(Roughly) Daily

… The [British] Ministry of Defence ran a UFO desk from 1952 until 2009; it was as underfunded as its American cousins, but it collected as many sightings (12,000) and was a bit more tolerant. Many of the MoD reports were accompanied by illustrations – diagrams, photos, sketches, even paintings – that were duly filed away. When the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2000, the UFO desk was inundated with requests. The MoD knew better than to put up a fight. They’d seen nothing definite in over fifty years, so from one point of view the files were too trivial to hide.

David Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, was made a consultant at the National Archives, where he spent ten years overseeing the UFO files’ release. There may be no extraordinary revelations in them, in the sense a UFOlogist would like, but there are fruits of a different sort. Clarke recently curated a peculiar and beautiful book called UFO Drawings from the National Archives, a showcase of the best ‘imaginative artwork’ sent to the MoD, ranging from scribbled crayon disks to diagrams in tidy pencil.

The book takes an old question (what did these people see?), sidesteps the nutjob theories and gives us a form of social history…

Hop aboard at “The UFOs we want.”

* NASA pilot Joseph Walker (referring to objects seen while he was tracking and photographing X-15 tests)

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As we scan the skies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that the first rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida– the “Bumper 2,” a V-2 missile base topped with a WAC Corporal rocket.

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