Campaigner urges UK government to restart UFO investigations

The unanswered question is not whether Britain has seen unexplained objects in its skies, but who now has the duty to assess them. A campaigner has urged the government to restart UFO investigations after the Ministry of Defence ended its official handling of UFO and UAP reports in November 2009, leaving no dedicated team in place to examine new sightings or their possible airspace-safety implications.

The policy line from Whitehall has changed little since then. In a written answer to Parliament on 11 December 2024, defence minister Luke Pollard said the MOD’s position remained that, in more than 50 years, no sighting reported to the department had indicated a military threat to the UK. He also said the MOD had not classified any new UFO or UAP material since the investigations ended and that all MOD UFO files created up to 2009 had been released to The National Archives. The department has said there are no current plans to create a dedicated UFO or UAP investigation team.

The records preserved in Kew show both the scale of the old operation and the limits of what survived. The final tranche of UK UFO files covered late 2007 to November 2009 and comprised 25 files containing about 4,400 pages. A National Archives transcript says 2009 was the record year, with 643 separate sightings reported up to November, roughly triple the number logged in 2008. The archives also say official reporting, analysis and recording began in the early 1950s, while the MOD destroyed UFO files at five-year intervals until 1967, which means many early records were lost.

That history matters because the issue has never disappeared from public life. The National Archives says the surviving material includes policy papers, parliamentary business, public correspondence with the MOD and sighting reports, much of it preserved only because later public interest forced declassification. The archives also note that UFO is a military label for something seen but not recognised, not a claim about extraterrestrial origin.

The same questions continue to surface outside Westminster. South Yorkshire Police records included alien-related calls in Sheffield in 2019, along with a 2022 UFO report in Barnsley, and other sightings across the county. The Calvine case remains one of Britain’s most famous examples: the sighting was reportedly made in Perthshire on 4 August 1990, the image passed through the Daily Record to the MOD, and a surviving print was donated to Sheffield Hallam University in June 2022 by Craig Lindsay, the former RAF press officer who had kept it. BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association, still trains investigators and supports research teams. For campaigners, that persistence underlines the central governance problem: Britain has records, reports and public interest, but no official process for what comes next.