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
## 10 August 2005 Dear Air Chief Marshal Sir Anthony Bagnall I have asked the Ministry of Defence to forward this letter to you as I understand that you recently retired as Vice Chief of the Defence Staff. I am working on a post-doctoral project at the University of Sheffield which is examining the evolution of Ministry of Defence policy towards the subject of unidentified flying objects. In particular, I am researching the relationship between media and public interest in UFOs and how this was reflected in MoD policy. I should point out am not concerned with the existence, or otherwise, of a "real" phenomenon (as opposed to misidentifications of known objects) and I am fully aware that MoD's interest was restricted to establishing if UFO reports had defence implications, i.e. as intruder aircraft. The specific question I wish to ask relates to the period in which you served as Assistant Chief of Air Staff at MoD, which according to your biography was late 1992-July 1994. This happens to coincide with a time when a number of accounts were published by the media, and questions asked by MPs, concerning stealthy triangular-shaped flying objects that were said to have been seen, both visually and on radar - and on one occasion photographed - near RAF Machrihanish in Scotland. On an earlier occasion a similar object, accompanied by a KC-135 and F-111s, was reportedly sighted from an oil rig in the North Sea by a trained ROC observer and reported widely in the media. Papers I have obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) show these stories were also circulating within the MoD secretariat responsible for UFOs and among the Air Staff late in 1992 and early 1993. They suggest that ACAS and his opposite number in the USA were also concerned by reports in Janes' Defence Weekly and The Scotsman newspaper which claimed the sightings might relate to the alleged US "black project" aircraft Aurora which some media reports claimed had been operating in UK airspace. On several occasions this matter was raised in the House of Commons and the answer given was that no permission had been given and no aircraft of this type had visited.
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.