The UFO Files by David Clarke

Author:David Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-08-19T21:00:00+00:00

One of a number of crayon drawings showing a UFO sighted by children from the playground of Upton Primary Junior School at Macclesfield in Cheshire in 1977. Their teacher sent the drawings to the MoD. DEFE 24/1206

Nevertheless, the sighting by the Broad Haven schoolchildren that triggered the Welsh UFO flap has never been adequately explained and the witnesses, now adults, continued to stick by their stories when interviewed for a TV documentary in 2008. The MoD’s files reveal they were not the only schoolchildren to see UFOs during that year. At 2.45 pm on 4 October 1977 a group of 10 children, aged from 7 to 11 years, spotted something strange hovering between two trees whilst they were in the playground of Upton Primary Junior School in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Their teacher immediately separated them and asked them to draw what they had seen. She, like her counterparts at Broad Haven, was so astonished at the remarkable consistency of the drawings that she passed them to the police. They took the report seriously and checks were made with Manchester Airport who found nothing unusual had been detected by their radar. A letter sent to the children’s teacher by the MoD thanked her for sending the drawings and then reassured her with the standard words that: ‘simple explanations are found for the great majority of UFO reports, the most common single source of sightings being aircraft or the lights of aircraft seen under unusual conditions. Investigations over a number of years have so far produced no evidence that UFOs represent a threat to the air defences of this country.’25

WE ARE NOT ALONE – SPIELBERG’S UFOS ARRIVE

Opinion polls show that 1978 marked the high water mark for belief in UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft. A Gallup survey that year found around half of all Americans believed in some form of extraterrestrial life and 57 per cent thought UFOs were ‘real’, with 9 per cent reporting a personal sighting. These figures reflect high public awareness of the subject created by the release of Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film, with a $19 million budget, opened in UK cinemas during February 1978. The plot involves benevolent aliens who slowly make their presence known to world governments and selected individuals via escalating UFO flaps. This build-up culminates in a final spectacular landing and contact hidden from the public by an ingenious cover-up by the US government. The plot, though fictional, seemed to reflect what many thousands believed was really going on and the overlap between fact and fiction was underlined by the presence of former Project Blue Book consultant astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek as Spielberg’s consultant. Hynek had coined the phrase ‘close encounters’ to describe categories of UFO experience, with the ‘third kind’ involving sightings of alien creatures such as those reported in Wales during 1977.

The effect of the film on UFO reports in Britain was dramatic. Files at The National Archives show the number of sighting reported to

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