Thursday, March 04, 2010

Alien Lore No. 168 - New UFO file releases from Britain


As you may or may not know, Russia, France, and Great Britain have released much of their previously secret government files on UFO/alien-Grey sightings and investigations. Partly, this is due to pressure to open up what The People rightfully own, similar to the literally millions of documents released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Partly, I believe, they release these records to quell the growing sabre-rattling of the conspiracy theorists (both fringe and mainstream), and partly because they believe--probably rightly--that releasing the ravings of deranged saucer-freaks and conspiracy and cover-up wacks will speak for itself.

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for pointing out these stories.

The Brits recently released their fifth batch of records about unidentified flying objects. The Ministry of Defence and The National Archives have released the files as part of a project to open the files up to a broader audience.

This release is the largest so far, with more than 6,000 pages of material from 1994 to 2000.

The files include:
- A sighting by a man in Birmingham, England, in March 1997. He said he came home from work at 4 a.m. to see a large blue triangle-shaped craft hovering over his back garden. It "shot off and disappeared" after about three minutes, the report said, leaving behind a "silky-white substance" on the treetops, some of which he saved in a jar. The documents did not say what happened to the jar and its contents.

- One report, from January 1997, details a man driving home through south Wales one night when he saw "a 'tube of light' coming down from the sky," which at first seemed like a "massive star" coming toward him. The man's mobile phone and car radio failed (classic symptoms!), and the man got out of his car and was able to walk through the light. When he re-entered his car he started feeling sick, and later developed a skin condition.

- Another report talks about a group of people, in August 1997, who saw, from their fishing trawler in the North Sea, a round, flat, shiny object hover in the sky. The witnesses saw it both with the naked eye and through binoculars. The witnesses, the report says, were "very skeptical of UFOs." They followed the UFO on radar for several seconds before it completely vanished, the report said.

- Cops in Boston, England, and Skegness, on England's east coast, witnessed a UFO on video at the same time that the Royal Air Force (RAF) detected an "unidentified blip" on their radar. In the 1966 sighting, officers saw "strange rotating red, blue, green and white flashing lights in the sky," the report said. Another ship in a bay near Boston, also saw the lights, at the same time the RAF air defense radars picked up the blip. Press coverage of the incident led the RAF to look into the lights, which they identified as stars and bright planets. The radar blip, authorities said, were due to a "permanent echo" created by a nearby church spire.

- The release also contains several incidents involving UFOs and aircraft, like the near-miss that happened in January 1995 when a British Airways Boeing 737 was approaching Manchester airport. The captain and a crew member saw the object, but an investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority failed to identify it, the report said. It never happened! Really?

According to the CNN report, "The release highlights how the reported shapes of UFOs have changed during the past half-century, the National Archives said. Many of the reports in the latest file describe UFOs as big, black and triangular, whereas reports from the 1940s and '50s tended to be about saucers or disc-shaped objects."

"In the 1950s the next big leap in technology was thought to be a round craft that took off vertically, and it's intriguing to note that this is the same period when people began to report seeing 'flying saucers' in the sky," said David Clarke, author of a book called The UFO Files.

Relevant links:

CNN's report on the release of the files
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