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LONDON \u2014 They were shaped like
\ncigars, saucers, coffins and amorphous blinking blobs. They hovered in
\na menacing manner, traveled at impossible speeds and vanished into the
\nnetherworld, or, in one instance, a hedge in Cornwall. <\/p>\n
A few carried humanoid life forms, or so it seemed. A few
\nmaterialized courtesy of the observers\u2019 possibly having had a drink too
\nmany, as in the case of an unidentified flying light cluster witnessed
\nloitering in the sky by the patrons of a pub in Kent. <\/p>\n
Whatever they were, these phenomena reported to Britain<\/a>\u2019s \u201cThe government has been telling us the truth,\u201d declared David Which is, frankly, a letdown, as is the government\u2019s prosaic The spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of anonymity \u2014 not because The files from 1978 to 2002 were released this month. Some older A citizen who gives her profession as \u201cmeals on wheels operator\u201d \u201cSome time on a Monday evening during the break in watching \u2018Quincy\u2019 \u201cThe light changed to a purplish color, prior to its exit into a thick hedgerow,\u201d the report reads.<\/p>\n The files include random newspaper clippings of questionable There are long letters asking big questions. \u201cWhen is a flying In the old days, the United States systematically compiled reports Some U.F.O. enthusiasts said last week that they believed the But Joe McGonagle, a self-described U.F.O. researcher here, said the \u201cA lot of people imagined that there was this vast U.F.O. project It is not as if the authorities have always failed to take the issue In 1979, the House of Lords debated the matter at the urging of the He was not the only noble believer. <\/p>\n \u201cI should like to tell your lords about some of the sightings I Lord Gainford said he had seen a U.F.O., which he described as None of their accounts were as detailed as that of a 78-year-old Out fishing in 1983, the man had just poured himself a cup of tea, \u201cAnxious to avoid causing offense,\u201d the report said, the man asked He was reluctant to tell his family, the report says: \u201cI knew my wife would say \u2018No more fishing for you, old man.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/05\/26\/world\/europe\/26london.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMinistry of Defense over the years and made public this month were
\nalmost certainly not actual alien aircraft piloted by actual alien
\nbeings. <\/p>\n
\nClarke, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University,
\nwho has a side interest in U.F.O.\u2019s. \u201cThere are a lot of weird things
\nin the sky, and some of them we can\u2019t explain, but there\u2019s not a shred
\nof evidence for a single alien visitation.\u201d <\/p>\n
\nexplanation of why, for decades, it has meticulously documented reports
\nof U.F.O. sightings. \u201cWe only check the sightings from the perspective
\nof making sure that our military airspace has not been breached, and we
\npretty much never have airspace breaches,\u201d a Defense Ministry
\nspokeswoman said. <\/p>\n
\nshe works with Agent Mulder in some shadowy basement office, but
\nbecause that is government policy \u2014 said the ministry had begun making
\nthe files public because it had been inundated with U.F.O.-related
\nrequests under Britain\u2019s Freedom of Information Act. <\/p>\n
\nfiles have already been declassified and made public; the rest will be
\nreleased over the next few years. Available on the Web from the
\nNational Archives at ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk<\/a>,
\nthey cover hundreds of sightings but are hardly the X-Files. Much of
\nthe material consists of one-page forms carrying details like how big
\nthe supposed aircraft was and what, if anything, it seemed to be doing.\n<\/p>\n
\ndescribes her shock and awe at the sight of a smallish \u201cVulcan-shaped
\nobject\u201d hovering in the sky. Another witness says she was roused from
\nbed by a brilliant light emanating from a U.F.O. \u201cthe size of a
\nmilk-bottle base.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\u2014 I checked my watch \u2014 I noticed an unusual happening in the sky,\u201d one
\ncorrespondent wrote. And from Cornwall, a report arrived from a
\n28-year-old motorist who observed a bright yellow light \u201cwhich bobbed
\nand weaved\u201d over the road, an image recalling Tinkerbell\u2019s mode of
\ntravel in \u201cPeter Pan.\u201d <\/p>\n
\njournalistic rigor. A 1986 Daily Mirror article reports that the light
\n\u201cfrom a glowing red object\u201d suffused the cockpit of a Royal Air Force
\njet carrying Prince Charles<\/a>, seriously unnerving the pilot. As an aside, the newspaper noted that \u201cPrince Philip<\/a> has been a keen U.F.O. follower for the past 36 years.\u201d <\/p>\n
\nsaucer not a flying saucer?\u201d muses one correspondent. \u201cAnd is the
\nmothership man-made or from a distant planet?\u201d <\/p>\n
\nof U.F.O. sightings, too. But its last program, known as Project Blue
\nBook, was closed down in 1969 after government officials concluded that
\nif something was out there, it was not anything they wanted to
\ninvestigate. <\/p>\n
\nBritish government had not released all of its files and was concealing
\nthe truth about a massive cover-up it had long perpetrated on the
\nBritish people. <\/p>\n
\ndocuments showed that far from concealing anything, the government had
\nfailed to investigate the sightings properly in the first place. <\/p>\n
\nwith lots of people working on it, when in reality it was a civil
\nservant spending 25 percent of his time on it, filing reports,\u201d he
\nsaid. <\/p>\n
\nseriously. In 1950, the government convened a secret committee, the
\nFlying Saucer Working Party, to investigate sightings of U.F.O.\u2019s. It
\nconcluded that U.F.O.\u2019s were optical illusions, weather phenomena,
\nairplanes seen from strange angles and the like, which has been the
\ngovernment\u2019s line ever since.<\/p>\n
\nEarl of Clancarty, who believed that man was descended from aliens who
\ncrawled from the earth\u2019s core via special tunnels or flew in spaceships
\n65,000 years ago.<\/p>\n
\nhave seen,\u201d said the Earl of Halsbury, \u201cbeginning at the age of 6, when
\nI saw an angel.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\u201cbright white ball with a touch of red followed by a white cone,\u201d at a
\nNew Year\u2019s Eve party in Scotland. Some children saw it, too, he added,
\nand they \u201chad been drinking soft drinks.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nex-soldier in Aldershot. His story, which he told to a U.F.O.
\ninvestigator, can be found in the newly released files. <\/p>\n
\nhe recalled, when he was approached by two four-foot-tall beings
\nwearing pale green overalls and large helmets. They led him into what
\nturned out to be their ship \u2014 \u201cI thought, Christ \u2014 what the hell\u2019s
\nthat?\u201d he said \u2014 and, apparently considering whether to subject him to
\nextraterrestrial experiments, suddenly announced: \u201cYou can go. You are
\ntoo old and infirm for our purposes.\u201d <\/p>\n
\nno questions, even obvious ones like, what planet do you come from?
\nInstead, he returned to the riverbank, where he finished his tea (by
\nthen cold) and resumed fishing.<\/p>\n