LONDON - Britain's front-line defense against alien invasion from outer space has fallen victim to spending cuts, according to documents released on Friday.
Papers published by the National Archives showed the country's defense ministry closed its specialist U.F.O.-monitoring unit because it could no longer justify a project that was consuming increasing resources.
It emerges that the ministry quietly shut down its U.F.O. unit in 2009 after concluding “no UFO sighting reported has ever revealed anything to suggest an extra-terrestrial presence or military threat to the U.K.â€
The decision meant the closure of a U.F.O. hot line and a dedicated e-mail address to which members of the public could report sightings of unidentified flying objects.
The ministry's assurances are unlikely to satisfy ufologists, some of whom insist the authorities continue to cover up the truth about close encounters with aliens.
According to the outgoing U.F.O. desk officer, “Frankly, whatever we say, they will choose to believe whatever they believe and we will never convince them otherwise.â€
The ministry's memos were part of the latest and final release of documents related to U.F.O. sightings.
Friday's batch of more than 4,000 pages included reported sightings of U.F.O.s hovering above the Houses of Parliament in 2008 and above Stonehenge in the following year.
A man in the northern town of Carlisle rang the hot line to report that he was living with an alien, and a man from Cardiff, Wales, complained a U.F.O. had snatched his dog, his car and his tent while he was camping with friends in 2007.
The ministry also received a request from the United States for information about the notorious Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980.
In what became known as Britain's Roswell, American servicemen stationed in eastern England followed mysterious lights that some took to be those of an alien spacecraft.
The ministry replied to the inquiry by saying it had little interest in the matter at the time and even less interest now.
The decision to shut the U.F.O. unit was taken after a tripling of reported sightings between 2007 and 2009 to more than 600.
The upsurge was blamed on a craze for Chinese lanterns, which had even fooled a squad of military fire-watchers and the national newspaper that printed their photographs under the headline “Alien Army.â€
There was an earlier surge in sightings in 1996, when the popularity of the television series “X-Files†was at its peak.
British officials have not always been so sanguine about strange and unexplained objec ts in the sky.
In World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so concerned about one reported close encounter that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent “mass panicâ€.
In the 1950s, the government took the potential U.F.O. peril so seriously that it established a Flying Saucer Working Party and commissioned weekly reports on sightings from intelligence experts.
The government began releasing its files in recent years in part to show it had nothing to hide.
David Clarke, a U.F.O. historian who campaigned for the documents to be made public, acknowledged it had put a strain on resources. “It became a huge public relations headache†for the defense ministry, he told the BBC.
Dr. Clarke, who has approached the U.F.O. phenomen on from a sociological perspective, noted that many U.F.O. sightings came from the Scottish city of Glasgow between 10 p.m. and midnight - around the time the pubs are closing.
If you want to delve into Britain's X-Files, here's the link.
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