Britain’s Ministry of Defense has been releasing a series of what people are calling real-life “X-Files” — and now it’s claimed one document could have intentionally been ordered as a reason to stop further public work regarding UFOs.
The government ran a project from 2008-2013 where it gathered data on UFOs from reports that were made between 1967-2000. Last year, they released 15 of the 18 files. This led to rampant conspiracy theories.
David Clarke worked as a consultant/advisor to get the files declassified and made available to the public. And he got his copies of the final three UFO files released by the MoD’s branch DI55 — more than 2,500 pages — before the rest of us. It took a while to thumb through, to say the least.
The files shed some light on what the MoD actually thought about having to go through all the records of UFO sightings, due to a growing interest in them from the public.
There were some interesting arguments between the female head of the UFO Desk and her opposite number in DI55, an RAF Wing Commander.
She really didn’t appear to care what happened with the data on past UFO sightings and didn’t feel it was necessary to look into them. He said that they hadn’t conducted any studies on UFO data since the 1970s so that it was risky to say that they didn’t pose a threat.
He also said, “It could be argued that the UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena] pose a threat to the Defence of the Realm since we have no idea what they are!“.
A report into UFO phenomena, codenamed Project Condign, was commissioned by the MoD from a private contractor in 1997 and delivered in 2000. It looked into a database of sightings from between 1987 and 1997, and eventually led to the closure of both the UFO Desk and DI55.
On the back of Project Condign, reports about UFO sightings stopped being copied to DI55 in 2000 and, eventually the branch closed down — before the UFO Desk also shut nine years later.
However, Clarke says the report itself could be flawed — with the author believing UFOs were “atmospheric plasma” and in it referencing Russian literature that was less than credible as a source, as well as books on ball lightning and earthquake lights.
Clarke also says that perhaps the most important takeaway from the newly released files is the fact that the MoD was looking for a definitive reason to stop further public work with regard to UFOs.
The project was a way to justify that decision, he says. Are there more secret UFO reports being gathered? Who knows. And if there are other programs that are secret, we’ll just have to wait for the reports to be released.