UK Ministry of Defence UFO Files Released to The National Archives, 2008 to 2013

The Ministry of Defence ran a UFO desk for more than 50 years. By the end it sat in the Directorate of Air Staff. The Defence Intelligence Staff's DI55 section kept files of its own. Much had already been lost. Until 1967, MoD policy was to destroy UFO files at five yearly intervals.

In May 2008 the doors opened. Under a five-year open-government programme, the surviving files began moving to The National Archives at Kew. They went online in tranches. Dr David Clarke, a folklorist and senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, advised the programme and spoke for it.

14 May 2008. More than 1,000 pages went public. Witness names were redacted after a national-security review. The first few days brought 1.7 million downloads. Clarke said it was "double the traffic" of the Domesday Book's launch online.

One account stood out. On 19 April 1984 the senior controller at a small airfield near England's east coast described a "bright, circular object, flashing different colors." It came in "at speed." It made a touch and go on runway 27. Then it departed at "terrific speed" in a "near vertical" climb. Clarke called it one of the more credible cases, because air traffic controllers reported it.

The tranches kept coming. Some 11,000 sighting reports. Witness drawings, colour photographs and notes of unusual radar detections. Parliamentary briefings and FOI requests. The August 2009 release carried the RAF Cosford file of 1993, with more than 30 sightings over six hours. The radar tapes were replayed. They showed nothing unusual. Papers on the Calvine sighting of 4 August 1990 came out too. The photograph itself was kept back.

Later batches brought a "Toblerone-shaped" UFO hovering over Annandale and a large blue triangle over a Birmingham back garden. One was a 1999 letter. It claimed Churchill and Eisenhower had been briefed on a metallic UFO that approached an RAF bomber crew. The Cabinet Office found "no records to confirm the claim."

In November 2009 Carl Mantell of RAF Air Command briefed Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth. The briefing described a task "which is consuming increasing resource, but produces no valuable defence output." From 1 December 2009 the hotline and email address were withdrawn. Reports had been climbing. About 150 a year before 2007. About 300 in 2008. More than 600 in 2009.

21 June 2013. The final tranche, more than 4,000 pages, carried the closure papers. It also held a last handful of voices. A Coventry woman saw "two orange balls" hovering over her back garden. She asked whether she and her dog could be contaminated. A Manchester schoolgirl sent in a drawing.

The MoD's position never changed. "They never found one, no bits of one," Clarke said in 2008. He suggested that many recent accounts "describe the appearance of Chinese lanterns even though people did not recognise them." Nick Pope, a former MoD UFO investigator, read the files differently, and the two held opposing views. The gaps fed suspicion. On 2 March 2011 the MoD said several Rendlesham files had been destroyed under routine policy. It said they were mostly duplicates of material already released. That August, a "huge" gap showed where the Defence Intelligence Rendlesham files should have been. Cover-up theories followed.

Even the totals differ. The National Archives counts 209 files and approximately 52,000 pages. Clarke counts 210 records and about 60,000 pages across ten tranches. Writing in the journal Folklore, Jeremy Harte called the desk's files "one of the largest bodies of de facto supernatural experience from ordinary people."