Video transcript, June 2013

UFO File release June 2013
Dr David Clarke
The 10th and final collection of Ministry of Defence UFO files released by The National
Archives.
There are 25 separate files of sightings, something in the order of 4300 pages in total
that you can now download from The National Archives website and they cover mainly
the years 2008 – 2009. The Ministry closed their UFO desk and cancelled their UFO
hotline in November 2009 and that brought to an end almost 60 years of collecting,
analysing and in some cases investigating sightings of mysterious things seen in the
sky.
The highlights of this collection of UFO files, the last one, is the build up to the Ministry
of Defence’s decision in November 2009 to close the UFO files and in that month they
closed the UFO hotline number which members of the public had used since 1997 to
report their sightings directly to Whitehall. They also redeployed the final UFO desk
officer and they sent out letters to the Home Office and to the Civil Aviation Authority
basically saying that the Ministry no longer wanted to receive UFO reports from the CAA
or from the police and they were no longer going to investigate anything that was
reported to them.
In this collection of files there are 4300 pages and 25 separate files and the really big
year is 2009 because in that year the Ministry received 643 separate sightings, up to
November when the UFO desk was finally closed. And that figure was actually a record
breaking number for the MoD, the number of sightings had trebled from the previous
year – 2008, and on average during that decade the MoD was receiving between 100-
200 per annum. Those numbers doubled in 2008 and trebled in 2009 and that really did
put a strain on the resources the MoD had committed to this subject and really it lead up
to the decision to finally pull the plug on ‘Britain’s X-files’ simply because they didn’t
have the resources to investigate these sightings or to look at them in any detail so they
tended to just be filed away. And the vast majority of the sightings in 2008 and 2009
seemed to be of very down to earth objects such as Chinese lanterns that had been
released by people at parties and weddings and these had been reported,
photographed and published in the newspapers which encouraged more people to
report these things and what you find is, looking through the reports, you get people
who are enjoying themselves out at night in the summer at BBQ’s, some of them in hot
tubs, they see something odd in the sky, they take a photograph on their mobile phone
and there are lots of examples in here where people are really really excited about
some orange light they have seen in the sky and they want to tell someone about it. So
there is a UFO hotline that the Ministry was running at that time, they would contact the
hotline they would leave a message and send some footage from their mobile phone or
iphone in some cases. The photographs you can see them yourself in the files, they are
not very good quality, a lot of them are just little blobs of light against a very dark
background. There are some more interesting photographs, there is one for instance of
a UFO supposedly seen over Stonehenge in Wiltshire. But when you actually look over
the description of that, you find in a lot of these cases that a lot of people who send
these photographs in didn’t actually see anything at the time they took the photograph, it
is only when they downloaded it later they noticed something odd and maybe because
there had been publicity about it somewhere in the press they thought they should tell
someone about it. The vast majority of cases where nothing was seen at the time and