Flying Saucer Review June 1983 [antikvár]

"starred question" in the House of Lords: "How many reports of UFOs have been received by the Ministry of Defence during the last four years, 1978-1981, and what action has been taken about them?" The Daily Mail's report on the debate {D.M., March 5, 1982) revealed that Admiral The Lord Hill-Norton, a former Chief of Britain's Defence Staff, had then proceeded to draw the attention of Their Lordships to the extraordinary fact that the whole of the Ministry's records of UFO sightings for all the years prior to 1962 had been destroyed "because someone had decided that they were 'of no interest'!"The Minister, Lord Long, pointed out in reply that all UFO reports received since 1967 were being preserved at present (But isn't it curious that he seems to have said not a word about any UFO reports presumably received by the Ministry in the five years from 1962 to 1967!)Prior to 1967, said Lord Long, the "five-year destruction rule" had been generally applied. And, in reply to Lord Clancarty, he said that the Ministry had received 2,250 UFO reports for the years since 1967. (According to The Times of March 5, 1982, these broke down as follows: 750 UFO reports in 1978; 550 in 1979; 350 in 1980; 600 in 1981).Well now, all of this is extremely interesting intensely interesting. For it so happens that, away back in April 1956, Mr. David Wightman, then Editor of the now-defunct UFO research magazine Uranus, in the company of Mr. John Pitt , a professional journalist who had previously served in British Military Intelligence, were granted a two-hour interview with a senior official of the British Air Ministry for the purpose of discussing the matter of UFOs. In the very near future we shall reprint the full text of Mr. David Wightman's account of that interview, as published by him in Uranus Vol. 2, No. 6, and Vol. 3, No. 3, and we shall also reprint the full text of Mr. John Pitt's report of the interview which he wrote for FSR and which appeared on pages 10-13 of FSR, Vol. 2, No. 5 (September-October 1956). One thing we can guarantee for you: all this is going to be very, very stimulating reading. (In the Tropics the papers in the archives rapidly get devoured by white ants. There must be a lot of folk who regret that we have no domestic termites established here in Britain for the purpose of eating FSR's archives). The most important thing that Messrs Wightman and Pitt discovered in their interview at the Air Ministry was that the latter already had, in early 1956, 10,000 UFO reports on file for the period 1947-1956. This is already almost as many as the U.S. Air Force were to claim to have on file (13,134) twelve years later (1968) at the time of the Condon Report! And we are now being asked to believe that those 10,000 UFO reports 'contained nothing of interest', and had all been destroyed by 1962!Let us say it plainly, here and now. We don't believe aword of it. And only imbeciles would believe it. Under the so-called "Thirty Years Rule" it is standard practice in Britain for normal official papers of permanent value to be released for publication after the lapse of thirty years, ephemeral stuff having of course already been weeded-out in the various departments automatically, on a year-to-year basis. We will wager that this "Thirty Years Rule" may have been causing quite a bit of cogitation and rubescence around the nape in some quarters as the end of the first thirty years after Kenneth Arnold's sighting drew near namely the year 1977.Therefore, long, long before there was any possible danger of anything 'untoward' happening in 1977 because of that "Thirty Years Rule", we will wager that all 'sensitive' material about UFOs or anything whatsoever connected therewith will have been removed from the Ministries or Departments concerned and lodged safely in the vaults of certain other gentry, certain other governmental agencies, be they military or civilian agencies that are not much talked about and don't like being talked about, who are custodians of the Realm and who guard the Nation's deepest secrets, whose files are nearly (but not quite!) as safe as those of the far more "professional" and far more ruthless and more efficient KGB. Some of these agencies the famed British Secret Service for example go back in essence to as far as the days of Queen Elizabeth the First and her celebrated Ministers, Robert Cecil and Francis Walsingham. These gentry, be it well understood, are answerable to nobody but to the Prime Minister of the day and to the Cabinet Office. They are lucky enough to be totally unaffected by blather about 'democracy" or 'the right to know", or by the fatuous idea (seemingly of American origin) that simply everybody has the sacred and automatic right ofThe eyewitness, Signer Filiputti.