Documents / Document
This MoD file, titled UFOs - Persistent Correspondence - Dr David Clarke, holds Dr David Clarke's Freedom of Information requests and emails to the Directorate of Air Staff from 2005 to 2008. Clarke asked for the DI55 report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region and for Rendlesham papers. He also sought records about Nick Pope. Other items include an internal review that released redacted passages on plasmas, the MoD's statement that it had no report of the 2008 South Wales police helicopter sighting, and a 2009 disposal form.
“Works”36 pages
## Letter dated 1 September 2005 6. I wish to request that MOD conduct an internal review of the decision to delete a) previous security classifications and b) paragraph 3 from the DIST's letter of 4 December 2000. a) Before release this document was downgraded so the security classification was removed as it was no longer applicable, but I can see why Dr Clarke may be interested in what it originally was. Again whether there is any harm in releasing this may depend on (1) whether the Report is going to be released and (2) Do you see any problems with the fact that the letter (and maybe the Report ) was classified SECRET UK EYES ONLY. Interestingly I have found on my UFO policy file a draft PQ answer which was sent to us by DIS on 17 January 2001 it reads: ## POSSIBLE ANSWER TO PQ03511 The DIS has applied the classification of SECRET UK EYES ONLY to a recent report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The DIS has received copies of UAP sightings for about 30 years. These were filed without analysis. Recently, a low priority study was conducted to database the reports and carry out an analysis. The main conclusion was that the sightings provided nothing of value to DIS in the assessment of weapon systems and that sightings can be explained as misreporting of man-made vehicles, natural but not unusual phenomena and natural but relatively rare and not completely understood phenomena. A decision has been made not to carry out any further work on the subject. The overall classification of the report was dictated by the analysis material included on the UK Air Defence Ground Environment otherwise it is UK RESTRICTED. I have been unable to find this particular PQ on the Parliamentary website and there is no further reference to it on our files. I therefore do not know whether this was given as the final answer, but if so it seems the existence of the Report and it's classification is already in the public domain. b) Paragraph 3 was removed after a discussion between ourselves as it did not seem relevant to the request and contained potentially sensitive information about weapons systems. Could you have another look at this and if you still wish this to be withheld we may have to look for an appropriate FOI exemption. 7. I noticed that DAS or it's predecessor Sec(AS)2 were not included in the distribution of the DIST letter of 4 December 2000. Presumably, DAS will have been notified of the decision in a separate document? If that is the case, please may I have a copy of that document? I do not have any letters on my Policy file that show DIS wrote to us to inform us of this decision (we were DAS 4A(SEC) at the time). The only reference we have to it is a LM to DAO ADGE1 dated 12 January 2001 that states "Recently we have been informed by DI55 that they no longer wish to see
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 160 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.