David Clarke

Flying Saucer Working Party · first official MoD study (UK)

The Flying Saucer Working Party was the study group set up in 1950 by the UK Ministry of Defence at the urging of Sir Henry Tizard. Its secret report, completed in June 1951, concluded that all sightings were explained by misidentification, illusion or hoax, and recommended no further investigation. It is the first official British study of the subject and was released at The National Archives in January 2002, in file DEFE 44/119. It shows the early official UK position; its conclusion is a general assessment, not the analysis of a specific case.

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Project Condign · UK MoD UAP study

Project Condign is the British Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence Staff study 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region', produced between 1997 and 2000 by an anonymous author from decades of reports gathered by the DI55 branch, in some 460 pages. It stayed classified until May 2006, when it was released under freedom of information to David Clarke and Gary Anthony. It accepts that the phenomena are real, finds no evidence of a hostile threat or of extraterrestrial origin, and attributes many cases to poorly understood buoyant atmospheric plasmas. That hypothesis is disputed: Clarke argues it explains the residue no better than others, and he documented a 1998 minute in which the author was already anticipating a recommendation that DI55 drop the subject.

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