November 6, 2001	Tuesday	Shaba’an 19, 1422

LONDON: Britain’s spies have given up looking for aliens after more than half a century of fruitless monitoring of thousands of UFO reports.

Ever since the early 1950s reports of sightings of unidentified flying objects by members of the public and military personnel have been logged by the UK Ministry of Defence and passed on to its intelligence branch.

But the Directorate of Intelligence, Scientific and Technical, has now abandoned the quest for ET. The directorate specializes in scientific espionage and analysis of advanced technologies but documents show

it asked last year that it be sent no further reports of UFO sightings. “These records, whether from members of the public or service sources, have not proved valuable,” the department concluded.

The decision ends five decades of army intelligence experts investigating UFO sightings from all over Britain, including many from Royal Air Force pilots. “They are essentially saying they have wasted their time for 50 years and they want nothing more to do with it,” said Dave Clark of the National Centre for Folklore Studies at Sheffield University and a leading UFO researcher.

Britain’s official search for UFOs began in the late 1940s and peaked with a top-secret government study into the ‘flying saucer’ phenomenon, commissioned in 1951. That study, details of which were published for the first time two weeks ago, concluded that no UFO sightings were genuine but attempted to hush up the reports to avoid creating panic at the height of the Cold War.

Clark believes the Government is finally willing to admit that studying UFO sightings is pointless. He said that modern radar systems had become sophisticated enough to explain the vast majority of sightings as being aircraft or atmospheric conditions. “They have looked at the subject and they have simply decided there is nothing in it,” he said. However, the Ministry of Defence will maintain its small internal UFO desk, which logs and reports all sightings reported to it by members of the public. “They are not shutting down entirely, but their intelligence experts don’t want to know any more. The operation is now just a PR stunt to keep the public happy,” said Clark.

UFO enthusiasts are not likely to be satisfied at the lack of interest shown in the possibility that aliens might be visiting Earth. Graham Birdsall, editor of UFO Magazine, said: “I find this decision extraordinary. If people are seeing unusual things in the skies of Britain, I am sure the intelligence officials will still want to know about it.”

There has been media speculation that the UFO phenomenon is on the wane. But Birdsall said that UFOs were still being seen in their hundreds and that it would be a mistake for the Government to stop investigating sightings. “The phenomenon is still as intense and busy as ever. The fact remains that UFOs continue to be se seen, continue to be reported and continue to be videotaped,” he said. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.