The summer of 2023 may mark the highpoint of a renewed resurgence of interest in UFOs both in the corridors of the Pentagon and for the world’s media. But all the online debate around whistleblowers and imminent disclosure obscures the fact that UAP are a global phenomenon.

So far the response of the UK government to US intelligence interest and NASA’s separate, ongoing study, has been muted. The official line is that MoD closed its UFO desk in 2009 after some 50 years acting as the focal point for sightings reported by members of the public. This followed the transfer of its surviving files to The National Archives, a process for which I acted as consultant. If you believe MoD’s boilerplate responses to recent FOI requests, the UK government has no further interest in the phenomenon.

But as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan may have once said ‘events, dear boy, events’ have a habit of changing game plans. In July 2021, after the US Director of National Intelligence released its second ‘preliminary assessment’ of UAP, Lord Aamer Sarfraz put the UK MoD on the spot during a mini-debate in the House of Lords. The Conservative peer, who sits on the National Committee of the Joint Security Strategy, wanted to know if as a result of the change in US policy the MoD planned to reopen its UAP investigations and what data it held.

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