The UFO files extract

‘What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it
mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.’
( PREM 11 / 855 )
The Prime Minister received a reassuring response from the Air Ministry
on 9 August 1952. Preserved alongside Churchill’s memo at the National
Archives, it said UFOs were the subject of ‘a full intelligence study in 1951’
that had concluded all incidents reported could be explained by natural
phenomena, misperceptions of aircraft, balloons and birds, optical illusions,
psychological delusions and deliberate hoaxes. Churchill was told that an
earlier investigation, carried out by Project Grudge in 1948–9 had reached
a similar conclusion and that ‘nothing has happened since 1951 to make the
Air Staff change their opinion, and, to judge from recent Press statements,
the same is true in America.’
The government’s Chief Scientist, Lord Cherwell (Frederick Linde-
mann) said he ‘agreed entirely’ with the Air Ministry and, in a minute cir-
culated to Cabinet members, dismissed the American saucer scare as ‘a
product of mass psychology’. But not everyone was so convinced. A 2009
release by the Churchill Archives included a letter from Duncan Sandys,
then Minister of Supply, to Cherwell that stated: ‘There may, as you say, be
no real evidence of the existence of flying saucer aircraft, but there is in my
view ample evidence of some unfamiliar and unexplained phenomenon.’19
The division in the establishment between those who ‘believed’ that
reports of flying saucers should be taken seriously, such as Duncan Sandys
and Lord Mountbatten, and those who dismissed the whole subject as
T H E F LY I N G S A U C E R A G E 4 7
FIg.15 Following a ‘flap’
of UFO sightings over
Washington DC, British
Prime MinisterWinston
Churchill asked the
Secretary of State for
Air: ‘What does all this
stuff about flying saucers
amount to?’
PREM 11/855