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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
... ' l ' I ~I, •;~ ". '. 1275 Unidentified [ LORDS ] Flying Objects 1276 [Lord GJadwyn.] some condition of the atmosphere, or upper atn~osphcre, unknown to us, pro- d~Jcing el~ctricaJ or similar phenomena which no doubt interfere with compr.sses, and for some reason dart about the sky, sometimes even coming to earth. The difficulty about such an explanation is that they never seem to come into actual contact with aircraft, or any other air- borne objects. Even if collisions have sometimes been suspected, they have not been proved to have occurn:-d. Nor, apparently, do they ever crash into anything important on the ground. When they are alleged to have been seen on the ground it is always, incident.11ly, away from houses. I sup;_')ose it is conceivable that they may be ca:)able of passing right through physical objects, their mindless trajectory being tile;·efore harmless, and dict was cmrent, as I remember well, in America at the time of the Korean war, \vhen I was in New "/ork. Jndeed, it was responsible for, as far as I know, the only known joke ever perpetrated by a Soviel: functionary, namely Mr. Gromyko, who when. asked ·.vhat he thought about flying saucer5 said, " Some people say these objects are due to the excessive consumption in the United States of Scotch whisky. I say that is not so. They are due to th~ activi:ies of a Soviet athlete, a discus thrower, in Eastern Siberia, practising for the Olympic Games and quite unconscious of his strength." If these objects are not t;:;rrestrial, then admittedly, always supposing they exist and arc not mere illusions, they must be of som.! non-terre:.trial origin. We can, I think, discard the pos£ibility that they come from uny of the other planets, as was said by the noble Viscount, ( Lord Oxfuird, whose maiden speech we so much appreciated; I hope we slu>JJ hear from him again shortly. Venus is too hot, ~1ars is a lifeless wilderness, an.d conditions on the others are extremeiy unlikely to be compatible wirh any form of life. Thus, from \vhence do t11ey come? They can cnly come from a planet in some other starry system, of which the nearest, as the noble Viscount said, is the siar Proxima Centauri, which is 4-1: light years away. Always supposing: therefore, that UFOs are manned by sentient beings who travel at the Sf)eed of light-and if you travel at 186,000 miles a secoDd, how do you slow down on approaching the earth? (how wonderful to imagine !)-these cr-eatures must have been cooped up in their small machines for no less than 4·5 terrestrial years before ::ppearing in cur atmosphae. One can perhaps i::12gine thai they may somehow have been able to escape from time and consequently not need any sustenance or sleep, but it is difficult, even on that hypothesis, to believe their machines are sor:.1ehow time-exempt and can conse- quently contain enough propellant to keep them steady on their millennary way. If a UFO was launched near Proxima Centauri and proceeded at the rate at which astronauts go to the moon, it would take, I am reliably informed, not 100,000 years bat more 1ii:e 900,000 years before it reac~1~:d the earth. In which case, it is indisputable that any non-terres- trial UFO now si1zhtcd over New Zcalaud or anywhere else~ must have started on its journey sc:-!1Cthing lik0 a million years ago. In other w0rds, since after all the huma11 race lives within time, it must have left long before any kind of re- cognisable hcman society existed here below. It is, however, also indisputable that UFOs have been observed for many hundreds of years in Europe, China and elsewhere. There are records of mediaeval monks seeing cigar-like objects in the heavens; and indeed it is quite possible that such sightings have been observed during the last few thousand years. There may be more ~ightings now simply because we have better facilities for observing them. Jf so, what conclusion m'.:st we draw as regards the whole non- terrestrial hypothesis? It is simply that ' 1-~ 1271 v! these sen6~nt telligeni bein if such they minable jourr. hover about 1 attempt a Jan~ of which we 1 evidence. What couk strange procee obviously intr; picked up cnm that a serious not feasible, t idea. Perh::ps mysterious wa cur Jangur.r;c ~ I think it w; Kimberley wb were under so from a p!anet Proxima Cent; simply a qucsti it cop:,es dow cosmic joke be beings from 4 unfortunate in· are a sort of induce us by t! them. It is a net think it is< There ~;re, i that m~1jor l:ln1 taken place ir inauguratic1~ • then app< re11i behnd some l sum ably to see that is, the ne\ brougH dov.n and Peru t1:en markings on t been utilized t together with t father of rhe r; who came du such tradition the world, dr proof that sl!< descended fro1 The ne2res -I cuctc t:1:s lengths to wi:i --is the tLeo Russia, tht star cf Bet;, ;e \vhich, to :.he en~ergcd ·' th
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