UFO classified information collected by British authorities has been posted online. Among the stories of alien abductions, there are also quite plausible reports of unexplained phenomena in the skies over the UK. Now anyone can start studying them.
The UK Department of Defense has published the first eight declassified folders with information on the invasion of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) on the islands. Among the 1968 pages of eyewitness testimony, official reports and memos prepared for reports to members of parliament and government, there are descriptions of unusual phenomena, mysterious incidents and other anomalies of varying degrees of delusion that occurred between 1978 and 2002.
The complete archive, to be published within four years, will contain several tens of thousands of pages, collected in 160-180 folders, and will cover the entire history of the invasion of the "green men" from the early 1950s to 2007. It will be the largest UFO publication in history.
While the documents can be viewed completely free of charge on the special website of the National Archives of the United Kingdom, however, over time, a small administrative fee may be introduced for individual files; now some previously published archive documents cost £ 3.5 (about 200 rubles) per copy. But you can see the notes signed by Winston Churchill, demanding to figure out "what is there in all this rubbish about flying saucers" is free.
The British Department of Defense was forced to publish data on UFOs by the Free Access to Information Act 2000.
It allows not only the subjects of Elizabeth II, but also everyone who wishes to request information from the government authorities of Great Britain (as well as from the police or universities) on any question of interest and demand an answer.
The answer, of course, can be a refusal, but the refusal must always be justified, for example, by reasons of secrecy. Therefore, when there are too many such requests, it becomes easier for ministries to publish the requested information in the public domain than to tinker with each interested person separately. The same thing happened with UFOs.
Documents published by the National Archives of Great Britain contain thousands of uniform descriptions of various kinds of unusual phenomena, drawn up according to the scheme proposed by the British authorities in the mid-1970s. They are complemented by handwritten letters to officials and members of parliament. Most of this evidence would not have attracted the attention of either the press or the military. People report very bright stars in a bright sky on a frosty morning, fast-moving flickering lights, flashes in the sky, and similar phenomena in which it is easy to recognize natural.
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However, there are among the eyewitness accounts and traces of the clear presence of reason - true, in most cases, earthly. So, the civilian chief of one of the airports (his name, like the names of most eyewitnesses, is erased in the documents so as not to violate the secrecy of private life) reports about an "unidentified flying object", similar to an airplane with four engines, on which white, red and green lights.
There is nothing surprising: for professionals, unidentified flying objects, UFOs, remain precisely flying objects that could not be identified, and during the Cold War, the British government itself required its officials and military to report all such cases. It is these messages that make up most of the published archives.
However, those who want to laugh, two thousand pages will provide such an opportunity. For example, an elderly Briton reports of a group of humanoids in green overalls who kidnapped him and took him on a tour of their ship. However, looking at the flabby old man, the aliens decided that his body was of no interest to them. The man claims that he was sober and in good health when all this happened. What state he was in when he wrote his testimony, the pensioner is silent.
A group of friends who left one of the pubs late in the evening on the outskirts of London did not become silent about this. The whole team saw a strange object heading towards London Gatwick Airport. The UFO had red fire on the left and green on the right, as well as a strange glow in between. It is unlikely that this incident led to a serious investigation.
The first such investigation was carried out at the beginning of the last century. It is from this time that the British interest in unidentified flying objects can be traced. In 1909 and 1913, when dark cigar-shaped objects were seen over numerous British cities, seemingly illuminating the ground with searchlights. Although HG Wells had already written his "War of the Worlds" by that time, the inhabitants of the British archipelago - especially in 1913 - suspected of these objects not aliens from distant space, but German airships. Other incidents have also been reported, such as bright dots of light or flaming objects speeding across the sky.
A special investigation, which was ordered by the then Chief of the Admiralty Churchill by the military, did not find evidence that the flying objects were German, but they concluded that about 90% of all messages can be easily explained by natural causes. UFOs could be bright planets, meteors, clouds of unusual shape and "bunnies" from military searchlights in the sky. The military could not say anything intelligible about the remaining 10% of eyewitness accounts, and these were for the most part strange, dark objects similar to airships.
In a new way, public interest in UFOs increased after the famous incident of 1947, which allegedly took place near the American military base Roswell. It was then that the American military allegedly collected the wreckage of an aircraft of extraterrestrial origin and almost the corpses of its pilots, which then disappeared without a trace in the underground bunkers of the Pentagon and CIA research centers. Just a couple of weeks earlier, a young American pilot, Kenneth Arnold, told the press about a squadron of 9 saucer-like aircraft that he had spotted flying over the mountains of the US West Coast. Soon the entire western world was flooded with reports of sightings of "flying saucers", and UFOs suddenly turned silver.
By the way, an interesting detail: when people knew only airships, UFOs were cigar-shaped and black, and they became silver only with the advent of more or less modern aircraft during the Second World War. Perhaps the horizons of human fantasy simply did not have time to keep up with the development of science and technology in the 20th century.
Nevertheless, there are some among the stories, for which an explanation has not yet been found.
For example, a group of completely sober, highly professional air traffic controllers at one of the small airports in the east of England reported in April 1984 that an unidentified object moving from the sea side "at high speed" approached runway 27, touched it and immediately headed almost straight up with a huge acceleration.
Perhaps, for the sake of such messages, all this data should be made public. The Cold War is over, and now it will be easier for scientists to understand the causes of these still unexplained phenomena. True, if from one flank - from the military - the pressure disappeared, then from the other - the endlessly replacing ufologists and other "independent researchers of the unknown" from independent academies of bioenergy informatics and other crap - it will only grow.
In any case, it will now be more difficult for British ufologists to accuse the government of hiding data on aliens. Let's see if this circumstance will stop their onslaught.
Artyom Tuntsov