Video transcript, June 2013

then shown up on the photograph it turns out to be some kind of film fault that has
created the image.
One of the really outstanding reports in this set of files is a sighting that was made by a
group of soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment at Turnhill Barracks in Shropshire in
June 2008. This was a period when the Ministry was receiving a very large number of
sightings of objects in the sky that were described as orange ball shaped phenomena,
often seen in clusters of lights that bobbed around in the sky and moved around in
formation completely silent and a lot of these sightings were reported in the national
media and in the tabloids and the more sightings that were reported the more it
encouraged people to come forward with their own accounts. This group of soldiers
were out on guard duty at this base in Shropshire and they saw these clusters of small
rotating objects in the sky and one of the soldiers, a Corporal, captured images of these
objects on his mobile phone and he decided to contact the news media and the story
appeared on the front page of The Sun newspaper. It later emerged the manger of a
nearby hotel had hosted a wedding party on the night of this sighting where the guests
had released a large number of Chinese lanterns and so the obvious conclusion was
that what had been seen by these soldiers were Chinese lanterns. There is quite a
substantial file on this sighting and how the Ministry of Defence decided they would
react to it.
What you get in these files are lots of amusing letters by people, people who believe
they have been abducted by aliens, people who are getting telepathic messages from
aliens. We get lots of photographs people have taken of odd things in the sky and
sometimes people send in sketches and they even photo-shop in images because they
haven’t had a camera with them and they want a way of depicting what they have seen.
Also one of the more amusing enclosures in these files is this letter from a schoolgirl
which was sent to the Ministry of Defence in January 2009. She’d been out in the
garden with her father and she had seen a lot of little objects flying around in the sky
and she wrote to the Ministry of Defence and she sent this little picture of an alien
waving from inside a flying saucer and she was saying, ‘please tell me what the truth is,
I have a right to know.’
What you also get in these files is, you get people reporting things, unusual natural
phenomena. This is one that I find particularly interesting, it happened in August 2009
and this is a lady in Dorset and she was in her kitchen one night at 9.50pm and through
the kitchen window came this bright white fireball about the size of a football and it flew
in through the open window and exploded in a flash of white light in her kitchen. She
was obviously, as you can imagine, extremely upset and worried about what had
happened. Reading the description it is a classic account of what is known as ‘ball
lightning’ which is a very very rare form of lightening. It is sometimes reported and there
are numerous examples of other people who have seen these balls which have
sometimes come down the chimneys in houses or floated through open windows and
there are examples of people who have been harmed by them and burned. But in this
case, fortunately this lady didn’t suffer any ill effects and could find no traces of this
thing after it exploded, so she was very fortunate.
We have now come to the end of this programme of release for the UFO files and it is
often said about UFOs that ‘the truth is out there,’ in my opinion the truth is actually in
here - in these files - and I would encourage everyone who is interested in this subject
whether you believe or whether you disbelieve take the time to take a look at the
content of these files that can now be downloaded from The National Archives website.