the military attitude towards UFOs was completely different to that of the general public. Official policy was restricted to establishing whether UFO sightings could be considered a threat to the realm. During the Cold War period the major threat came from behind the Iron Curtain. Once Soviet aircraft were eliminated, the identity of a particular UFO was of no further interest to the MoD. As one of the documents explains: “it is quite common for a sighting to remain unexplained but require no further official action”.

But those reports that could not be explained continued to add fuel to the arguments of the civilian UFO groups who believed in alien craft. A Daily Express opinion poll in 1954 found that 16.5 per cent of the British population believed in flying saucers. By 1998 an ICM poll for the Daily Mail found that this figure had risen to 29 per cent, while two per cent even claimed to have had direct experience of an alien visit. The MoD’s most recent UFO policy document, released under the FoIA [in 2005], is agnostic about extraterrestrial visitors. It says that, despite more than 10,000 reports, the ministry has never received any solid evidence, but adds: “[we] do not have any expertise or role in respect of UFO/flying saucer matters or to the question of the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life-forms, about which [we] remain totally open-minded”.

The British authorities did not undertake any formal study of UFOs (or flying saucers as they were widely known before 1950) until news of the many sightings in the USA filtered through to the British media. During the summer of that year newspapers serialised the first flying saucer books and a number of senior officials such as Lord Louis Mountbatten and the government’s scientific advisor, Sir Henry Tizard, put pressure on the authorities to study the phenomenon. The files reveal how the division of opinion between believers and sceptics in government was a reflection of the views held by Britain’s general public as a whole.

While Mountbatten believed the saucers were of extraterrestrial origin, others such as Air Marshal Tom Pike of Fighter Command, feared they could be spyplanes developed by the Russians. In turn, the MoD scientist Professor RV Jones declared that he would not believe in them until he was able to examine personally a captured flying saucer.

The fascination for seeing UFOs filtered through all levels of society at the height of the Cold War. Belief in a higher power benevolently watching over mankind provided reassurance for many people who were concerned about the possibility of nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. At the same time, invasions by extraterrestrial hordes were widely depicted in popular culture and in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which reflected the anxieties of the Cold War. The UFO craze reached a peak in the summer of 1952 when reports of saucers tracked by radar and chased by jet fighters over Washington DC made headlines across the world.

They led Prime Minister Winston Churchill to fire off a memo to his Air Minister demanding to know: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?” In reply, he was told that “a full intelligence study” had been carried out in 1951 which found that all sightings could be accounted for as misidentifications of natural phenomena, optical illusions and hoaxes. The report of the oddly named Flying Saucer Working Party used to brief Winston Churchill on possible sightings was kept secret until 2001 when I was able to locate the single surviving copy in the MoD archives.

The very first official study of the phenomena lasted just eight months after which the conclusions were delivered to a meeting attended by senior officials of both the MoD and CIA. These recommended no further investigation of UFOs until solid evidence came to light. That decision was overturned in 1952 when the celebrated “UFO invasion” of Washington placed the subject in the news again. In the UK the Air Ministry was then asked to set up a standing committee of intelligence specialists to investigate future sightings. This UFO section, later incorporated into the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence when the modern MoD was formed in 1964, continued to scrutinise UFO reports until October 2000 when its interest finally came to an end.

It was typical of the amicable post-war relationship between the intelligence agencies of the USA and UK that the latter’s policy on UFOs would closely follow the lead taken by its larger neighbour. In 1953 the CIA convened a panel of senior scientists who decided there was no threat from UFOs themselves but feared that “phantoms” could be used by the Soviets as a weapon to generate confusion in the event of a war. The panel called for a campaign to debunk UFOs and asked the air force to comment publicly only on those reports where explanations had been found. In Britain, orders were circulated by the RAF which said sightings made by aircrew, particularly those involving radar, were covered by the Official Secrets Act and should not be discussed in public, particularly with the press.

This was the origin of the claims concerning a “government cover-up” on UFOs which was in reality just another example of the obsession with secrecy that permeated many areas of the British establishment during the Cold War.

Ironically, at the same time the intelligence agencies were debunking UFOs, their own covert activities were contributing to the UFO myth. During the 1950s high altitude flights over the Soviet Union by secret U2 spy planes caused a spate of UFO reports by civilian aircrew. Another project used giant Skyhook balloons to collect aerial photographs behind the Iron Curtain – these were widely misreported as UFOs.

Britain’s X-files show how sensitive the ministry was to criticism of its UFO policy, particularly from MPs and the media. With the ending of the Cold War, UFOs were no longer taken seriously as a defence issue, but the subject simply would not go away. As senior official James Carruthers put it in a secret memo to Defence Minister Denis Healey, while they wished to avoid wasting public money chasing phantoms, “it would only require one sensational unexplained or much publicised incident to bring down a shower of public criticism on the Government for failing to give adequate attention to such matters”.

World's Most shocking UFO incidents all the time

1897- Texas

In 1897, a “cigar-shaped” UFO supposedly crashed into a windmill belonging to Judge J.S. Proctor of Aurora, Texas. The incident was reported in the April 19 edition of the Dallas Morning News, two days after the crash occurred, and it claimed the pilot of the ship was “not an inhabitant of this world.” Supposedly, the pilot’s remains were buried in an unmarked grave at a local cemetery, and the ship was partially buried with the pilot. The rest of it is said to have been dumped down a well.

Barbara Brammer, a former mayor of Aurora, claims the whole thing was a hoax crafted in order to save Aurora. See, the town was suffering after a series of unfortunate events that included a fire, the local cotton crop dying out, a fever epidemic, and the cancellation of a planned railroad into town. The “hoax” put Aurora back on the map. But the events of that April still haven’t been fully disproven.



1947- Kenneth Arnold

The origin of today’s fascination can be traced back to civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold. While flying his small aircraft near Washington’s Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold claimed to have seen nine blue, glowing objects flying fast—at an estimated 1700 mph—in a “V” formation. He first believed the objects to be some sort of new military aircraft (this was, after all, just two years after WWII and the first year of the Cold War), but the military confirmed that there were no tests being conducted near Mount Rainier that day. When he described their motion as similar to “a saucer if you skip it across water,” the media coined the now-ubiquitous phrase “flying saucer.” Soon, other reports of a group of nine UFOs cropped up across the region, including sightings by a prospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial flight in Idaho. The government never had a true explanation for the sightings—it simply claimed that Arnold had seen a mirage or was hallucinating. But UFO mania had set in, and just a few weeks later, the infamous Roswell sighting would perpetuate the obsession.

1947- Roswell

It’s the mother of all UFO sightings, but no object was actually observed flying in the Roswell incident. In the summer of 1947, rancher William “Mac” Brazel discovered mysterious debris in one of his New Mexico pastures, including metallic rods, chunks of plastic and unusual, papery scraps. When Brazel reported the wreckage, soldiers from nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base were called in to retrieve the materials.News headlines claimed that a “flying saucer” crashed in Roswell, but military officials purported that it was only a downed weather balloon. Ever since, conspiracy theorists have been hard at work trying to prove the wreckage was extraterrestrial, with one gentleman, Ray Santilli, going as far as releasing a video in 1995 of an alien dissection purported to have taken place after the incident. (Santilli would admit in 2006 that it was a staged film, but he maintained that it was based off of actual footage.)

As it turns out, the government was indeed covering something up—but it wasn’t aliens. The crashed weather balloon was, in fact, part of a top-secret military endeavor called Project Mogul, which launched high-altitude balloons carrying equipment used to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Air Force provided plenty of proof in a 231-page report released in 1997 called “Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash.” Though the mystery has been thoroughly debunked, interest in the case has only grown, and Roswell’s tourism is heavily based around its famous “UFO sighting.” It’s home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, a spaceship-shaped McDonald’s and an annual UFO festival, held each summer.

1950 - McMinnville, Oregon

One of the most disputed and often-studied UFO events in U.S. history concerns a pair of photos taken by Paul Trent after his wife, Evelyn, first spotted a slow-moving, metallic disk in the sky near their farm just outside McMinnville, Oregon. Trent only managed to snap two pictures before the disk was out of range, and skeptics and believers have fought over the photos since.

In the ‘80s, two journalists, Philip J. Klass and Robert Sheaffer, made it their mission to debunk the sighting. They concluded that the Trents lied about the time of day the photos were taken, so they, of course, had to be lying about the content of the photos. Ufologists have since contested that theory. But the photos were printed in Time magazine, making it one of the best-publicized UFO events in history. To this day, there’s still no consensus.

1951- Lubbock Lights

On the evening of August 25, 1951, three science professors from Texas Tech were enjoying an evening outdoors in Lubbock, when they looked up and saw a semicircle of lights flying above them at a high speed. Over the next few days, dozens of reports flooded in from across town—Texas Tech freshman Carl Hart Jr., even snapped photos of the phenomenon, which were published in newspapers across the country and Life magazine. Project Blue Book investigated the events, and their official conclusion was that the lights were birds that reflected the luminescence from Lubbock’s new streetlamps. Many people who saw the lights, however, refuse to accept this explanation, arguing that the lights were flying too fast.

1957-Levelland

Have you ever seen the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind? There’s a famous scene where a UFO makes the electronics in a car go haywire. As it so happens, that’s not just a Hollywood invention for the silver screen—there’s real-life precedence. In 1957, dozens of citizens of Levelland, Texas, individually reported seeing a rocket or strange lights that interfered with their vehicles: Engines died, lights cut out. Though the police initially thought the reports were a hoax, they, too, saw the mysterious lights, as they investigated the situation.Project Blue Book, a UFO research group created by the Air Force, was assigned to investigate the case. Their findings? It was an electrical storm and ball lightning that caused the lights and the mechanical malfunctions, despite the fact that there were no reported thunderstorms in the area that night.

1965 - Kecksburg, Pennsylvania

In 1965, a giant space acorn landed in the woods outside Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. That’s, at least, what the town members and volunteer firefighters who found the craft said. The alien craft was supposedly the size of a car and covered in writing that resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs. Locals claim that the U.S. military rolled in, secured a perimeter, kicked civilians out, and took somethingaway on a flatbed truck. The military publicly denies having found anything in the woods that day.

Similarly, a local newspaper, the Greensburg Tribune-Review, ran a story the morning after the event, confirming the sighting and landing of a UFO, as well as the military’s intervention. A later edition of the paper claimed the exact opposite: that nothing had been found.

1976- Tehran

The September 19, 1976, incident in Tehran, Iran, started much like many others, with phone calls from concerned citizens reporting a bright light in the sky. An F-4 fighter jet was set out to investigate, but as it neared the object, its instruments blacked out, forcing the pilot to return to base. A second F-4 took its place, and as it neared the unusual light, it achieved radar lock. But then, according to the pilot, the UFO released a glowing object—the pilot assumed it to be some sort of missile headed straight for him. As he prepared to fight back, the pilot experienced malfunctions with his instruments, and he witnessed another bright object released from the UFO that headed straight toward the ground. He safely returned to base, despite the faulty equipment.After the incident, Iran contacted the United States to aid them in an investigation. An unclassified memo by U.S. Air Force section chief Lieutenant Colonel Olin Mooy detailed the events of the night: There are explanations for nearly all of them.

First, the bright light seen by civilians (and possibly the pilots) might have been Jupiter, which was visible in the sky that night. Second, as author Brian Dunning notes in a podcast, the second F-4 jet had a long history of electrical problems, meaning that the instrumentation might have failed regardless of a UFO situation. It also could explain the radar lock—it might simply have been a malfunction. The first F-4, reports Dunning, was never turned in for maintenance following the incident, so there’s no official indication that its instrumentation failed. And finally, as for the “alien missiles,” there was a meteor shower that night, which could easily account for the sightings.

1980- Rendlesham Forest

In December 1980, U.S. Air Force members stationed at two British Royal Air Force bases, Woodbridge and Bentwaters, reported seeing strange, colorful lights above Rendlesham Forest, about 100 miles northeast of London. One man who entered the forest to investigate claimed to have discovered some sort of spacecraft there, and the next day, others confirmed damage to nearby trees and a higher-than-normal level of radiation at the site.Several days later, more sightings were reported. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt recorded his observations on an audio tape as he watched the lights, and while not definitive proof, theorists consider this the strongest evidence of the events. But the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which oversaw reports of UFO incidents until the early 2000s, did not find any credible threat to the nation, and thus did not pursue investigations further. As at Roswell, UFO tourism is prevalent in Rendlesham Forest, and there’s even an official Rendlesham UFO trail that visitors can hike, off of which is a model of the reported spacecraft.

1983 - Hudson Valley, New York

A fever of sorts overtook the Hudson Valley area in the mid-‘80s, with over 5,000 people reporting UFO sightings between 1982 and 1986. But the most significant event from that period came in the form of a mass sighting on March 24, 1983.

Throughout the evening of March 24, Hudson Valley residents reported seeing a V-shaped object covered in lights. It took interest in a nuclear reactor and bodies of water. Witness reports from that time are all documented in the book Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings, which quotes a witness as saying that on that night he saw an enormous flying object covered in multi-colored lights. “If there is such a thing as a flying city, this was a flying city,” he said.

The prolonged event is often considered to be a grouping of air force jets, though there’s no real proof of that.

1989-1990 - The Belgium Wave

At the end of November 1989, citizens of Belgium reported seeing a large, triangular UFO hovering in the sky. But other than these visual sightings, no evidence of the UFO’s existence was to be found for now. A few months later, in March 1990, new sightings of multiple objects were reported, which were confirmed by two military ground radar stations. Two F-16 fighter jets were sent out to investigate the anomalies, and though the pilots could not see anything visually, they were able to lock onto their targets with radar. But the UFOs moved so fast that the pilots ended up losing them. Some 13,500 people are estimated to have witnessed the incident, making it one of the most widely experienced UFO sightings of the modern era.The Belgian Air Force had no logical explanation for the activity, but it acknowledged that an unknown activity had taken place in the air. The Belgians reached out to the UK’s Ministry of Defence to investigate further, but once they determined that the incident was not a hostile or aggressive one, they stopped the investigation.

1997 - Phoenix, Arizona

The 1997 Phoenix Lights are one of the most-documented sightings in U.S. history. Documentaries and fictional adaptations alike have portrayed the lights — a v-shaped formation that reportedly blocked out the stars and was seen by hundreds — as an incredibly realistic unknown. The lights are often seen as being connected to similar events in the Hudson Valley (above) and are viewed by researchers and witnesses alike as benign in nature.

Phoenix Light deniers tend to settle on the explanation that the lights were either flares or a military thing, as there are several military and air force bases in the Phoenix area. But films such as Phoenix Forgotten are determined to posit that something wholly out of this world was seen that night.

2008 - Stephenville, Texas

Early in 2008, flashing orbs of light, red as fireballs, zipped through the air above the Texas plains. “First, I saw a yellow-red orb the color of lava in a volcano,” Constable Lee Roy Gaitan of Dublin, Texas, said. “Then, instead of the red orbs, there were nine or 10 flashing lights maybe 3000 ft in the air, bouncing and very bright. They hovered there, strobing for 2 or 3 minutes, bright like German auto headlights. Then they shot off at blazing speed like a school of fish, you know, when it’s frightened.”

At first, local air force bases denied having crafts flying in the area at the time, though many witnesses reported seeing military aircraft chasing after the lights. On January 23, it changed its tune, saying it had been conducting training flights in the Stephenville area that involved 10 fighter jets at the time. Conspiracy theories still abound.