Behold the Sky: Full of Such Mischief, British U.F.O. Files Say

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Behold the Sky: Full of Such Mischief, British U.F.O. Files Say
March 3, 2011
by Sarah Lyall
The New York Times

LONDON — The year was 1977. Above the tiny island nation of Grenada, big things were happening in the sky. Sir Eric Gairy, the country’s prime minister, was convinced that the objects he thought he was seeing were hostile alien aircraft from outer space.
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The National Archives, via Associated Press

A retired Royal Air Force officer's 2004 photograph of a doughnut-shaped phenomenon was released Thursday with Britain's U.F.O. files.

The British government did not share Sir Eric’s conviction that, as he put it, “persons from outer space are studying us, or perhaps living among us as earthlings.” A “ridiculous proposal that will only bring the United Nations into disrepute,” was what one British official called the prime minister’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to form an agency to investigate U.F.O.’s.

This historical tidbit was revealed by the British National Archives on Thursday, when it released thousands of pages of government files related to the subject of U.F.O.’s over the years. Sadly, nothing in the material appears to prove without a doubt that we are not alone.

But one can always hope. The files contain a trove of observations from British citizens about unexplained phenomena they observed in the sky and reported to the Ministry of Defense, including peculiarly flashing lights, oddly shaped or strangely behaving aircraft or things that just looked as if they did not belong there.

There are also photographs and detailed diagrams of supposed alien spaceships that some U.F.O. spotters helpfully included with their letters. There are government briefing papers; details of a House of Lords debate about U.F.O.’s in 1979; American documents prepared in the extraterrestrial-crazed 1950s; and a copy of a report produced in 1951 by the Flying Saucer Working Party, a Defense Ministry group convened to brief Prime Minister Winston Churchill on flying saucers.

In one letter from 1998, a man from West London wrote to announce that after observing a strange craft hovering over his garden, he awoke the next morning to find that he had undergone a period of unexplained time. Could he have been abducted and fallen into an alien space-time vacuum?

No, an official wrote back: that was the night the clocks had been turned back an hour.

As for Sir Eric, flying saucers were his passion but also his undoing. After triumphantly persuading the United Nations to hold a debate on the subject in 1979, he flew to New York to take part — whereupon his enemies back home staged a coup and overthrew him.