A great example of misinformation

News wires are heating up with another example of the ultimate non-story released today, the story of the latest release of UFO files from the UK Ministry of Defence group the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) the group that advises military and political groups on threats to British defensive capabilities. We have known about the role of DIS in administrating British UFO reports and sightings for a number of years. A former member of this group Nick Pope has been openly speaking on the UFO circuit since his retirement from the group in the 1990's and indeed the group itself closed its UFO desk in the late 1990's as far as public reports were concerned at least. I'm sure many people will be reading these news reports and getting tremendously excited about the highlights like Prime Minister Tony Blair being briefed on UFO's in much the same way that thirty years ago when a document from Winston Churchill asking to be briefed some people took it as proof of UFOs and extraterrestrials, so why have I started this article by saying that it is a non-story? Well there are a few reasons. Firstly these documents, 6,700 in number were actually released in August 2011, but have only been made available online through the National Archive today, so serious UFO researchers have been studying them for almost a year already, and there has been little if any new information of any significance.

Then we need to consider that these documents had been declassified before that point which suggests strongly that they do not relate to any threat to national security, which any genuine sightings almost certainly would. It should also be noted that although there are a huge number of documents, these are not the complete set of documents for the period. They represent approximately 78% of the total with the remainder still be too highly classified to be covered by Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. It should also be noted that these documents have been released under FoI rules which exempt many classes of official document which are considered security or commercially sensitive. Lets also look at the Tony Blair connection. The documents suggest that all Prime Ministers are briefed on UFOs but this should be expected as they are likely to be asked at public events as was the case when UFO researcher Richard D Hall posed the question of the release of information to David Cameron at a public debate. It would be extremely remiss of government advisers to leave a politician of this stature with no answer to such an obvious question. It is not evidence of UFOs per se, just a matter of expediency.

Also to be considered is that these documents were released initially to UFO researchers and the documents reveal that part of the role of the DIS was to maintain links between UFO research groups and government. This strongly hints at the possibility of disinformation, particularly in light of recent cases of media and police disinformation policies and the use of selected economists to present positively spun government finance figures. Whatever these documents are, in terms of evidence of British government seriousness about UFOs they are in no sense any new evidence, nor do they move the debate over whether UFOs are real or not any further forward. To date there is no evidence of UFOs, whether you chose to believe that or not, it is a statement of fact. That is not to say that such information doesn't exist, nor that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. There is every possibility that any real evidence would be kept secret as suggested under American and UK policy for dealing with UFO evidence laid out in the 1960's.

What is of interest is the way in which the media is reporting these files, and the impact that this has on how the alternative media is portrayed when viewed with a cynical eye.