THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE AND UFOS
Since 2008, David Clarke has worked with the National Archives on releasing the Mod’s UFO files
Could you give us a quick idea of what the files contain?
There are two sets of files. The first are paper ones transferred to the National Archives under the old 30-year rule. These cover roughly 1950 to 1984, but are very patchy because many earlier records were destroyed. The second set are from 1984 until 2009, when the MOD closed its public UFO desk. Both sets consist of UFO policy, sighting reports and public and parliamentary correspondence.
Looking at the sightings reported by the public, do some of them have obvious explanations?
The vast majority of the 12,000 sightings logged by the MOD have down-to-earth explanations, but some remain unexplained. The truth is they never had resources to do more than a few basic checks on reports, and very few were investigated properly. There are almost as many explanations as there are sightings – everything from paper lanterns to bright planets and space debris. The MOD received 750 reports in 1978, one of the largest totals – this was the same year Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released!
Can you give a couple of examples of sightings that are harder to explain?
One of the most puzzling is the Calvine incident from 1990. Two men saw a large diamond-shaped object hovering above moorland in Scotland and took six photographs. They show the UFO being shadowed by what appears to be an RAF Harrier. But the image in the files is a poor-quality copy. The case was investigated by MOD intelligence, but there’s little in the files that reveals the results. The most famous incident in the files is the Rendlesham Forest encounter in Suffolk in 1980. Both cases provide examples of the limitations of these records in that sensitive information has been removed and in some cases destroyed.