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This Ministry of Defence file, released through The National Archives and published by The Black Vault, holds the MOD's 2002 handling of Dr David Clarke's requests for UFO documents under the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information. It includes the MOD's 9 December 2002 reply, which covered reports from 1976, 1980, 1993 and 1996 and charged £260. It also contains internal emails and file requisitions, plus Foreign Office and United Nations papers from 1978 on Grenada's proposal for UFO research.
“Police”60+ pages
. 1ppealfrom ~ v:1l use :' est, ~-hino- . -. -.·";1 o-h .~ ·--...."t-1· '\.;e~ -· ...... t:"-*-- \.Jl ,·;c·st L \ve ·Jserv;:.!· posts c and ;;;nalvse ·, the pubiic. : .::,ponsihilit v ::.:e. sift the c·rgaHi~ation -, like these, '!·)test about ::t vohmtccTs .k for a few o it for very ill!. 1 have Service, and ':ll I should ; n!cmb~r of .... ,1s one of ·'intcd when -· 1 recall 1 and the <'ful job for ··or!unity, I •r working re, if that ,; for the 'quircd. I summings o explana~ henomcna .1" the pnst the nob 1e c:se fty·ing •he phrase Jcccntuate add that ronomical 10 risk of !blic have ·y Lords, who has he noble g us an ~camper ·icws on roversial .uJd like )Unt O!J bviously rssemb!e ·---.. .-~·-"'····----·····~--.,...... ' 1289 Unidentified [ 18 JANUARY 1979 J Flying Objects 12S'<O set of considerations, which augurs well for his· future in your Lordships' House, wl1ere I know he is already welcome. At the risk of capping the ~tories of the noble Lord, Lord Gainford, I should like to tell your Lordships about some of the sightings I have seen. I will order them in terms of my curriculum ritae, beginning at the age of six, when I saw an angel. I do not know whether it was the noble Lord, Lord Davie3 of Leek, who mentioned aneels, or \\+ether it was the noble Lord: Lord Trefgarne, or the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley; but it is perfectly true that there was my guardian angel sitting on the edge of my bed. Naturally, with the imagination of a child, I clothed lhis presence in human form with a large pair of feathery wings. This presence procec-ded to rebuke me for initiating a practice which it said would _get me into trouble if I persisted in it. Having remembered the rebuke all my life and acted upon it, I am not prepared to deny the reality of the presence that was there with me. This should be a sufficient answer to the noble Earl-l see I have put him to flight-who thinks that if scientists come across something they cannot explain they are afflicted with a kind of vertigo. On the contrary, we welcome something we cannot explain because it is a new phenomenon which, as it were, stretches our capacities and brings out something in us. The next item came along in year two of World War I. I was about eight years old, and the next thing that I sighted were Zeppelins. I used to go out after dark into the garden of the house where we lived and come back reporting the number of Zeppelins I had seen. What I had seen, in my interpretation of it, a Zeppelin-it was a large illuminated cigar~shaped object. In fact what I was looking at was the lenticular shape that the perspective of a searchlight thrown · on to a cloud~base makes, and I was interpreting it as a Zeppelin and I was telling my parents how many Zeppelins I had seen. . f.l The 1nex1 t on~his s1 undohgs and this fits 1 very c ose y Wit w 1at t e noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, was saying about Macbeth's dagger and the laser holeo~ graphic reconstruction of things which really are not there. What sort of an interpretation would somebody who had H.L.8 Q never read about these or read about them put upon sundogs? Most people have not seen them or read a bout them. I wa:; fortunate enough to liave read about them and to have known the explanation before 1 saw the first. When you look at a cloud with drops of water, you are looking at a diffuse reflection of the ~un but if instead of there being drops of water in the cloud there are drops c·f ice, .and if they were form.:d unJer meteorological conditions where all the facets of the crystals ha ppcn to be pnrallcl as they f::;_ll through a rising stream so that they arc remaining roughly stationary, the effect is of a rather dilute mirror, if one can so describe it. Jf the sun is up there, you see it actually reflected in this imaginary mirror down through the cloud, and one does not exnect to 1 see the sun looking down in this direction. Still less does one expect to perceive it travelling along beside one. Furthermore, one is not accustomed to focusing one~s eyes on infinity in that particular direr:tion. The only times it would be appropriate to do so would be if you were standing on top of a skyscraper where the vanishing point would be down here instead of over there, and it makes you rather dizzy. Seeing a sky dog is a rather uncanny sort of phenomenon. You cannot focus on it properly; it does not seem to be an~where in particular. 1t is flying along beside you-and what sort of terms would a person, who had never seen it bl!fore or read r. bout it, report it in? I think that they \vould be rather bewildered. They might report it just as a child would report the vision of an angel as having human form and feathery ·,vings. So it might easily be reponed as anything that they had read about. I now come to the green flash. I was about 20 and a student, and there was a controversy in the p:ges of The Times and in the correspondence columns of Nature about the green flash. What is it? Under certain rather rare atmospheric conditions, the last glim of the setting sun suddenly flashes brilliant emerald green. When I was a student 50 years ago, this phenomenon· v:as not realiy established. It was possible to have a controversy as to whether there was such a phenomenon. People wrote to The Times saying that they had seen it. I remember one man who said that he -· ·~--. --·-.' ···--·~--. ·--.~·-·-·-c·····; ..... -.-~ ...~..·~-·--~.-.···~··:·~-·,.-.,...,.., .. _.,.~--·-~ ........ -.·..,~-<\1:···---:-··- ...-~-..,~-·· ,_, . -····~ -·----· , ...... _.. ... ' ......... ...
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