You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. He teaches media law and his research specialism is contemporary legend. Previously he worked as a journalist for The Sheffield Star and Yorkshire Post and spent four years working as a Press Officer in local government.
This blog covers his twin research interests in journalism and folklore. The views expressed in the contents are entirely his own. So you have to see belief in UFOs in the context of that period; Rapid technological advances, the space race, the influence of science fiction, movies and TV programmes, government secrecy which was endemic throughout the Cold War and the continual spectre of nuclear war.
These all fuelled anxiety and paranoia on a mass scale which fed into this growing myth of visitations. You can actually trace it all to one specific event. Kenneth Arnold, private pilot; he was flying looking for a crashed supply plane in Washington State over Mount Rainier on the afternoon of the 24th June , and we can trace the modern UFO phenomenon specifically to that date and that time. He was flying along and he noticed a formation of what he described as nine mysterious objects in the distance and they were flying in echelon formation.
He described it when he landed in one of the airfields in Washington State, he was asked by a reporter what did you see. He said well I saw these bat wing shaped objects, and they said well how they did they move, and he said they moved like a saucer would if you skipped it across a pond.
So you could see the way journalists looked at this and thought we need to come up with a phrase that people will recognise. Arnold later calculated the speed of the mysterious aircraft that he had seen as being around mph. That was actually double the speed of the most advanced fighter aircraft that was in existence at the time. But he right to his dying day never used the phrase flying saucer he described the nine objects as crescent shaped or bat wing shaped.
Flying saucers were invented by newspapers. But within 48 hours of his report arriving, the headlines created an international sensation. People began reporting seeing mysterious disk and saucer shaped objects not only across North America but the entire world.
At the time many commentators wrote off flying saucers as being a silly season fad, came along at the time when newspapers are looking for that kind of quirky story. It was compared to the Loch Ness Monster in the British press.
People thought that by September people will have forgotten about it. But few people back then realised we would still be talking about this subject 70 years later. One measure of its massive cultural impact was that in August , just two months later, the Gallup Organisation ran a poll of US citizens and it found that nine out of ten people had heard about flying saucers. Think about that, within two months of this sighting nine out of ten Americans had heard of flying saucers. Gallup has said that that is one of the largest recognition ratings in the history of the Gallup Organisation.
Just shows you what impact this story had. Ken Arnold himself initially believed that he had witnessed a test flight, a top secret prototype aircraft flown by the US Navy or Army Air Force. General Twinning says that an intelligence assessment of the reports that were made during that summer had concluded that the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary, which was quite something at the time.
So that marks the beginning of the modern era of government UFO investigations. So much has been written about the American Project Bluebook, since its records were deposited at the US National Archives but far less has been said about its British equivalent, the Ministry of Defence files which are now largely here. I should explain that the first files on this subject were opened here when this place was called the Public Records Office under the Thirty Year Rule in In the 20 years between and , a further files were opened, usually on the January 1st.
You could order them up and consult them in the reading room. At that time there were already existed about files on the subject at Kew. When we got to , the Ministry of Defence decided because there was so much interest in this subject, to release all of the remaining archive in what was a special open government project in response to the public interest in the subject.
Some of money was found to scan and redact personal information from the remaining documents and these were uploaded to a dedicated UFO landing page on the archives website which is still there, you can still find it. They were released in ten tronches which began in May and ended in July Now my role was as a consultant or curator of the files, to read and prepare summaries and highlight each of these ten tronches of files, and to act as the media expert or go-to person when each of the files were released to the public.
In terms of public impact and engagement this project was a massive success. The first release in alone broke records. It received more unique visits than the release of the Doomsday Book online which is an incredible impact. All the wonderful things that you can do now, you can find out how many people have visited, when they visited, where they are. And South Korea as well, the people are interested in what people have been seeing.
One document alone, that particular one which is a UFO policy document has been downloaded a quarter of a million times. So what took me by surprise, this massive public and media interest, the Ministry of Defence and The National Archives seemed to be quite surprised that there was so much interest in this subject. Interest in UFOs is a mainstream topic, it should be treated as such and not as trivia not something to be disregarded as unimportant.
In they were playing with a new toy called the Internet to experiment and they actually uploaded some of their UFO files onto the MOD website for people to download. As you can see they were unprepared for the results, this is just one sample period between 29th November and 18 December As you can see they logged 15, downloads of UFO documents from their website.
The top three files as you can see were all UFO related. They were even more popular, can you believe it, than MOD press releases. In , the first year of implementation of the Freedom of Information Act, they received requests, individual requests, for UFO related documents, again in the top three.
So what is it in these documents that people find so fascinating? Well here are just some examples, these are crayon drawings made by children from a primary school in Cheshire in They ran to tell their teacher that a flying saucer had landed in their playground at lunchtime. Imagine that. The police arrived and they were convinced that the children had seen something unusual. So much so that the police officer ran Manchester Airport, Air Traffic Control, ruled out any chance of it being an aircraft.
The young woman who produced this amazing pencil drawing of an object that looks like it might be one of the advanced thunderbird aircraft.
This was seen over Hampstead en route to Tracy Island in Note these are just a few of the images. When I look at these crude but often effective drawings of UFOs and flying saucers sent to the Ministry of Defence by ordinary people I see objects of great cultural, historical and imaginative value whatever they represent.
But from , freedom of information imposed a responsibility upon Ministry of Defence archive managers to firstly put in place a rigorous and efficient record management system that was part of the requirements under FOI and for the first time in law they had to respond to requests for access to closed files and records from people like myself.
So UFO records were no longer regarded as unimportant in terms of public records they were now invested with public interest. I like to believe I played a small but significant role, be it my freedom of information request and research in shifting the perception of these records as trivia, which is how they were regarded before that, to something of long lasting cultural value.
One of the unfortunate consequences upon the government has been public trust. Shelves if you look at them have been filled with public letters and questions from ordinary members of the public, the press, members of parliament, lords all doubting the basic truth of the Ministry of Defence straightforward policy statements on the subject.
And many of these doubts are based upon responses from the Ministry of Defence who say they cannot comment because all the files from the earlier period have been destroyed. Now just to gain an understanding of the records we need to get our head around the complex administrative structure of the MOD that produced them.
There is this popular idea of a UFO desk that once existed that conjures up images of lavishly funded secret organisations, like in the Men in Black films that you may have seen. But from my research it was more accurate to describe the system as more like something you would see in Yes Minister. This diagram attempts to show that there was never just one branch that had an interest in the subject or sole responsibility for it. So you can imagine all these people all beavering away on the subject, all creating their own series of files, all sharing documents.
You can see and appreciate how easy it is for stuff to get lost and destroyed and discarded. The UFO Desk acted as a filing cabinet and a post-box for standard line that was sent out to anyone that contacted the ministry to report an UFO experience.
But they were never responsible for investigations of UFO incidents that were deemed to be possibly of Defence significance. The people who did the investigations were Air Technical Intelligence and the air defence, the RAF, HQ, Number 11 Group and Air Defence Ground Environment who had access to radars so if someone saw something they could immediately check whether it was visible on their radar picture.
The files revealed that these two had the resources when they needed to carry out detailed enquiries and if necessary impound radar film or even scramble aircraft. How did they gather sightings? This was photocopied so it turns up lots of other examples of the files.
So when a member of the public called to report a sighting someone would grab a blank copy of that, take down the basic details and send it to the UFO Desk. By they were so inundated because their workload doubled even trebled because The X-Files were on TV that they actually set up an answerphone in Whitehall. If you read through them some of them are quite amusing. For example, two objects that looked like stars or a dot in the sky that did not look like an aeroplane. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.
Learn how your comment data is processed. He teaches media law and his research specialism is contemporary legend. Previously he worked as a journalist for The Sheffield Star and Yorkshire Post and spent four years working as a Press Officer in local government. This blog covers his twin research interests in journalism and folklore.
The views expressed in the contents are entirely his own. Email Address:. Skip to content. The Calvine UFO.
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