We're done here, now go away

David Clarke, the tireless Sheffield Hallam University professor whose decade-long quest in getting his country’s National Archives to release UFO files compiled by the British Ministry of Defence, reached the end of the road on June 23 with a final data-dump into the public domain. And he signed off on that last batch with I-told-you-so relish. There were no smoking guns amid the 52,000 pages released since the incremental undertaking began in 2009, and even veteran British researcher Jenny Randles lauded Clarke’s persistence.

“I may not agree with everything that he says on the subject — but I do with much of it and respect all of his views about the remainder,” she wrote in an addendum to Clarke’s parting shots. “I certainly know that he is nobody’s puppet. And I, for one, say thank you for his efforts.”