UK Ministry of Defence UFO Desk

Sighting flurries in 1950 prompted the Air Ministry to convene the Flying Saucer Working Party, which concluded no defence significance. Nonetheless a dedicated Secretariat (Air Staff) branch—colloquially the UFO desk—continued receiving reports, liaising with the Royal Air Force for radar corroboration and threat evaluation.¹

  Project Condign and Intelligence Assessment

From 1997 to 2000 Defence Intelligence Staff division DI55 ran Project Condign, a classified study of thirteen thousand reports. The 460-page assessment, declassified in 2006, judged most sightings the result of rare atmospheric plasma but conceded that a small fraction exhibited genuine novel phenomena warranting further scientific study.²

  Public Engagement and Closure

Staff produced annual digests, responded to Parliamentary Questions, and released case files under the Freedom of Information Act. Media interest peaked during the 2008–2013 phased publication of 52,000 pages at The National Archives. Budget pressures and conclusion that sightings posed no threat led to termination of the desk on 1 December 2009.¹³

  References

1. nationalarchives.gov.uk ↩ ↩²

2. UK Ministry of Defence, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region, 2006. ↩

3. House of Commons Defence Committee, The MoD's Closure of the UFO Desk, 2010. ↩