British UFO Files

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From Telegraph.co.uk....

UFO files: Winston Churchill ‘feared panic’
over Second World War RAF incident

Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War
encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public “panic”
and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.

By ANDREW HOUGH and PETER HUTCHISON | 12:01AM BST - Thursday, 05 August 2010

THE FORMER Prime Minister allegedly banned reporting of the “bizarre” incident, off the east coast of England, for half a century amid fears disclosures about unidentified flying objects would create public hysteria.

He is said to have made the orders during a secret war meeting with US General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.

The claims are contained in thousands of pages of declassified files on UFOs, released on Thursday online by the National Archives.

The 18 files, which cover from 1995 to 2003, are made up of more than 5,000 pages of reports, letters, and drawings drawn from correspondence with the public and questions raised in parliament.

The allegations involving Churchill were made by the grandson of one his personal bodyguards, an RAF officer who overheard the discussion, who wrote to the Ministry of Defence in 1999 inquiring about the incident after his grandfather disclosed details to his family.

According to the series of letters, written by the guard's grandson who is now a physicist from Leicester, a reconnaissance plane and its crew were returning from a mission over occupied Europe when they were involved in the war incident.

During their flight, on the English coast, possibly near Cumbria, their aircraft was approached by a metallic UFO which shadowed them.

Photographs of the object, which the crew claimed had “hovered noiselessly” near the plane, were taken by the crew.

Later, during discussions about the unexplained incident, the two men were claimed to have become so concerned by the incident that Churchill ordered it remain secret for 50 years or more.

During the meeting, a weapons expert dismissed suggestions the object was a missile as the event was “totally beyond any imagined capabilities of the time”.

Another person at the meeting raised the possibility of a UFO, at which point Churchill ordered the report to be classified for at least half a century and reviewed by the prime minister to stop “panic” spreading.

“There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations, and this caused a high degree of concern,” wrote the scientist, whose details are redacted.

“Mr Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following: ‘This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church’.”

Apart from telling his daughter — the scientist’s mother — about the incident when she was nine, the bodyguard, who was “greatly affected by his experience”, only disclosed the details to his wife on his deathbed in 1973.

The scientist, also an expert in astronomy who said he developed software for use in “spacecraft thermal engineering”, was told years later by his mother.

Stressing he was not a “crackpot”, he said he wanted to investigate the science behind the incident after his grandfather, who was bound by the Official Secrets Act, remained convinced that the object was secret technology being tested by a foreign power.

After investigating the claims, an MoD official said there was no evidence to support the claims as all “UFO files before 1967 were destroyed after five years” due to insufficient public interest. This was supported by a Cabinet Office official.

While there was documents supporting the events, historians last night believed it more than likely occurred.

They said that Churchill had a known interest with UFOs, even asking for a report in 1952 on “flying saucers” and what it “amounted to”.

Dr David Clarke, author of The UFO Files and Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, said the “fascinating” files showed the level of concern about such “bizarre incidents” during the war.

“It does tie in with what we already know as you have to remember that this was also long before the phrase UFO was created,” he said.

“I suspect there is an element of truth to the statement.”

• Government releases new UFO files (click on the link to view a video clip).

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/7926037/UFO-files-Winston-Churchill-feared-panic-over-Second-World-War-RAF-incident.html

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From Telegraph.co.uk....

UFO files: sightings ‘taken seriously’ by
top British intelligence chiefs in 1950s

UFO sightings were taken so seriously in the 1950s that incidents were discussed at
the highest level by Britain's senior intelligence chiefs, the secret files also show.

By ANDREW HOUGH and HUGH KMIOT | 7:30AM BST - Thursday, 05 August 2010

THE JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, which prepared briefings on national security and defence for ministers and senior officials, was advised that a number of UFO sightings remained unexplained during this time.

In April 1957 a memorandum on “aerial phenomena” was prepared for a meeting of the Cabinet Office’s then intelligence group.

It was firstly told that all reports of such strange sightings were “satisfactorily explained”, either as mistakes in interpreting radar readings or as balloons and aircraft.

But a week later the Air Ministry prepared a memo for the Red Book, the JIC's weekly intelligence survey, which disclosed that some sightings were still shrouded in mystery.

One of the six unexplained sightings was later accounted for by lack of evidence and another was thought to be a weather balloon. The rest remained unexplained.

The files also detail a near miss between a British Airways Boeing 737 and an “unidentified Object” while the aircraft was approaching Manchester Airport at 1.50pm on January 06 1995.

In a report to the Civil Aviation Authority, the Captain and the First Officer described it as being “two triangular shaped objects which merged into one”.

A sketch drawn by a witness in Accrington, Cheshire, showed an oblong craft with a curved front and a series of small nozzles at the rear.

The witness, who was not named, also described the “UFO” as “20 times the size of a football field”, a claim which was unfounded. An investigation found no trace of the object.

Eyewitness sketches are also included in the newly-released National Archive files.

Among them were three triangular UFOs, meant to resemble stealth aircraft, were drawn by a resident in Torrisholme, near Morecambe, Lancs and sent to the MoD in May 1997.

They said the UFOs hovered over people's homes and followed cars but were not helicopters, normal planes or balloons.

One black triangular craft had pulsing red lights at the front and two continuous white lights at the rear.

The witness, who saw it in Stanley, Co Durham on the evening of September 29 1995, said it travelled about 40mph and was accompanied by a high-pitched tone similar to an aircraft in a dive.

While a circular “space station” had red, green and white lights pulsing like a heartbeat when it was seen six miles above Crumlin in Gwent, South Wales, on the night of May 09 1998.

Dr David Clarke, author of The UFO Files and Senior Lecturer in Journalism from Sheffield Hallam University said the dates of the files came during a time when interest in paranormal activity was at its peak, largely in part to television shows and Hollywood movies such as “The X Files” and Independence Day.

“People believed the hype,” he said.

Nick Pope, a former MoD civil servant who worked on the official UFO files, added: “Whatever you believe about UFOs, there's some fascinating material in these real life X-Files.”

“Most of these sightings turned out to be misidentifications of things like aircraft lights or meteors, but a small proportion could not be explained.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/7926190/UFO-files-sightings-taken-seriously-by-top-British-intelligence-chiefs-in-1950s.html

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From Telegraph.co.uk....

What do the UFO files reveal?

UFO files released by the MoD tell us more about Britain in the
1950s than they do about aliens, says Damian Thompson.

By DAMIAN THOMPSON | 8:37AM BST - Thursday, 05 August 2010

U. F. O. Three letters that produce a feeling of creeping unease in normally rational people — albeit for different reasons.

For some of us, nothing is more disturbing than the thought of unexplained objects in the sky. They may be turquoise lights that throb gently among the stars, causing you to stop and squint as you put out the rubbish. Or they may be sinister black projectiles that flash across your windscreen so fast that you nearly crash your car. Either way, there's something Out There and the Ministry of Defence needs to know about it. (Unless it already does, but isn't saying.)

For others, the mere thought of UFOs produces a different kind of fear: that of being cornered at a party by — and here I'm quoting a colleague — “one of those paranoid losers who wear the same T-shirt for five days in a row”.

If that's your view of UFO enthusiasts — or Ufologists, as they prefer to be known — then you had better go on red alert right now. Because last night, on the dot of midnight, the Government released previously secret files from the National Archives which prove that, for many years, flying objects were a much bigger deal than we suspected. True believers will go nuts with excitement.

The MoD files (Ufologists always talk about “files”, never boring old documents) reveal that RAF jets were scrambled to investigate UFO reports no fewer than 200 times a year during the Cold War. Martin Redmond, an obscure Labour MP, extracted this information from the MoD back in 1996, but only now has the answer to his Parliamentary Question been published.

Two hundred times a year! Those were busy skies, crawling with unidentified blips on the radar and three fighter jets a week sent to check them out and, if necessary, take them to our leader. But take a closer look at what the documents reveal. All those jets were scrambled or diverted from other tasks during the Cold War. The incidents fell to zero after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In other words, the MoD worked out early on that the only unidentified objects it needed to worry about were anti-submarine aircraft and spy planes sent into British airspace by Moscow. These particular “UFO” reports were a product of the Cold War.

But the MoD files also include a different type of UFO report: sketches of extra-terrestrial rockets and spaceships sent in by members of the public, which until now have remained hidden in the National Archives. These range from a simple triangle with three lights (one red, which “pulsed”, two white, which “did not pulse”) to a “small rocketcraft” seen in the vicinity of Jupiter that bears a spooky resemblance to a flying lavatory brush. The latter drawing is inscribed, in neat handwriting, with the words: “All rights reserved. All rights waived for defence purposes.”

The loo brush UFO dates from the 1980s and is therefore a relatively late example of the phenomenon. Bizarrely, the MoD employed an official, Nick Pope, to collate these reports during the late 1990s. He uncovered nothing genuinely mysterious, though the popularity of The X-Files ensured plenty of media exposure. But this was long after the heyday of the UFO phenomenon, which stretched from the late 1940s to the 1970s and was at its most intense during periods of international tension.

This may seem a trivial detail, but I'm always struck by how many observers from that period reported seeing lozenge-shaped aircraft. People sucked lots of lozenges in the 1950s, just as they drank gallons of Horlicks and other malted drinks: soothing products for a nervous age. Behind the dazzling smiles of housewives and hubbies in the advertisements of the period lurked real and justified anxiety about Communists and the atom bomb.

“People projected their Cold War fears into the skies,” explains Dr David Barrett, author of The New Believers, a comprehensive guide to fringe religions that includes UFO cults.

“The atom bomb was a horror that people couldn't come to terms with — big, scary and alien. It encouraged fantasies, particularly in the United States, where people were already stressed out trying to come to terms with an American dream that was also essentially a fantasy.”

This tension between convention and anxiety gave birth to a highly suggestible generation. Hollywood and television were quick to exploit the appetite for horror from outer space — but even the most cynical producers could not have guessed how many viewers would claim to have seen aliens and spacecraft virtually identical to the studios' own rubber and plywood creations.

In the 1950s, films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) depicted flying saucers that, not coincidentally, began to show up in the scribbled sketches of UFO-spotters. Likewise, a later generation of movie spacecraft were triangular in shape, and that is what members of the public saw. Mind you, the Stealth bomber was also triangular. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but there's strong evidence that some UFO reports were provoked by accidental sightings of experimental US technology.

Mark Pilkington's book Mirage Men, published this week, argues that for decades the American authorities encouraged members of the public to think that they had seen a UFO rather than a prototype aircraft.

“It goes back as far as the U2 spy plane in 1956,” says Pilkington. “The early version was shiny, which meant it could be seen from a long distance. Air Force staff would visit people who'd seen it and tell them it was Venus or a weather balloon — but, if that didn't work, they were quite happy to leave them with the impression that it was an alien spacecraft.”

Pilkington also interviewed a former member of the US Air Force office of Special Investigations who claims to have disguised planes as UFOs as recently as the 1990s — and he reckons Britain may have tried similar subterfuge.

Ufologists will certainly have fun with one of the newly published documents, an investigation into a famous incident known as the “Welsh Roswell”. On the evening of January 23, 1974, reports flooded in of a huge bang and brilliant light hovering over the Berwyn Mountains in north Wales. The MoD explanation? A noisy earth tremor coinciding with a meteor burning up in the atmosphere. For devout UFO believers, however, this is just a cover story concealing an alien spaceship crash.

To be fair, however, few British Ufologists now believe in the literal reality of spaceships — the so-called “nuts and bolts” school of thought. In this country, members of the UFO community are rather like members of the Church of England: they love the feel of the subculture — the conspiracy theories, the films, the TV series, the video games, the merchandise — without subscribing to the implausible doctrines. They leave that to Americans, where UFO conventions are packed with believers in “grays” (little grey aliens with wraparound eyes) and fabulously sophisticated spaceships. Even born-again Christians in the Bible Belt are in on the act, arguing that grays are a portent of the Antichrist.

Which isn't to say, however, that the new files won't be pored over obsessively by British enthusiasts. If there are any contradictions in the testimony, any anomalies in the drawings, they will be minutely examined — and discussed at one of the UFO community's regular pub gatherings around the country. This is a big day for Ufologists. Some of them may even put on a clean T-shirt to celebrate.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/7927676/What-do-the-UFO-files-reveal.html