According to The Daily Record, some of the weirdest records relate to the "Stargate" programme, a secret US Army unit established in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defence Intelligence Agency and contractor SRI International to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications, which inspired the 2009 movie The Men Who Stare at Goats - starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.
Also included is a 1964 report by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena that included retired armed services chiefs. The 186-page document lists UFO sightings across the globe, including a mysterious case in Wigtownshire on 4 April 1957, in which three radar posts tracked a UFO that "dove and circled" between 14,000-60,000 feet.
"Quite definitely this was no freak. It was an object of some substance and no mistake could have been made", Wing Commander W P Whitworth, based in Scotland, says in the document.
The file goes to recommend increasing attempts to communicate with aliens, and drafting special laws to govern how humans interact with ET.
"On the basis of the evidence in this report, NICAP has concluded UFOs are real and they appear to be intelligently controlled. We believe it’s a reasonable hypothesis UFOs (beyond those explainable as conventional objects or phenomena) are manifestations of extraterrestrial life", it concludes.
In the 1980s, the CIA also took an interest in the work of leading Edinburgh University parapsychologist Deborah Delanoy, who exposed a "bright and very affable" 17-year-old metal-bender as a fraud in 1983-84. He claimed to have started bending metal, mostly cutlery, at the age of four and been doing so ever since, but after seven-and-a-half months of lab tests, researchers began to suspect they were a fraud, and used a hidden camera to expose him.
"[He] confessed to deceptive behaviour. He said he was a practicing magician who had wished to see if it were possible for a magician to pose successfully as a psychic in a laboratory. We must never let ourselves forget our subjects may be deceiving us", Delanoy concluded.
Other files are far more sinister and serious in content. For instance, a 1983 terrorism review relating to a spate of letter bombs in the UK, with the Scottish National Liberation Army being one of the groups among those responsible. It chronicles eight letter bombs attributed to the SNLA over the course of almost a year, starting in March 1982, in which government offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow were targeted. In May, letter bombs were sent to the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh, followed by an unnamed political party headquarters in the city on the 19th of June. On November 22nd that year, the British Industry Secretary was targeted in London, followed by Glasgow’s City Hall on 17 February 1983. There have been claims the SNLA were a state-run false flag organisation, created to discredit the Scottish independence movement - whatever the truth of the matter, many UK government documents relating to Scottish independence from the period have been sealed for 50 years.
A quarterly report on "significant international terrorist incidents" from 5 September 1981 also documents an attack on the US Consulate in Edinburgh. The authors erroneously refer to the consulate as being in England, before giving an account of the incident - three "gasoline" bombs were hurled at the ground floor windows of the consulate on Regent Terrace.
"A security-glass window cracked but kept the bombs out of the building. Damage was minor and no injuries were reported. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack", the report states.