The summer of 2023 may mark the highpoint of a renewed resurgence of interest in UFOs both in the corridors of the Pentagon and for the world’s media. But all the online debate around whistleblowers and imminent disclosure obscures the fact that UAP are a global phenomenon.
So far the response of the UK government to US intelligence interest and NASA’s separate, ongoing study, has been muted. The official line is that MoD closed its UFO desk in 2009 after some 50 years acting as the focal point for sightings reported by members of the public. This followed the transfer of its surviving files to The National Archives, a process for which I acted as consultant. If you believe MoD’s boilerplate responses to recent FOI requests, the UK government has no further interest in the phenomenon.
But as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan may have once said ‘events, dear boy, events’ have a habit of changing game plans. In July 2021, after the US Director of National Intelligence released its second ‘preliminary assessment’ of UAP, Lord Aamer Sarfraz put the UK MoD on the spot during a mini-debate in the House of Lords. The Conservative peer, who sits on the National Committee of the Joint Security Strategy, wanted to know if as a result of the change in US policy the MoD planned to reopen its UAP investigations and what data it held.
Responding for the government Baroness Goldie said MoD ‘have no opinion on the existence of extraterrestrial life and we no longer investigate reports of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena’.
She admitted they were aware of the Pentagon’s renewed interest but had ‘no plans to conduct our own report into UAP, because in over 50 years no such reporting has indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK’.
As with all parliamentary statements the real interest lies not in what was said, but in what was not said. There are no plans to produce a new UK UAP report but that does not mean those operating the UK air defence system are not actively monitoring or collecting UAP reports from military sources.
Evidently they still are as Goldie went on to say MoD treats incursions of unidentified objects into UK airspace ‘very seriously’. But the MoD’s priority is to address ‘actual threats where those threats are identifiable and can be substantiated’. UAP, by definition, are elusive, nebulous phenomena that may or not be solid ‘objects’ capable of radar detection or conventional interception by fighter aircraft.
But is the ‘no interest’ response provided in Parliament and in response to numerous FOI requests the truth? I believe we should remain sceptical as the MoD provided similar stark denials two decades ago while a defence contractor was working on a computerised study of the MoD’s UAP data. The report he produced, codenamed Project Condign, completed in 2000 was itself commissioned in the mid-1990s in direct response to an earlier period of intense media and political interest in UAP
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The MoD’s stonewalling backfired in May when Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the US UAP Taskforce, addressed NASA’s public hearing on UAPs. When quizzed on how the twin inquiries were partnering with international agencies, Kirkpatrick revealed he had recently attended ‘our first Five Eyes forum on the subject’. The Five Eyes Alliance is a secretive global information-sharing network that includes intelligence agencies from the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. It was created during the first Cold War and one of the four UK agencies that share information with the US agencies is Defence Intelligence. DI’s interest in UFOs dates to 1950-51 when their Flying Saucer Working Party report was prepared with the blessing of the CIA and later used to brief Winston Churchill.
Kirkpatrick’s revelations begs the question: precisely how is the UK going to share data on UAPs if it has closed its UAP reporting network?
It is common knowledge that the defunct UFO desk never had the resources to conduct field investigations or analyse of the largely low-quality sighting reports it received on daily basis from the public. Its closure was followed by the cancellation of standing orders to police forces and the Civil Aviation Authority that had since the mid-1960s routinely channelled sighting reports to MoD.
But files at The National Archives reveal that since 1967 DI55, a branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff, had been the lead UK agency responsible for investigation of UFO incidents categorised as potential threats to defence. These were primarily reports from members of the armed forces or radar stations. As UFOs were regarded as ‘unidentified’ and ‘flying’ by default they fell within DI55’s remit – albeit mainly as a time-consuming side-task that involved reviewing paperwork copied to them from the UFO desk.
Significantly it was DI55 who decided during the 1990s to replace UFO with the acronym UAP that is routinely used by US intelligence agencies. At that time the acronym referred to ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ but last year, shortly after the NASA study was initiated, the US Congress redefined UAP as ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’. Declassified files reveal the British intelligence adoption of UAP as opposed to UFO was part of a strategy to evade the public spotlight and evade further entanglement in a problem that had brought unwelcome attention to their main espionage activities targeting Russia and China.
According to the paper trail, DI55’s investigations ended in December 2000 when British Aerospace contractor Ron Haddow completed his hefty three volume UAPs in the UK Air Defence Region. Nicknamed ‘the Condign report’, the study book-ended the half-century between the Flying Saucer Working Party report. In contrast to the authors of that earlier report, Haddow had access to a computer database populated with two decades of sighting data. That allowed him to scrutinise several thousand incidents logged both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall
.The Condign report pre-empted the current US inquiries and states bluntly that UAP do exist. But Haddow concluded they are a type of rare natural phenomena that include ball lightning and atmospheric plasmas, despite a complete lack of scientific input. His main recommendation, that had been decided before the study began, was that UAP were no threat to the defence of the UK and should therefore be deleted from DI55’s list of tasks. Haddow has never spoken publicly about his work on UAP for the British Government and the MoD have gone to great lengths to conceal his identity.
When I became aware of the existence of his report in 2005 I used the new Freedom of Information Act to secure its release. At the time it was classified Secret/UK Eyes Only and the process of declassification took almost 18 months to complete. Redacted versions of the three volumes and executive summary were uploaded to the MoD’s website in 2007. Large sections of volume 3 were deleted from the version released to the public. It would seem obvious that any sharing of intelligence on UAPs between the US and UK would depend upon access to Haddow’s report and the computer database that was used to generate its conclusions. But what became of the unredacted original version?
Five years ago I was told the report would be reviewed in 2020 prior to its transfer to The National Archives. But one year later UFOlogist Matthew Illsley dropped a bombshell. He submitted a FOI asking for it to be reviewed for release. But he was told a search had drawn a blank and inquiries had established that it had been ‘accidentally destroyed’ whilst it was being scanned or copied! News of this careless blunder arrived as, across the Atlantic, the US Task Force was in the process of upgrading the UAP reporting procedure and reopening the Pentagon’s UFO archive.
As a direct result of our concern MoD ordered further searches of the Defence Intelligence archives and an investigation of the circumstances of its loss. In the process it emerged that searches were stymied by the fact that DI55 no longer existed. The unit once described by a tabloid as ‘our secret army against the aliens’ vanished in the early noughties during a massive cost-cutting exercise that followed the so-called Strategic Defence Review implemented from 1998 under Tony Blair’s government. Its former responsibilities, including aerodynamic missiles and threats from foreign aircraft and drones, are now split between two or more sections in the alphabet soup of surviving Defence Intelligence branches.
According to my sources, those who have inherited DI55’s remit have no interest in UAP and have ‘washed their hands of the entire subject’. With ever-decreasing budgets and staffing, no one in the MoD management treats the subject as a priority issue – in stark contrast with their partners in North America. The inertia and complacency that replaced the enthusiasm of the 1990s is blatantly illustrated by the lack of interest they displayed when alerted to the loss of the Condign report.
But I can reveal that all is not lost. During the summer of 2023 MoD contacted me with some surprising cheery news. Their investigation had carried out further searches of what they call ‘legacy information systems and their local physical record holdings’, in plain English paper files that had been overlooked in earlier keyword searches of computer databases.
The result?
‘[We] can now happily report that after these exhaustive searches, a full unredacted copy of the original Project Condign Report has been located. The report is classified SECRET [but] as part of our Public Record Act obligations, we will be conducting a review of this record to determine if any personal or defence capability sensitivities remain’.
One further victory for openness and transparency emerged from my own successful FOI request to The National Archives for the opening of the existing redacted version of the Condign report on their public catalog. Even though a version had been available online since 2006, the archives were obliged to once again submit my request to the MoD. After a public interest test that took eight months to complete my request was approved by the Secretary of State for Digital Culture, Media and Sport. In the end, my ‘arguments made in favour of disclosure’ had won the day:
‘The Ministry of Defence believes in open and transparent government, and there is an assumption in favour of public access…this is particularly the case in relation to topics of heightened public interest, such as the study of unidentified flying objects’.
The redacted version of UAPs in the UK Air Defence Region (The Condign report) can be downloaded for a small fee from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk by searching for DEFE 24/3356 UFO Policy 2000.
The report is free to download if you sign-up for a National Archives account. At least it gave the yanks a nicely obscure acronym with which to rebrand the narrative.
That dusty old House of Lords session was abysmal. Not one peer bothered with the obvious follow-up question - If “not a threat” why won’t the government release its data for scientific analysis and/or sponsor academic investigation into the phenomenon? Ironically, the threat narrative is now the only basis on which it is being investigated by the government across the pond. - There’s NASA, I suppose, who are STILL thinking about how they might think about studying it…