by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
As most people who have an interest in the subject of flying saucers/UFOs are aware, the United States Air Force had an official investigation program looking into the phenomenon for over 20 years, starting in 1948, that continued until its termination in 1969. What many might not be aware of is that England also had an early official interest in the subject, and the Ministry of Defense put together an investigation team in 1950 called “The Flying Saucer Working Party.” It lasted less than a year and was disbanded after the group issued a report recommending against further investigation. Continued sighting reports and interest among influential people caused the MoD to reconsider, and in 1952, two divisions of the Air Ministry were tasked with investigating.
The story of the MoD’s first involvement with mysterious aerial phenomena is told in the study guide titled Unidentified Flying Objects on the National Archives (UK) website. Besides providing a jumping off point for researchers, the guide provides links (they were broken at the time of this writing) to many pertinent records. After defining what a UFO is, it begins with a history of official interest that starts in 1909. This was the year of the British airship, or “scareship” mystery that involved reports of Zeppelin-like craft similar to those reported in the U.S. during a wave there that occurred around 1896.
After that, the guide gets into the mystery lights reported by Allied and Axis pilots over wartime Britain in the 1940s that were known to the USAF as “foo fighters” and termed “night phenomena” in British Air Ministry records, as well as the “ghost rockets” reported over Scandinavia.
According to the guide, over three years after flying saucers were all over the news in the U.S., two major papers in the U.K., The Sunday Dispatch and The Sunday Express, started carrying articles covering the phenomenon. The Express serialized Gerald Heard’s 1950 book The Riddle of Flying Saucers, the first saucer book published in the U.K., and the Dispatch carried excerpts from Donald Keyhoe’s 1950 book The Flying Saucers are Real and Frank Scully’s 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, which were the first and second saucer books respectively published in the U.S.
It was this coverage that is said to have led some influential people, including Earl Mountbatten and the retired Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, to “press the Government for action.” The action that was taken was at the behest of Sir Henry Tizard, who was Chief Scientific Advisor at the MoD. In 1950, Tizard “requested that a small working party should be established in the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence/Joint Technical Intelligence Committee (DSI/JTIC) to investigate the phenomenon. This was dubbed the Flying Saucer Working Party.”
According to the guide, the FSWP was unknown to all but a very few, but an indication of its existence was discovered when a file containing correspondence between Winston Churchill and the Air Ministry “was opened at TNA ref: PREM 11/855.” A response, dated 9 August 1952, to Churchill’s inquiry regarding the “truth” about flying saucers contains the information that they “were the subject of a full Intelligence study in 1951.”
According to the guide, the FSWP’s “existence was revealed when minutes of the DSI/JTIC were released under reference DEFE 41/152.” It’s described this way: “The working party included five intelligence officers from the three services and was headed by one of the MOD’s scientific intelligence branches. All the members were specialists in the field of scientific and technical intelligence.”
The single remaining copy held in the Archives of the FSWP’s final report, designated DSI/JTIC Report No. 7, is the only report found that had been produced by the group. It was found after a request made by Dr. David Clarke “under the Code of Practice for Access to Government Information.” Another researcher, Georgina Bruni, is said to have acquired it at around the same time, and it was “made available at the National Archives on 1 January 2002 under reference DEFE 44/119.”
The document, stamped “DISCREET” in larger letters over “SECRET,” consists of 5 pages and a cover. The cover indicates that this is “Copy No. 17” put out by The Ministry of Defense Directorate of Scientific Intelligence and Joint Technical Intelligence Committee. It is titled, Unidentified Flying Objects.
The report starts off with sections numbered 1-3 under the heading “Introduction: Historical.” The “Historical” is covered in the first two sections with the first one describing the ghost rockets and the second covering the 1947 report by Kenneth Arnold in the U.S. (it is said he reported a “saucer-like disc” when he actually reported 9 crescent-shaped objects) and the publicity that followed. The third section states that no “objective evidence” had been submitted making it “extremely difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at anything like scientific proof of the nature of the phenomena.”
Following this are sections 4-9 reviewing the findings of the USAF investigation operating as Project Grudge, which include a description of the 1948 Thomas Mantell incident and the conclusion that he died chasing the planet Venus. It is said just after this that the team is said to have been “informed in conversation with a member of the United States investigating team, that the even more sensational report of the discovery of a crashed ‘flying saucer,’ full of the remains of very small beings, was ultimately admitted by its author to have been a complete fabrication.” This is almost certainly referring to Frank Scully and the story he told in his book.
The next section of the report is headed “Investigation of Incidents in the United Kingdom.” The publicity given to the subject by the British press in 1950 is brought up. Some reports from that year are described, and they are explained as “undoubtedly a meteorite” in one instance, “an optical illusion” in another, and misidentification as the likely cause of many reports.
Under “Conclusions and Recommendations” the authors bring up William of Occam’s principle that “the most probable hypothesis is the simplest necessary to explain the observations” and conclude that all the reports were the result of the following:
- Astronomical or meteorological phenomena of known types.
- Mistaken identification of conventional aircraft, balloons, birds, or other normal or natural objects.
- Optical illusions and psychological delusions.
- Deliberate hoaxes.
The report failed to ultimately stop the MoD from continuing to investigate UFO reports, but the USAF investigation known as Project Blue Book from 1952 until its termination in 1969 is far better known, probably due to the MoD’s policy, discussed in the study guide, of destroying UFO files every five years up until 1967 “because they were deemed to be of ‘transitory interest.’” Because of this, it is said in the guide that most of the relevant files held by the archives “tend to be dated from 1962 to 1979.”
There wouldn’t be another MoD study like that of the FSWP until Project Condign, which ran (again in secret) from 1996 until 2000. The report was released in May 2006.