Documents / Document
This Ministry of Defence file, released through The National Archives and published by The Black Vault, holds the MOD's 2002 handling of Dr David Clarke's requests for UFO documents under the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information. It includes the MOD's 9 December 2002 reply, which covered reports from 1976, 1980, 1993 and 1996 and charged £260. It also contains internal emails and file requisitions, plus Foreign Office and United Nations papers from 1978 on Grenada's proposal for UFO research.
“RAF”60+ pages
- -~·-..-"'-·'··-. :;-,8terial ::-,rchives c \'.'liich : put.lic, •ding it p1,:-.[!o·e ~s '(~~d a UFO ::1 given , ·::~carch l to do ·. but a I of two ~ppears ~re is a .re in a ve had : kd to Defence n UFO 1at they n UFO to in- n.omena :r space. !JSi"uiJity Can the :;.nd the :;e this :i, Lord will he ~rnment support )r. Kurt get the uti on jnt~nt of ty, said 'nentary a year. rther, I be en- vid'!nce. diculed. honest; ' Parlia- :>e open .. 1261 Unidentified [ 18 JANUARY 1979 ] Flying Objects 1262 with them and to cease what I am convinced that is quite possible if you believe in the is a cover-up here. The people of Brit:-tin now accepted-or shall we say more have a rir..ht to know all that the Govern- popular--theory of the " big bang" for mcnts, not only of tbis country but others the start of the universe. Undoubtedlv, throughout the world, know about UFOs. our wn and its solar svstem must have been shared \Vi!h n:any others at that Before l sit down I ask the noble Lord, moment when we suddenly appeared. Lord Strabolgi, whether he will tcil your They even give dates for it now; they Lo::'dships why the Ministry of Defence talk about 5,000 miilion years ago, which has not informed the public of 18 con~acts fits in with our own geological back- from 23rd May 1977 up to 22nd February ground. 1978, numbered K 5634 to K 5651 in- clusive. Further, what do the classification numbers 5, 3, 20, 16, 6, 8 and 23 mean for these ! 8 contacts? Moreover, docs the noble Lord r.:alise that 13 out of these 18 contacts \vcre seen dur;ng the hours of daylight? There ned be no fear that the people of this country may panic, since if UFOs are extra-terrestrial their intelli- gence and knowledge is far ahead of our primitive understanding. J·Jy Lords, I hc.artily support the Motion moved by the noble Earl, L)rd Clancarty, for an intra-governmental body to research UFOs. Let Her Majesty's Go\'e:·nment give an example to the rest of the >vorld by being the leader in this investigation. 7.55 p.m. The Viscount ofOXFUIRD: My Lords, first I should like to thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancerty, for initiating this ~xtremely interesting debate. Of course it is really much above my head, but I have enjoyed it already and I hope I ~hall enjoy it for the re~t of the evening. To me, the first question really is, where han~ these UFOs come fro;n? There could be a great many ans\:vers to that, but in the first place we can look at our own planet and there is no doubt tbat there is very little chance of their having come from anything in our own solar system. In fact I think I should quote a few· >vords from Professor Kopal's recent book on the solar system which finishes up, after lamenting the fact of what they found out about Mars, by saying: " The hope of finding life on Mars has evaporated, together with the canals, into the thin Martian air. It is new almost certain th<!t as living beings we arc alone in the solar system". I think that is a very good example of the fact that we cannot look to the solar system to discov:;r where these things come from, if they come from anywhere. The next possibility which has been paraded is that they might come from the sister Slm in our own galazy. Of course H.L. 8 P2 There are many stars which have a solar systei:1 which might well be in the same position; they might have one planet. as we have, as go<.'d as ours and with th~ same amount of knowledge. On the other hand, we must accept the fact, as the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley, was saying, that it would j1ave to be something which we have not been able to ..,,~tain on this earth and something that we do not understand en this earth, because if one wanted to get, say, from A Centauri, which is our nearest star, to here, it wculd take half a lifetime. Even travelling faster than anything we have ever produced in the way of space ships in this world of ours, the distance is 250,000 times the distance that '"e are from our sun, which is 93 million miles. It is a distance which would certainly take half a lifetime, even at 100,000 miies an hour. So I do not think it would be reasonable to look at another solar system, say A Centauri, which is very ncar, being only roughly 4t light ytars from us, which is not very much in space. There is of course the possibility that the UFOs may come from some secret effort on this earth. This I very much doubt because one could not keep a thing like that secret for 20 or 30 years. I very much doubt the possibility of its being on this earth. So we get an entirely different picture. We have progressed in the last 30 years both in cosmology and in many other sciences, more than we have ever done before, certainly in my lifetime. I think the feeling really is that we are now on the edge of something in the universe which we do not understand yet; However. if we are going to understand the UFO question, we have got to _move to the extent of understanding something beyond cosmology today. From our point of view, what we are looking at is the tip of the iceberg. We know perfectly well that we get information, we put it into. computers and come out at the other "!'"T,,.,-~""'····:·:-;·'<"'~' .,. ·-.··y-·-•'J'"'":-"'~~11fn:~-:":~~-· .. ~.······-..,..-:""·' ~ -·····~·~ ~'7/""''_"'-'<"...,...·"""·.,-.__.·~·~·',•·· .,..,-,.-~7-~'.'!'~~'!"··;~~~~ .. ~.,- ....-~-··· ,_",...,.......,~...,"'l-:--,~1·· .... -·~1--.,-.;-..,...,_,.,, -~..._~.,· · •rt ~~~-~, .. ;,; ; ·-
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 492 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.