The real UFO project
For two decades FT’s DAVID CLARK has pursued the truth about the UK Ministry of Defence’s secret UFO investigations. This year he obtained copies of British intelligence records that reveal the hidden agenda behind the MoD’s decision to end its 50 year interest in ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’.
The last elusive UAP files produced by the UK’s defence intelligence branch DI55 have been released. Back in 2007 a decision was taken not to include them in the list of 210 files earmarked for transfer to The National Archives as part of the open government project that began in the following year ( FT238:28-29). The Ministry of Defence gave me a written commitment they would be released after the main disclosure project ended in 2013; but five years passed and, after a series of baffling administrative holdups, unexplained ‘issues’ and lame excuses I began to suspect they must contain some smoking gun that the MoD was desperate to conceal.
But then a complete set of redacted copies were sent to me ahead of their planned opening at The National Archives in Kew. The three files run to more than 2,000 pages and some of the more sensitive papers, declassified from Secret, have been heavily redacted. 1 The files paint a fascinating picture of the arguments that raged behind closed doors in Whitehall around the 50th anniversary of the UFO mystery in 1997. Within them, civil servants, intelligence officers and military staff debate how they should respond to growing public interest in the phenomenon and what they call “the media’s obsession with UFOs”. But hidden deep within the layers of administrative tedium lies a more disturbing aspect of military and intelligence interest in the subject – and the decision to discontinue more than half a century monitoring UFO reports.
As the Defence Intelligence branch responsible for the investigation of UFO reports, DI55 secretly collected data on sightings from 1967 until the end of 2000 ( FT226:32-33). For 33 years the MoD’s public relations branch Secretariat (Air Staff) 2, popularly known as the UFO desk, copied all sighting reports they received to military desk officers in DI55; but they had no ‘need to know’ what happened to the data after that point.
The DIS quietly deleted its UFO task in 2000; and nine years later, in November 2009, the MoD announced it was closing its UFO desk and telephone hotline. The reasons were made clear in the 10th and final tranche of UFO desk files released in 2013 ( FT304: 28-9). Carl Mantell of the RAF briefed ministers that in more than 50 years “no UFO sighting… has revealed anything to suggest an extra-terrestrial presence or military threat to the UK”. The decision was presented as an easy option to divert resources to more urgent defence priorities.
But what prompted the defence intelligence staff’s decision to disengage from the subject was cleverly buried. The new papers show the UFO desk head in 1997 “wanted to get rid of” an issue that civil servants considered a “diversion from their main duties”. But at that time her military opposite number in DI55 – an RAF Wing Commander – disagreed with their ostrich-like stance. He argued that as the MoD had not carried out any funded study of the sighting data they had accumulated since the 1970s it was not credible, and also politically risky, to claim publicly that UFOs posed no “threat to the realm”. He compared UFOs, whatever they were, to Soviet intruder aircraft that routinely penetrated UK airspace during the Cold War. “They were not hostile but they were definitely a threat,” he wrote.
But despite the DI55’s more open-minded attitude, in 2000 the head of Defence Intelligence, PH West, formally asked the UFO desk to discontinue the arrangement whereby reports of strange objects in the sky were sent to them, even those from ‘credible’ sources such as police officers. At the time, the precise reason for this extraordinary decision remained an official
Hidden within layers of administrative tedium lies a more disturbing aspect of intelligence interest in UFOs
secret. It was only in 2006, when I used the new Freedom of Information Act to request a full explanation, that the existence of a secret DI55 study of UFOs emerged.
THE CONDIGN REPORT
In that year, the MoD revealed that a four-volume report with the title UAPs
in the UK Air Defence Region had been commissioned by the DIS in 1996 and completed in 2000. This has become known as the ‘Condign Report’, after the code-word used by the MoD that means fitting and well deserved and is usually applied to punishment ( FT211:4-6). It was originally classified ‘Secret’, with the caveat ‘UK Eyes Only’. For some time, the DIS had used the acronym ‘UAP’ –
unidentified aerial phenomena – to avoid the popular link with extraterrestrial craft. The new papers show terminology was just one of many sources of disagreement between DI55 and the UFO desk. The latter stubbornly refused to use UAP, arguing that “to the vast majority of the public we deal with, ‘UFO’ with all its extraterrestrial connotations is the only [term] they recognise, [so] we shall continue with UFO”.
One issue they did agree upon was the need to conceal any reference to the existence of the UAP study from the public because of the potential for “political embarrassment and misunderstanding”. For decades, MPs, press and members of the public had been routinely told that no public money had been spent on any study of the thousands of UFO reports the MoD had received since the 1960s. Yet in response to a Parliamentary Question from Lib Dem MP Norman Baker in 2007, the MoD admitted £50,000 had been paid to an existing defence contractor to produce the Condign Report. Defence Minister Adam Ingram refused to release the name of the author, a retired DI55 desk officer (see panel at right) but said that the “report was circulated within the DIS and to other branches of the Ministry of Defence and RAF”. 3
During the three-year project, the report’s author worked under strict secrecy. In James Bond style, only his boss and secretary (who was told “not to use the term UFO on the phone”) were allowed to know the project code-name. The new files reveal his opposite numbers on the MoD’s UFO desk (where Nick Pope’s successor Kerry Philipott worked until 1998) were deliberately kept out of the loop because DI55 regarded civilian desk officers as prone to ‘leakiness’.
In his terms of reference, the head of DI55 ordered the Condign author to focus his attention only “on the possible threat to the UK and technology acquisition” and not “X-files activities such as alien abductions”. He was given access to the (then secret) surviving DI UFO file store at the MoD’s Old War Office building, which contained several thousand sighting report forms dating from the 1970s. Most of this information was, by his own admission, of poor quality, and few sightings reported to