UK releases more UFO archives.

[stephendare]

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/stories/347.htm?WT.hp=nf-38130

17 August 2009

It can be nice to feel needed - but two men returning home from an evening out in Staffordshire were less than happy when a lemon-headed alien supposedly appeared beneath a hovering UFO and wanted to take them away.

Dashing to their local police station, the terrified men filed a report which ended up with the Ministry of Defence. It can now be found among the many mysterious incidents featured in official UFO files released today.

The files are available to download for free for one month from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos, where you can also find a wealth of information on the files, and a videocast by UFO expert Dr David Clarke.

The release is part of a three-year project by the Ministry of Defence and The National Archives to open up these records to a worldwide audience. This fourth instalment consists of 14 files of sightings, letters and Parliamentary Questions spanning from 1981 to 1996.
Highlights from the files

The records feature papers relating to the famous Rendlesham Forest sightings, often described as 'Britain's Roswell'. Other highlights include:

    * More than 30 sightings of bright lights over central England in just six hours in March 1993. Most of the sightings were later attributed to a Russian rocket re-entering the earth's atmosphere
    * The Belgian Air Force scrambling F-16 fighters to intercept UFOs reported by police officers and others
    * Numerous sightings over Scotland as Bonnybridge became the UFO hotspot of the mid-1990s
    * A report of wailing noises and mysterious lights being beamed onto a cemetery in Cheshire in July 1996. Investigations discovered four smouldering railway sleepers, one with a hole burnt through it.

Fact and fiction

Many of the UFO reports in this release were filed in 1996, the year of Will Smith's heroics in Independence Day and the growing popularity of TV's The X-Files. UFO reports spiked from 117 in 1995 to 609 in 1996.

Dr David Clarke, a journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, said: 'It's evident there is some connection between newspaper stories, TV programmes and films about alien visitors and the numbers of UFO sightings reported to the MoD.

'Obviously, films and TV programmes raise public awareness of UFOs and it's fascinating to see how that appears to lead more people to report what they see to the authorities.'

[Jason]

Ock, were you really in rail utopia of "Colombia" for all those years or were you in fact abducted?