The UK Defence Ministry may relaunch a division unit which was tasked with investigating UFO phenomena, the Daily Telegraph reported, citing an anonymous source. According to the newspaper, the ministry will make the decision after learning about the findings of a much-anticipated Pentagon report, in which US officials shared details about the data they collected on mysterious flying objects.
"I think that if there was enough evidence to suggest that there was something, and that we needed to do it as well as the US, then of course we'd think about it. We'd look at it. There's all sorts of things that we wouldn't rule out, and this would certainly be one of them," the source told the newspaper.
Findings of the Department
According to Nick Pope, a former employee of the UK Defence Ministry who headed the department between 1991 and 1994, the unit examined 12,000 sightings of UFOs. He said about five percent of the cases could not be explained.
One of the incidents involved a UFO hovering over Woodbridge and Bentwaters air bases in England. The team concluded that levels of radiation at the site where UFO had been seen, were "significantly higher than the average background".
Pope criticised the ministry’s decision to close the unit in 2009, telling the Sun that the move left Britain “wide open to terrorist attacks”.
"I call on the MoD to reopen the real-life X-Files and treat the issue in the way that it should be treated - as a serious defence and national security issue," he said.
The United States created its own taskforce to detect and analyse UFOs last year. The move came after the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of three videos showing US pilots chasing what the DoD described as “unexplained aerial phenomena”.
The Pentagon’s Dossier
In December 2020, former President Donald Trump signed a coronavirus relief bill, which among other things, had a strange provision requiring the Pentagon to brief Congress on all the information it possesses about unidentified flying objects within 180 days.
Reports say the much-anticipated report, which will be published in June, will contain information on US forces' encounters with UFOs as well as sighting reported by civilians.
Many officials, however, argue that the 180-day limit is not enough to provide a comprehensive report on the issue, which has been the subject of heated debates for years.
Recent statements made by former president Barack Obama have added fuel to the fire. The Democrat revealed that US government recordings of mysterious objects that officials have struggled to explain. "We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern," Obama said.
