Britain releases files of UFO encounters

During the Cold War, Britain sent fighter jets to intercept Soviet aircraft as often as 200 times a year, one MoD document showed.

The note, filed in 1996, said mystery sightings picked up on radar during the Cold War were invariably proved to be Soviet anti-submarine or long-range reconnaissance planes.

Analysts suggested that most of the reported encounters were either made up by UFO enthusiasts or false impressions of secret military objects.

"It goes back as far as the U2 spy plane in 1956," The Daily Telegraph newspaper quoted Mark Pilkington, a London-based writer, as saying Thursday. "US Air Force staff would visit people who'd seen it and tell them it was Venus or a weather balloon - but, if that didn't work, they were quite happy to leave them with the impression that it was an alien spacecraft."

David Clarke, author of The UFO Files, told the Northampton Chronicle that in 1996 alone, "there were more than 600 reports, 343 letters from the public and 22 inquiries from MPs, perhaps related to the popularity of TV shows such as The X-Files at the time."

Agencies