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Britain Opens X-Files
Last year it was France's turn to reveal its secret documents detailing encounters with UFOs; now Britain's Ministry of Defence has opened the first set of 200 secret files detailing sightings of strange lights in the sky by policemen, the military and members of the public.
The files document cases from the 1970s to the late 1980s, with a peak in sightings coming in 1978, the year the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in the UK.
One document reports on a UFO spotted over London's Waterloo Bridge; another tells of a man's regular meetings with aliens. The Sun has a good round-up of the stories contained in the files.
The MoD says that the files are being released because of demands from the public, and also in the interests of transparent government; many of the documents, the BBC reports, are papers from civil servants to government officials including the office of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
While there is no sure evidence of the reality of either flying saucers or alien visits, the papers reveal that government did take claims seriously: Thousands of ordinary people called the police about sightings of objects in the sky or even landing on British soil. US authorities had decided by the 1980s that UFO sightings could be explained by natural phenomena or earthly aircraft, but the British continued to research the public's claims.
However, the government's conclusion won't cheer believers: "there is nothing to indicate that UFOlogy is anything but claptrap" wrote government chief whip Lord Strabolgi in 1979, preparing a debate on the issue. He would say that, counter believers, who claim a conspiracy to cover up evidence of alien life. His last word? "The idea of an "inter-governmental conspiracy of silence" was "the most astonishing and the most flattering claim of all"."
The files can be downloaded from the National Archives website.
The files are released as the Vatican's chief astronomer Father Jose Gabriel Funes has declared that a belief in extraterrestrial life is not at variance with Christianity, and that aliens would also be "part of God's creation."
Father Funes told the Vatican's newspaper that Christians could "admit the existence of other worlds and other forms of life, even those more evolved than ours, without necessarily questioning faith in the Creation, the incarnation and the redemption of mankind".
He added, "astronomy does not favour the view of a Godless world. In fact, I think it is those who work at the Specola who bear witness to the fact that it is possible to believe in God and work with science in a serious way... (there could be) other beings created by God, including intelligent ones. We cannot place limits on God's creative freedom."
