UFOs - Leslie Kean [94]
The Public Informed … the Public Denied
When I joined the MoD in 1985, it was a closed organization with limited public and media interface. But the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) came fully into force in 2005, and the department I left in 2006, after a twenty-one-year career, was virtually unrecognizable from the one I’d known when beginning there over two decades ago. The section where I worked was now so busy dealing with FOI requests that this had taken precedence over the research and investigation that was done in my day. Few UFO sightings were investigated in any meaningful sense of the word, and most sightings elicited little more than a standard letter. If the witness was a commercial pilot or a military officer, the incident was at least investigated, but not to the extent that had previously been the case.
By 2007, the workload involved in dealing with FOI requests about UFOs on a case-by-case basis was becoming intolerable and I know that staffs were getting increasingly frustrated. Accordingly, because of this administrative burden, the MoD decided to proactively release its entire archive of UFO files. The French government had done so in 2007, and MoD officials hoped that the move would assuage accusations that the British government was covering up the truth about UFOs. Indeed, both the MoD and the National Archives expected that this would be a good news story about open government and freedom of information. The MoD confirmed to me in December 2007 that the final decision had been taken and I duly broke the story in the media.
The 160 files, some of them containing hundreds of pages of documentation, comprise tens of thousands of pages in all. Each page has to be considered for redaction to ensure classified information and personal data aren’t released. The first batch of eight files was released on May 14, 2008, and within a month there had been around two million downloads from the National Archives website. So far, many of the UFO sightings detailed are mundane, but there are some extraordinary accounts by civil and military pilots and sightings corroborated by radar evidence. The release program is expected to be completed in 2011.
The MoD was midway through its ongoing program declassifying its UFO files when it made the decision, in December 2009, to close its office for receiving reports from the public—the well-known UFO desk—much to the disappointment of many. I was surprised that there was no announcement in Parliament and no public consultation about the change in policy, which ended all correspondence with the British people about UFO sightings. Instead, the news was slipped out in a way designed not to attract attention, through an amendment to an existing document, “How to Report a UFO Sighting,” in the Freedom of Information section of the MoD website. The new text stated that “in over fifty years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom” and went on to say that “MoD will no longer respond to reported UFO sightings or investigate them.”
On the face of it, this looked like the termination of the MoD’s UFO project, mirroring what had happened to Project Blue Book in the United States. But the real situation was subtly different. An MoD spokesperson told the press that “any legitimate threat to the UK’s airspace will be spotted by our 24/7 radar checks and dealt with by RAF fighter aircraft.”7
This confirmed what I already knew: Behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny, the really interesting UFO sightings would not be ignored. Sightings from police officers, UFOs witnessed by civil or military pilots, uncorrelated targets tracked on radar—all these things will continue to be looked at, albeit outside