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recommended that investigations should be terminated "unless and until some material evidence becomes available." [1] But that policy was reversed a few years later following a series of high-profile UFO sightings involving the military. Two Air Ministry divisions—S6, a civilian secretariat division on the Air Staff, and DDI (Tech), a technical intelligence division—then became actively involved in investigating UFO sightings. Their brief was to research and investigate the UFO phenomenon, looking for evidence of any threat to the UK. That policy was still in place when I came on board in the 1990s. UFO sightings were to be investigated to see whether there was evidence of anything of any defense significance, any threat to the defense of the UK, or information that may be of use to us, scientifically or militarily. Having a UFO project in no way implies a governmental belief in extraterrestrial visitation. It simply reflects the fact that we keep a watchful eye on our airspace and want to know about anything operating in the United Kingdom's Air Defence Region. Many other countries have similar research efforts. I had access to all the previous UFO files, some of which had been very highly classified, so I had a vast archive of data to assess. This enabled me to undertake various research projects, looking for trends, etc. But the bread and butter of the job was investigating the new sightings that were reported on a virtually daily basis. We used to receive 200 to 300 reports each year. The methodology of an investigation is fairly standard. First, you interview the witness to obtain as much information as possible about the sighting: date, time, and location of the sighting, description of the object, its speed, its height, etc. Then you attempt to correlate the sighting with known aerial activity such as civil flights, military exercises, or weather balloon launches. We could check with the Royal Greenwich Observatory to see if astronomical phenomena such as meteors or fireballs might explain what was seen. We could check to see whether any UFOs seen visually had been tracked on radar. If we had a photograph or video, we could get various MoD specialists to enhance and analyze the imagery. We could also liaise with staff at the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at RAF Fylingdales, where they have space-tracking radar. Finally, on various scientific and technical issues, we could liaise with the Defence and technical could with Defence we Intelligence Staff, though this is an area that I can't discuss in any detail. After investigation, around 80 percent of UFO sightings could be explained as misidentifications of something ordinary, such as aircraft lights, satellites, airships, weather balloons, or planets. In around 15 percent of cases there was insufficient information to draw any firm mm rr ed eof a conclusions. The remaining approximately 5 percent of sightings seemed to defy conventional explanation. The sorts of cases that got into this latter category included UFO incidents where there were multiple witnesses, or where the witnesses were trained observers such as police officers or military personnel; sightings from civil or military pilots; sightings backed