Operation UFO: Britain Plans To Capture Flying Saucer

MIKE BRANAGAN

British spies planned to capture a flying saucer and use its alien technology to build super weapon, secret files reveal. Even after the Cold War, there were fears that the Soviet Union or China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secrets to develop superfast warplanes that could hover in mid-air and be invisible to radar.

Intelligence service chiefs urged the Government to be on the alert for sightings of strange foreign aircraft showing sinister signs of extraterrestrial tinkering.

The dossier, obtained by British XFiles expert Dr David Clarke, reveals the Government was running two UFO desks. The public UFO desk was only set up to gather reports of sightings. The real work was being done by experts from Defence Intelligence.

For half a century, spy bosses pored over the reports convinced they represented “as grave a threat to the Realm as the Soviet Union”.

But by 1997, the word had come down from Whitehall that the security services investigating “X-files stuff such as alien abductions” had become “a diversion from their main duties”.

A review was ordered to confirm the desk should be shut down, but also to determine whether anything had been learned over the years which could be useful to military. The dossier reveals the RAF were “particularly interested in any novel technologies which might be useful to their programmes”.

“Propulsion, stealth, and any novel electromagnetic technologies are of particular interest,” the confidential memos added.

But the report, by a senior air force commander, reached the conclusion that an enemy power may have already had a UFO in its grasp.

“Monitor all reports in case in the future the hitherto unknown/not understood underlying phenomena is being exploited by another nation,” he wrote.

“An actual – or potential enemy – could develop a flying device with the characteristics that these phenomena seem to have.”

Particular attention should be paid to any aircraft behaving like a UFO with the tell-tale signs of “high velocities, sharp manoeuvre, stationary ‘flight’, and few radar returns”, he added.

The report called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region is part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages.

They were held back from the UFO records earmarked for transfer to the National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013. But earlier this year, a complete set of redacted copies was sent to Dr Clarke ahead of their release to the National Archives, which is imminent.

Dr Clarke said: “MoD have been desperately trying to delay the release of these formerly secret and highly sensitive papers for more than a decade.

“Even though they have been partly censored they can’t conceal the fact the UK military were interested in capturing UFO technology – or what they coyly refer to as ‘novel weapon technology’.

“And the files reveal they were desperate to capture this technology – wherever it came from – before the Russians or the Chinese got hold of it first.

“Although this was 1997, Russia was still regarded as undefeated enemy with a weapons programme regarded as a threat to the West.”