For thousands of years, humans worldwide have claimed to have encountered or seen creatures or objects from out of this world.
Extraterrestrials and UFOs are hot topics and have seen almost all cultures experts them in art, literature, music, and media.
The US government this year piqued the interest of UFO enthusiasts worldwide when it declassified many files purporting to contain information about alleged sightings over the years.
It was among the most significant such file drops in history, and shed light on what has been a murky world filled with conspiracy and intrigue.
While the US has often been the focus of UFOs, Britain has had its fair share of sightings, which led a previous Government to set up a group to monitor such sightings in secret.
In the last two decades, the Government has released several documents known as the ‘X-files’ into the public domain.
Each has revealed just how worried the Government once was over the existence of UFOs and what their potential presence would mean for the public.
In one batch, released in 2011, it was disclosed that the House of Lords held the only entire debate on UFOs in the history of the British Parliament and how the country thought it was facing an alien invasion in 1967.
In 1950, some of the 8,500 pages revealed, the Government began making official inquiries into UFOs after receiving reports of sightings from the public.
The Ministry of Defence set up a secret work group called ‘The Flying Saucer Working Party’, tasked with monitoring the sightings and reporting back to the Government.
The group’s existence would remain under wraps until 1988 when correspondence between Winston Churchill and the Air Ministry was published — but even then few people knew about it.
Back then, writing to his air defence chief, Churchill asked: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.”
He was later handed a six-page report which presented no evidence to suggest anything mysterious was occurring in Britain’s skies.
It concluded the reports of sightings were mere hoaxes, psychological delusions, and mistaken sightings of ordinary objects.
Yet, the X-files show that the Government would go on to work with the CIA and US Air Force, receiving information to help “debunk the subject and restrict the release of information to the public about UFO sightings made by the armed services.”
And while the Government’s report had turned its nose up to UFO sightings, it didn’t stop it from sending out defences and police forces on September 4, 1967, when a number of calls reported six small “flying saucers” across Southern England.
Those small objects transpired to be a false alarm, but it was clear that the UK was also being swept up by the UFO mania.
In the following years the Government would log thousands of UFO sightings, but up until 1967 standard policy “was to destroy UFO files at five-yearly intervals, as they were deemed to be of ‘transitory interest”, according to the documents.
As such, a large number of documents from before then have been lost.
Between 1959 and 2007, Britain’s Defence Intelligence branch logged “more than 11,000 UFO reports.
Nothing has ultimately come of the numerous reports, but more declassified files could await prying eyes in the future.
