Documents / Document
This MoD file, titled UFOs - Persistent Correspondence - Dr David Clarke, holds Dr David Clarke's Freedom of Information requests and emails to the Directorate of Air Staff from 2005 to 2008. Clarke asked for the DI55 report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region and for Rendlesham papers. He also sought records about Nick Pope. Other items include an internal review that released redacted passages on plasmas, the MoD's statement that it had no report of the 2008 South Wales police helicopter sighting, and a 2009 disposal form.
“International UFO Reporter”20 pages
## Section 40 Directorate of Air Staff-Freedom of Information Ministry of Defence 5th Floor, Zone H Main Building Whitehall London SW1A 2HB Answere JGmc. 11 April 2007 ## FOI Request ## Dear Section 40 I wish to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act for information relating to MoD's internal discussions concerning public statements made by a former desk officer on the subject of UFOs. As you will no doubt be aware one of your predecessors, Mr Nick Pope, who was Sec(AS)2a from 1991-94, publicly declared his conversion to "a believer" in UFOs in 1995 after he left the post (Mail on Sunday, 2 July 1995). In the following year a book he had written about UFOs, and his experience as a desk officer responsible for dealing with public inquiries about UFOs on behalf of MoD, Open Skies Closed Minds, was published. The book set out Mr Pope's belief that UFOs did pose a possible defence threat to the UK in stark contrast to the publicly stated MoD policy (which remains in place today) that the phenomenon has been repeatedly judged, most recently by the DIS report on UAPs, to be "of no defence significance." I am fully aware that Mr Pope's statements, during his employment with the MoD, were made in a private capacity and that he was not authorised to speak on behalf of the MoD. I also appreciate that the Data Protection Act 1998 protects information of a personal nature. Nevertheless during his employment, and specifically in 1995-96, Mr Pope was a serving MoD officer and the stance that MoD decided to adopt in response to his very public statements - that were clearly in contrast to the department's stated line - must fall within the category of information defined as "in the public interest."
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 160 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.