The Ministry of Defence has released new secret documents about incidents concerning UFO sightings. These documents reveal for the first time that staff at MoD accepts at least one incident of UFO sighting as genuine. Several incidents ranging from 1986 to 1992 have been put online by the government for perusal. The files may be found on the government’s homepage and are published as PDF documents.

The most startling of these incidents having been investigated by the Ministry of Defence happened above Lydd in Kent. It involved an Alitalia flight from Milan to Heathrow in descent for landing. The secret documents released reveal that an unknown flying object was seen by the pilot. Heathrow confirmed the object’s existence by radar.

The incident took place on April 21, 1991, and was investigated both by Civil Aviation Authority and by military experts. After ruling out the possibility of weather balloons and missiles the case was closed. The object was declared an unidentified flying object, UFO, by the MoD. The same day, there were reports of two more sightings over Essex.

This case and many more can be found on the government’s homepage as such sightings are regularly investigated by the MoD. If you are a believer into alien aircraft, or if you treat it as a joke, it is fun anyway to read a bit in the official files. But it has to be said quite clearly at this point: The Ministry of Defence and the UFO believers do not use the same language, only the same words.

When military staff starts talking about UFOs they are not referring to alien aircraft; that is the most common mistake to be found in the theories of the believers. When military reports mention an UFO it’s exactly just that, a flying object they were unable to identify. And therefore it could have been anything from a low flying dustbin to the flagship of Zorg the Invader.

The fact that Intelligence Services around the world are not telling the truth on principle makes it impossible for the reader to assess the value of the information contained in these files. The sighting at Lydd could have been anything; a British experiment gone wrong which obviously would be kept secret for fear of being ridiculed. It could have been one of many planes operated by the United States which officially don’t exist because of their illegal trafficking. A fact which Washington would certainly deny. It could have been a Russian missile on a spree. Moscow in turn would deny this because it would constitute an unfriendly act.

A worldwide industry is involved in professional lying. This throws wide open a field to conjecture of the most lurid kind. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these conjectures are all wrong, but there are limits to credulity. Most of the time such constructs are a harmless enough pastime of some aficionados which don’t do any harm to anybody. But I detest it when they start to frighten people for nothing. On the other hand, if such theories are denied often enough and possibly by government people, it’s time to take a closer look. Apparently, there is something in such a story to frightening the high and mighty. Enough, to issue and publish heavily worded denials. Where there is smoke, there is fire.

For these denials there is sort of a reverted mechanism in place. You can assess the truth of the denied fact primarily by two things. One, how near to the eight o’clock news was it broadcasted. Two, how near to the Tower of Power is the government flunky who read it out. The peak is reached and a story most certainly true, if the President denies it in the news.

If you get bored at work, reading the government’s official pages for once is good fun.