Theorists unmoved by UFO denial

SHEFFIELD: Last month, the British Ministry of Defence made public a top secret report on UFOs, concluding that three decades of sightings had failed to produce evidence of visiting extraterrestrials.

Case closed for alien aficionados? Not so. Far from alleviating UFO buffs’ suspicions that governments are concealing what they know, the report has intensified them. “I just e-mailed the MoD explaining my disgust at their latest UFO report,” an Internet UFO forum member wrote, saying the Ministry was in denial.

Instead of alien spacecraft, man-made vehicles and natural phenomena, some of them little known, were behind the UFO sighting, according to the report.

David Clarke, a journalist and folklorist who used freedom of information laws to gain access to the report, said UFO believers would not accept any explanation for the phenomenon other than the extraterrestrial one.

Last year, the alien hypothesis gained a prominent supporter in Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian defense minister, who told a conference that UFOs were “as real as the airplanes that fly over your head.”

Nick Pope, a Defense Ministry official who worked on UFO cases from 1991 to 1994, said he did not rule out aliens as the explanation for UFOs, but added there was no conclusive proof.

If there are alien visitors, “the lack of artefacts is a significant mystery,” the report said.

To the folklorist Clarke, claims of the discovery of pieces from alien craft and marks on the ground bear a resemblance to tales from the past.

“It’s like these fairy stories when people visit fairyland. They’re given a gift by the fairies, and when they come back it just dissolves.”