The Ministry of Defense of Britain might have closed its UFO desk in 2009 and the last batch of X-Files released through the National Archives reveal UFO sightings at U.K. landmarks including the Houses of Parliament and the Stonehenge.
The big batch of X-Files consist of 25 files with 4,300 pages pertaining to the work of the UFO desk between 2007 and 2009. This batch of files is just a small chunk of the X-files released since 2008 with about 209 files of 50,000 pages.
The Mirror published an article claiming that the reports about UFOs grew more than triple in 2009 where the agency received 520 reports compared to 150 reports on average between 2000 and 2007.
"That really did put a strain on the resources that the MoD had committed to this subject, and really led up to their decision to finally pull the plug on Britain's X-Files, simply because they just didn't have the resources to investigate these sightings, or to look at them in any detail. So they just tended to be filed away," explained David Clarke, a spokesperson for the UK National archive and a UFO historian, in an interview with the NBC News.
The jump in the number of sightings were primarily attributed to Chinese lantern craze during holidays and weddings and the easy access to media recording device such as mobile phones.
According to Clarke, most of the reported UFO sightings have simple explanations.
The sighting of UFOs hovering over the Houses of Parliament were reported in February 2008. The objects were described as red, white, and green lights in the sky and observed to fly in the distance for around an hour or so.
The Stonehenge UFO was about a discoid object that was spotted in photographs of the landmark.
"I thought that I would send you these digital photos because they were taken a couple of years ago at Stonehenge of all places; so, possibly significant. All were taken within about 30 minutes (including the one of the thistle) and although I didn't see anything in the sky at the time because I was focusing upon the stones," stated an email dated January 14, 2009 reporting the sighting to the UFO desk of the MoD.
"Upon uploading them to my computer, though, I spotted the discoid shapes in the background. It was upon 'zooming in' on the shapes that I thought the images significant," the sender related.
The last batch of X-Files also included entries on UFOs monitored on radars, police helicopter encounter with UFOs, alien abductions among others. The files can be downloaded from the National Archives site.
Watch a video of Clarke discussing the details of the UK X-Files:
