Videocast transcript, July 2012

One of the documents in the policy file is quite interesting. This was drawn up by an
Intelligence Officer in 1978 and this was in preparation for the House of Lords debate on
UFOs that happened early in the following year and basically the Ministry of Defence
asked all their scientific advisors to advise on what to say in this debate and this
Intelligence Officer came back and he was talking about the possibility of visits to earth
by extra-terrestrials. He said one point that should be made is that if there were extra-
terrestrial space activity by other civilisations then one would have expected some of
the intensive radio listening services out there carried out by reputable scientific
organisations – in America for instance – to have intercepted some of the transmissions
between spacecraft or between spacecraft and their original base. As far as he was
aware nothing as yet had been intercepted that was acceptable by reputable scientists
as being of alien intelligence and since radio transmission is somewhat cheaper than
space travel one would have expected rather more radio communication than actual
visits.
He then goes on to say, another good argument against the extra-terrestrial origins for
UFOs are as follows “recent American and Soviet space probes rule out the possibility
of intelligent life elsewhere in the solar system”. So he says that if UFOs are alien in
origin then they must have come from outside our solar system.
So if one makes a reasonable assumption about the number of stars in the universe
and the proportion of those which have inhabitable planets and then further drew up a
list of all the interesting places in the universe that an intelligent community might wish
to visit. One is driven to the conclusion that a visit to an insignificant planet such as the
Earth of an uninteresting star (the sun) would probably not occur more than once in a
thousand years or so, even if one assumes that every intelligent community makes a
launch at least ten launches a year. He therefore says that the thousands of claims of
visits in the last decade or so by alien spacecraft to planet earth is just too large a
number to be credible.
All the files I have been talking about are now available on The National Archives UFO
website which is www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos