BRITAIN'S X-FILES / THE NEW X-FILES
In the post War years, RAF pilots and navigators began to report sightings of unidentified flying objects over the UK. The air crew were trained and rational observers, and their testimony was sounding alarm bells among military chiefs
Monday 3 November 2003, 8.00-8.30pm
In the post War years, RAF pilots and navigators began to report sightings of unidentified flying objects over the UK. The air crew were trained and rational observers, and their testimony was sounding alarm bells among military chiefs.
Programme 1:
The concern was not that Britain was about to be invaded by aliens, but that the Russians were gaining the upper hand in the Cold War and had developed a new fighter aircraft that could outpace anything the West had developed.
The evidence wasn't only coming from pilots. On a number of occasions, RAF radar stations tracked fast-moving objects over Southern and Eastern England.
A top-secret working party was established at the heart of Whitehall to investigate the threat these UFOs posed to our national security. For fifty years, the Ministry of Defence has denied the existence of a specialist team of UFO investigators. But social historians Dr. David Clarke and Andy Roberts have discovered hitherto classified documents that piece together Britain's military response to this strange aerial phenomena.
And while the concern of senior military commanders may have been the threat from the Eastern bloc, there were others in the British establishment who believed the UFOs were in fact other life forms trying to communicate with us on Earth.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/xfiles.shtml