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from http://www.bbc.co.uk"Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show" "THE GOVERNMENT TOOK THE THREAT OF UFOS SO SERIOUSLY IN THE 1950S THAT UK INTELLIGENCE CHIEFS MET TO DISCUSS THE ISSUE, NEWLY-RELEASED FILES SHOW.Ministers even went on to commission weekly reports on UFO sightings from a committee of intelligence experts.The papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent "mass panic".The files show reports of UFOs peaked in 1996 - when The X Files was popular.The Joint Intelligence Committee is better known for providing briefings to the government on matters relating to security, defence and foreign affairs.But the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week.The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent "mass panic".X FILESNick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed."But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid."The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views." Reports of sightings of UFOs peaked in 1996 in the UK - when science fiction drama The X Files was popular.According to the files, there were more than 600 reports in 1996, compared with an average of 240 in the previous five years.The figures for 1996 show 609 reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, 343 letters from the public to the MoD's UFO desk and 22 enquiries and questions from MPs. But by 2009, the MoD's UFO inquiry desk -Sec(AS)2 - had been closed down.The 18 files released on Thursday are the latest to come out as part of a three-year project between the MoD and the National Archives.Dr David Clarke, a UFO consultant to the National Archives, explained why the papers are being made public now.Dr Clarke told the BBC: "Since the Freedom of Information Act arrived in 2005, this subject - UFOs - have become the third-most popular subject for people to write to the Ministry of Defence saying 'please could you release this file, or papers that you hold on this particular case'."What they've decided to do is to be totally open and to say, 'look we're not holding any secrets back about this subject we've got all these files and we're going to make them available to the public'."One includes details on "aerial phenomena" prepared for a meeting of the Cabinet Office's Joint Intelligence Committee in April 1957.According to a note included in the Red Book, the weekly intelligence survey, four incidents involving UFOs tracked by RAF radars were "unexplained".SPACEMANThe documents also include reports of a famous incident dubbed the "Welsh Roswell" in 1974, where members of the public reported seeing lights in the sky and feeling a tremor in the ground. Other cases included in the files are: A near-miss with an "unidentified object" reported by the captain and first officer of a 737 plane approaching Manchester Airport in 1995. A mountain rescue team called to investigate a "crashed UFO" in the Berwyn Mountains in Wales in 1974. Attempted break-ins at RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire - sometimes referred to as Britain's "Area 51" - the US's secretive desert military base.The Western Isles incident, when a loud explosion was reported in the sky over the Atlantic in the Outer Hebrides.The 14-minutes of "missing" film relating to the Blue Streak missile test launch in 1964, believed by some to show a "spaceman".A gambler from Leeds who held a 100-1 bet on alien life being discovered before the end of the 20th Century, and who approached the government for evidence to support his claim after the bookmakers refused to pay out. The MoD said it was open-minded about extra-terrestrial life but had no evidence of its existence. The files come from more than 5,000 pages of UFO reports and letters and drawings from members of the public, as well as questions raised by MPs in Parliament. They are available to download for free for a month from The National Archives website"from http://www.independent.co.uk"Did Churchill and Eisenhower cover up UFO encounter?" written by By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter"With a civilian population haunted by the Blitz and the Second World War still in the balance, it was one development Winston Churchill could have done without - an incursion into British airspace by an arrow-shaped metallic object feared to contain an invasion force of little green men.Such was the sensitivity of an alleged UFO sighting by an RAF bomber crew returning to England from a mission over Germany that Churchill ordered it to be covered up with the words: "This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church." This at least was the allegation put to the Ministry of Defence by relatives of a senior British military aide who claimed to have witnessed the cigar-chomping Prime Minister discuss the incident with General Dwight Eisenhower as part of a meeting about a succession of "foo fighter" sightings by Allied air crews in the Second World War. The curious matter of visits by wartime aliens is one of hundreds of reports of strange celestial phenomena - from a space station covered in pulsating lights to an unusually agile rocket which buzzed a Boeing 737 at Manchester Airport - to be revealed in documents released today by the National Archives in Kew, west London. The files are the latest tranche of 11,000 UFO sightings logged by the British Government between the early 1900s and 2000 to be released from Ministry of Defence files, providing a candid insight into a national obsession with suspected flying saucers and attempts by Whitehall functionaries to explain that they were - almost always - nothing of the sort. Officials launched a investigation into the MoD files when the unnamed grandson of the British military aide to Churchill wrote in 1999 saying that the object seen by the RAF reconnaissance crew "appeared to hover noiselessly relative to the aircraft". The grandson, who described himself as a scientist, said: "It appeared metallic... the object very suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace of its earlier presence." He added: "This event was discussed by Mr Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations... another person raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr Churchill declared the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future prime minister."A trawl of documents revealed no existing record of the encounter. But it was one of many sightings of fireballs and moving lights by Allied aircraft during the Second World War. American pilots called them "foo fighters" after a comic strip character who often said, "where there's foo there's fire". Any decision by Churchill to halt publicity about the sightings has also gone unrecorded but in July 1952, after a spate of reports in Britain and the US, he wrote to the Air Ministry saying: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?" Unknown to Churchill, intelligence chiefs had formed The Flying Saucer Working Party in 1950 to investigate the reports, with the blessing of Lord Mountbatten, who thought the UFOs were alien craft. The MOD has long stated it "knows of no evidence that substantiates the existence of these alleged phenomena"
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