Fleet Street is enjoying watching the Ministry of Defence squirm, again, as federal censors attempt, again, to get the UFO monkey off its back. The controversy was officially put to bed in 2013, when the UK’s National Archives dumped the last of the MoD's reports into the public domain. That was it. End of story. No mas. But last week, in a shout-out to “World UFO Day,” The Daily Express crowed “Exclusive: MOD to release UK’s top secret UFO ‘X-Files’ that ‘could prove aliens exist.’”
That’s wishful thinking. But the MoD really should be ashamed of itself for putting Archive historians in such a sticky wicket last year. That's when, in response to a FOIA request concerning retired U.S. airman John Burroughs -- who claims to have suffered permanent injuries from an alleged 1980 UFO encounter at an air base on British soil -- the military admitted it was still sitting on, ahem, 18 relevant documents. That shouldn’t have been terribly surprising, since few if any of the previously published pages from half a century of eyewitness sightings had ever been classified to begin with. In reply to Burroughs' followup, the Defence Secretariat conceded in February 2014 that the files in question were being considered for release “in the near future.”
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