UK shuts down UFO/Alien Hotline after 50 years

Claims no need for it as there ARE no extraterrestrials/UFOs

[Just caught on CNN - looking for linkable source, now]

What a joke!

reply to post by SquirrelNutz


I heard they are sick of talking calls from David Icke.

That's really strange cause just last week I was on the U.K national archives site and was surprised to see that you could download copies of the released UFO documents from the 80s onwards.

They are still up and they asking for a FEE for some of them ...

Previous file releases

The National Archives holds other UFO files that have already been released by the Ministry of Defence. You can download these in PDF format for a small fee. The files contain details of numerous UFO sightings.

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk...

So if UFOS don't exist, why are they still making money out of them?

[edit on 4-12-2009 by Flighty]

ha ha - Here we go: www.cbc.ca...

Britain's military has closed a hotline that took reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

The Ministry of Defence says that the phone service and an associated email address were taken offline Tuesday.

The military explained Friday that more than 50 years of UFO sightings had not revealed any evidence of alien life or threats to the U.K.

It said that there was "no defence value in investigating UFO reports" and that the money could better be used funding operations in Afghanistan.

The officer who used to deal with the reports has now been reassigned.

Originally posted by SquirrelNutz
Claims no need for it as there ARE no extraterrestrials/UFOs

[Just caught on CNN - looking for linkable source, now]

What a joke!

Yes, it was a waste of money wasn't it?

reply to post by SquirrelNutz


SquirrelNutz -good post.
The British establishment's attitude towards UFOs seems to have come full circle since the 1952 Yorkshire incident involved with Operation Mainbrace .

"It was these sightings, I was told by an RAF exchange intelligence officer in the Pentagon, that caused the RAF to officially recognize the UFO."

Captain Edward J. Ruppelt -Chief of Project Blue Book

As for the MOD closing the UFO reporting desk,it does seem highly irresponsible as they know full well that credible unexplained sightings do occur - a good example is this RAF incident from 1977 which was postponed from public release for being 'too sensitive'.
Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

lol maybe they did get their answers and maybe they dont need to investigate anymore

that doesnt mean nothing is happenning

theres an artical on the bbc if anyone wants it.
but seriusly, no threat to defence?
bloody hell i dont know what there on but i would call something landing in an air base, firing some sort of laser scanner # whatever to where nucs are. id call that a defence threat

Here are a few statements of interest from Nick Pope who actualy ran the British Ministry of Defense UFO desk at Air Secretariat 2-A from 1991 to 1994:

"I concentrate on the science. I'm interested in the UFOs seen by the police and military witnesses. I'm interested in the near misses that pilots report, where their aircraft nearly collide with these things. I'm interested in the visual sightings backed up by radar. I'm interested in the military bases that are overflown by these things. I'm interested in the cases where you have radiation readings on the ground.
These are no lights in the sky. These are not mis-identifications of fantasy prone individuals. This is a cutting-edge technology being reported by reliable, trained observers, and it is something that goes beyond what we can do.
That to me suggests that if it is not ours, it belongs to someone else. If that technology is better than ours, then the extraterrestrial hypothesis seems to me the best explanation."
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994





"Certainly when I socialized with my RAF colleagues, I would find that they were a little bit more receptive to the idea of UFOs--and by that I mean perhaps even an extraterrestrial explanation for this -- than you might have supposed. One of the reasons for that was that so many RAF pilots had actually seen things themselves. Many of them have never made an official report. I had one chap tell me that he had seen something over the North Sea. I asked him why he hadn't reported it, and he said, 'I don't want to be known as Flying Saucer Fred for the rest of my career.'"
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994





"We were asking the Americans, 'Are you operating a prototype aircraft in our airspace?' That, of course, was nonsense. You simply would not do that from a diplomatic and political point of view. It would undermine the entire structure of NATO if you were putting things through someone else's airspace, particularly a close ally, without seeking the proper diplomatic clearance. But we had to ask. And the Americans, having had similar reports, I guess, since the Hudson Valley wave [New York state, mid-1980s], had been quietly asking us if we had some large, triangular shaped object that could go from 0 to Mach 5 in a second. Our response was that we wished we did. This was the bizarre situation: that we were chasing the Americans, and the Americans were chasing us."
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994





"The official line from the Ministry of Defense is, 'Yes, this happened. No, we don't know what it is, but we say that it is of no defense significance.' How can it possibly be of no defense significance when your best jet is left for standing by a UFO? And, again, how can it be of no defense significance when your air defense region is routinely penetrated by structured craft?"
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by karl 12
Here are a few statements of interest from Nick Pope who actualy ran the British Ministry of Defense UFO desk at Air Secretariat 2-A from 1991 to 1994:

"I concentrate on the science. I'm interested in the UFOs seen by the police and military witnesses. I'm interested in the near misses that pilots report, where their aircraft nearly collide with these things. I'm interested in the visual sightings backed up by radar. I'm interested in the military bases that are overflown by these things. I'm interested in the cases where you have radiation readings on the ground.
These are no lights in the sky. These are not mis-identifications of fantasy prone individuals. This is a cutting-edge technology being reported by reliable, trained observers, and it is something that goes beyond what we can do.
That to me suggests that if it is not ours, it belongs to someone else. If that technology is better than ours, then the extraterrestrial hypothesis seems to me the best explanation."
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994

What is nice about Nick Pope's characterization of these sightings is that he appears open to multiple explanations, when he says "ET is the best explanation", he is inferring there are other possible explanations he thinks less likely. Not everyone agrees with his assessment of the likelihood but open-minded people have to admit that until the UFOs are identified, we don't know what they are and yes they could be ET however likely or unlikely one feels that to be, or they could be something else however likely or unlikely one feels the alternative to be. Until we know what they are, we are speculating.

The question is, whether they would have any more information after another 50 years about ET than they have in the last 50 years? At the end of the day we have a lot of unexplained sightings where we still don't know the cause. If they didn't close the UFO department and ran it for another 50 years, would we just have another 50 years of unexplained sightings like the last 50 years but be no closer to the true explanations for those sightings? I'm not sure, but I can imagine the discussions that took place in this closure decision.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
What is nice about Nick Pope's characterization of these sightings is that he appears open to multiple explanations, when he says "ET is the best explanation", he is inferring there are other possible explanations he thinks less likely.

Arbitrageur,thanks for the reply - you make an interesting point.

Atmospherical physicist Dr James Mcdonald also engaged in 'deductive reasoning' about certain UFO incidents and made this intriguing comment during his lecture entitled "UFOs: A Case Study in Public Mis-information" at Kent State University in Ohio,1968:

Audio Link

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
The question is, whether they would have any more information after another 50 years about ET than they have in the last 50 years?

I think 'would they have' and 'would they release' are two very different questions.

In this short interview Timothy Good says there are a great many other British top secret documents which have not been released and the majority of the ones that have are
never classified higher then 'confidential'.

He also says that in 1978 alone, the British Ministry of Defense spent eleven million pounds on investigating the UFO problem.

www.livevideo.com...

Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Thanks, Karl. Yeah, I found this to be just absurd!

Why do you think the MOD is closing it's public UFO investigations group? To follow suit with U.S. policy? They always state that they have no opinion, and UFOs don't amount to anything. This is such a bogus policy. HOW CAN THE MEDIA LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS???

www.telegraph.co.uk...

You can voice your opinion by contacting the MOD:

www.mod.uk...

www.foxnews.com...

Britain Pulls Plug on UFO Hotline, Will Use Funds for Afghanistan

Nick Pope responds:

www.guardian.co.uk...

"This is a sad day for science."

Originally posted by ufo reality
HOW CAN THE MEDIA LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS???

I don't think the media cares very much.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by SquirrelNutz


SquirrelNutz,thanks for the reply - I agree.

If you just take the unexplained reports from Scotland (nevermind Britain) then I think its pretty obvious that closing the UFO reporting desk is an irresponsible move.

en.wikipedia.org...

There are also some incredbily bizarre Police UFO reports to come out of the United Kingdom which remain completely unexplained.

Cheers.



[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Originally posted by karl 12
Arbitrageur,thanks for the reply - you make an interesting point.

Atmospherical physicist Dr James Mcdonald also engaged in 'deductive reasoning' about certain UFO incidents and made this intriguing comment during his lecture entitled "UFOs: A Case Study in Public Mis-information" at Kent State University in Ohio,1968:

Audio Link

That is an interesting approach that reminds me of Spock's quote in Star Trek:

www.imdb.com...

"when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

So if we have a given sighting and say it's impossible to be a known manmade craft, impossible to be psychological, impossible to be geophysical, etc then what is left?

I think that's where the argument falls apart if used to support an ET conclusion. Most certainly ET piloted craft is one of the things left, but the question is, is it the ONLY thing? In some cases we don't even list all the other possible explanations because we may not even know what they are to consider them. Obviously I'm open to a possible ET interpretation, so this logic does support that possibility, however it really doesn't support that conclusion IMO.

Another possibility is ruling out some things we shouldn't rule out, and here's an example. Here's a case where we have an eyewitness with 20 years in the aviation industry, and I find him credible as in I don't think he's lying, I think he's being honest.

Listen to what he describes at 1m45s saying the UFOs "took off" !! This would clearly cause us to rule out the balloon theory.

Google Video Link

So now that we've ruled out balloons, and we know of no manmade craft that can hover silently, and be invisible to radar, then it must be ET right?

Should we trust reliable eyewitnesses with 20 years in the aviation industry to give us an accurate account of what they saw? I don't think ANYONE can be trusted to give an accurate account, even myself making my best effort to describe what I saw. We will all make mistakes as we all have known human flaws in our perception, though some flaws are bigger than others. Most people don't want to admit this but the credible eyewitness testimony such as seen at 1m45s in that video may be part of other cases still unsolved that cause us to conclude certain explanations as impossible, when in fact those explanations should NOT be ruled out based on witness testimony as this case clearly demonstrates. And I'm not calling this guy or anyone else a liar, I think most are telling the truth, but very few people (except a few scientists who have studied it) realize how flawed human perception really is even in the best of witnesses (and I'd say the guy in the video seems to be a pretty good witness with his aviation background, level of intelligence, etc.)

At about 6 minutes in the video there's an eyewitness who says "it's impossible" for the objects to be what they actually are! So I'm hesitant to rule out what's possible and impossible, especially based on witness testimony.

Nor do most people understand the flaws of radar, etc.

I didn't think the MOD had released all of their files yet, and it may be years before they do (if ever). But from what I've seen of old files released by the US military, they were as much in the dark about what these things are as anybody else. And it seems like many of the coverups are to try to hide that fact, as in the case of JAL1628 when the spooks told the FAA "this never happened" or something to that effect.

[edit on 5-12-2009 by Arbitrageur]

Another interesting quote made by Nick Pope:

“On the basis of my offical research and investigation into UFO sightings and reports of alien contact, I am personally convinced that intelligent extraterrestrial are visiting Earth. I say this on the basis of the data available to me at the Ministry of Defense, both in terms of the historic records and the several hundred new cases that I investigated each year.

…There was a hard core of cases that defied any conventional explanation and involved craft capable of speeds and maneuvers beyond the capabilities of our own technology. I was particularly interested in UFO sightings that could be correlated by radar and in reports where the witnesses were military personnel; such cases were directly responsible for my gradual conversion from skeptic to believer.”

Nick Pope - Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994